Lust for Gold (1949)

The posters might suggest that Lust for Gold, released by Columbia in 1949, is going to be a western. It isn’t. Not quite. It is set in the West but it’s a thriller and the setting is contemporary. Or at least partly.

The original director was George Marshall but he walked off the set early on and producer S. Sylvan Simon took over directing duties.

The movie is based on the story of a real-life lost mine that has never been found.

The movie is about what the title says it’s about. Gold fever. Somewhere in the vast sprawling expanse of Superstition Mountain there is a lost mine (the legendary Dutchman Mine) and a huge hoard of gold. Enough gold to get twenty men murdered over the previous 70 years. If the Apache legends are correct then a lot more men than that have died for this gold.

And nobody knows for sure that there is any gold. Or if there is any chance of finding it.

Young Barry Storm (William Prince) has just seen the twentieth man die on the mountain. Barry’s grandfather Jacob Walz claimed to be the owner of the mine.

Barry becomes obsessed with finding the mine. He finds an old guy who tells him Jacob Walz’s story. This is not so much a main story bookended by a framing story as two distinct stories taking place decades apart both dealing with a search for the mine. There are multiple murders in both stories.

In 1887 Jacob Walz (Glenn Ford) found the mine. The mine had at that time been lost for many years. He becomes involved with a woman who owns a bakery in the nearby town. She is Julia (Ida Lupino). The connection between Julia and Pete Thomas (Gig Young) guarantees that things will get very messy.

What follows is a sordid tale of human depravity. It’s not just the lust for gold. There’s sexual lust, emotional betrayal, jealousy and a web of deceit.

The plot is delightfully overheated. Both stories have wild crazy endings. In fact there’s a third ending and it’s wild and crazy as well.

This is a fairly rare chance to see Glenn Ford as an out-and-out bad guy and yet in his own strange way he’s an innocent and a victim. It’s a credit to Ford’s subtlety as an actor that he can make us feel oddly sympathetic towards Jacob even after we’ve seen him do some breathtakingly vicious things. Ford really is outstanding here.

Ida Lupino is extremely good as a woman who may be thoroughly rotten, partially rotten or just easily tempted or maybe she’s just out of control and has no idea which way she will jump next.

All the characters are reprehensible and yet all are perhaps victims. Men will do terrible things for gold or sex. And women will do equally terrible things. Although without that gold maybe all of these people would have been decent enough. Or maybe not. They have all been corrupted.

This is not a movie that casts humanity in a very flattering light.

I’m always leery of describing movies as noir westerns because in most cases they don’t really fit the noir mould. Having said that there are of course westerns that contain some of the elements that are found in the crime movies that were later labelled as film noir. During the 40s there had been a slight shift towards darker subject matter and a more cynical pessimistic edge in several genres. Lust for Gold falls into that category. It’s part of a trend that began in the 40s, towards harder-edged less conventionally heroic westerns

Ida Lupino can certainly be seen as a femme fatale here, leading every man she encounters to disaster. It might seem like a stretch to see Glenn Ford as Jacob as a noir protagonist (he’s already a very bad man at the start of the movie) but the argument could be made. Perhaps he could be redeemed by love. He does genuinely love Julia. But choosing Julia as a vehicle for redemption is a bad bad choice.

The plot (or plots) gets crazy enough and events spiral so much out of control that although it seems highly likely that things will end badly it’s difficult to predict exactly how disaster will strike. And there’s at least one wild plot twist you won’t see coming.

Lust for Gold is a rather oddball western-thriller genre hybrid and it’s exceptionally interesting. Highly recommended.

The Spanish Blu-Ray looks great. It includes the original English-language version with removable Spanish subtitles.