La bataille de l'or

Although she might admit to it now, but not back in her salad days, one of the reasons that Olivia DeHavilland's films are so well remembered from her days at Warner Brothers was the sheer expense of them. She did do her share of sound stage shooting, but as often as not Warner Brothers would cast her as the heroine in their expensive period costume dramas. She certainly did them well, though she wanted better parts. Even films like Anthony Adverse and Gone With The Wind added to her reputation. But these films and Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex and The Adventures Of Robin Hood are what we remember of her early period and one of the reasons she's better known than a lot of her contemporaries today.

One that was less known and I suspect because she did not have Errol Flynn as her leading man is Gold Is Where You Find It. This is a western feud story set in 1879 in California thirty years after the Gold Rush. It's not hard rock Fortyniners panning for gold out of the stream any more. Huge mining concerns are using hydraulics to create mudslides that are ruining the crops of landowners large and small. The biggest of these is Claude Rains whose grain crops like everyone else's is threatened by the mine owned by Sidney Toler whose foreman is Barton MacLane.

Into the lives of all of them comes mining engineer George Brent from the east and he makes an impression on all, on MacLane's skull and on the lives of Rains's children Olivia DeHavilland and Tim Holt. He gets caught right in the middle of the feud coming to a boil. Do we doubt where he's going to end up?

Michael Curtiz directed Gold Is Where You Find It with the usual Curtiz supply of action. There's a climax involving a battle between the miners and the farmers that's exciting and well done. The costumes and sets reflect a good eye for the period. In fact Curtiz probably decided all this needed was Errol Flynn and he got him next year for Dodge City.

Though she hated making the costume epics, these films have survived and part of the reason they have survived is Olivia DeHavilland is so darn good in them. Sadly this film is not out so one has to wait until TCM broadcasts it. It's worth the wait.

I generally agree with the majority of my fellow IMDBers that in their understandable zeal to tell a late Depression era, populist story where the villain is Big Mining (as personified by Barton MacLane and Sidney Toler) scenarists Robert Buckner and Warren Duff forgot to make their characters interesting. The result is fairly long stretches of boredom involving a really dull love story between George Brent and Olivia DeHavilland and a tepid father/son conflict between Claude Raines and eternal spoiled brat Tim Holt. The movie does come alive at certain points. Michael Curtiz is too good an action director for it not to. I love the denouement with the evil hydraulic miners drowning in their own watery muck. Truly an ending that would have pleased Frank Norris. But in general this is pretty much low grade schlock. And can we please lose the gratuitous racism, please? Solid C.

You've seen this picture before - with a different title and a different cast. It's the one about two warring factions (here, miners and wheat growers) battling over precious land while she (Olivia deHavilland, daughter of the most prominent wheat grower) and he (George Brent, employed by the mining syndicate) fall in love. All very conventional, despite a solid cast and first-rate production values.

Clumsy off-screen narration at both the beginning and end attempts to give this story a documentary feel and some measure of historical significance. Did the film makers tack this on because they felt the story lacked significance and originality? I did.

Not much distinction to this routine western, aside from the fact that it introduced Olivia de Havilland to the screen for the first time in technicolor. Unfortunately, neither her role nor the film itself are ever able to rise above the routine dimensions of a weak script. George Brent stars as the miner in conflict with de Havilland's rancher father Claude Rains.

It takes place in the 1870s and has a narration at the beginning and end that tells us this was meant to be an important little "epic" for the Warner studio. Despite some solid scenes of mining operations and an agreeable enough cast that includes Tim Holt (as de Havilland's brother), Margaret Lindsay and Sidney Toler (before his Charlie Chan days), the story itself is a weakness guaranteed to produce yawns long before the rambling tale reaches an action-filled finish. But by then, you're not likely to be paying too much attention.

Of all of the early ingenue roles de Havilland had at Warner Bros., this is definitely one of her weakest. It seems that when she wasn't playing opposite Flynn, she had no real leading man. Charisma between her and Brent is sorely lacking.

A mining engineer, caught between a mighty gold syndicate and a group of stubborn ranchers, learns that GOLD IS WHERE YOU FIND IT when he meets the beautiful daughter of a powerful landowner.

Warner Brothers had great hopes for this lavish Western, and the money that was spent certainly shows up on the screen. Unfortunately, the romantic attraction between stars George Brent & Olivia de Havilland never catches fire. This is largely the fault of the script, which seems strangely aloof from their involvement and makes their love scenes rather pedestrian. Alas, real life can be much the same way...

In this case it is important to look at what strengths the film possesses. Chief among these is master actor Claude Rains, in a suave performance as Olivia's determined, courageous father. With his rich, silken voice, he could have simply read the script directly into the camera and made it compelling. Always a treat to watch & listen to, the movie is fortunate to have him.

Good support is given by young Tim Holt as Rains' amiable, tragic son; Harry Davenport as a friendly old doctor; Gabby Hayes & Willie Best as employees of Rains; and Sidney Toler & Barton MacLane as the murderous syndicate president and mine foreman.

The Technicolor photography - still rare & wonderful in 1938 - is pleasant on the eyes. The massed attack on the mine is well handled & exciting.

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Viewers of the film are likely to hear more about hydraulic gold mining than they ever knew before. Indeed, the environmental problems which the film depicts, with the immense runoff fouling the downstream waters & farmlands, are quite accurately depicted.

The Golden Moon Mine in the movie could have easily been based, in part, on the great Cherokee Mine in Northern California's Butte County. Located at the base of Table Mountain, between the towns of Chico & Oroville, the Cherokee Mine attracted Argonauts from around the world (as its cemetery still attests) and became the largest hydraulic mining enterprise on earth. Nearby Butte Creek was dammed to provide a 300 acre supply of water for the Mine (three smaller reservoirs were also created). Over 100 miles of conveyance were constructed to move the water to the Mine, where each day forty million gallons were needed for the eighteen immense monitors which directed their gush at the side of the Mountain. Sluices nine miles in length were ready to catch the particles of gold washed down from the bluff. In its few years of operation - 1880 until 1887 - two and a half million dollars worth of gold was found, as well as small amounts of platinum, topaz and even diamonds. Eventually the gold played out and the Mine was no longer cost effective to remain open. To this day, the scars still remain on the side of Table Mountain as mute witness to one of the engineering marvels of the 19th Century.