Wild Gold (1934) User Reviews

Fox Features Rambles Hither And Yon

[boblipton · 5/10 · 29 March 2021]

Showgirl Claire Trevor is fleeing sleazy husband Monroe Owlsley and entranced mining engineer John Boles. She winds up staying with kindly Roger Imhof in a mining town where Boles decides to reopen an old gold mine. Add into the mix comic Harry Green as the impresario of a traveling leg show who wants to make some money, and you have one of the mishmosh scripts that Fox Films made into movies before the amalgamation with Darryl Zanuck's 20th Century Productions: some good bits, particularly Imhof's role, are overwhelmed by a meandering storyline that ends with a huge flood and a sudden, happy ending.

The usually amusing Green inserts himself ineffectively into so many of the subplots that he becomes annoying, and Miss Trevor gives a performance in which she goes squeaky with futile impotence.... not one of her more endearing performances. Boles is muscular and bland. Look fast and you may spot an improbably young Will Geer playing poker.

Fox Programmer Not Bad as a Claire Trevor Vehicle

[lchadbou-326-26592 · 5/10 · 1 March 2021]

Of the two main stars in this Fox programmer, the bland John Boles as an engineer does nothing for me but it is always nice to see Claire Trevor, here as a runaway spouse taking a gig as a night club chanteuse in a mining town. There is some Depression period feel in the background of men looking for work and the construction of the Boulder Dam, with a flood sequence toward the end. Good support from the reliably sleazy Monroe Owsley as Trevor's husband, Harry Green as the impresario of a traveling troupe of chorus girls, and Roger Imhof (singled out by Variety) as a kindly old prospector. Trevor does one of those now forgotten songs of the time, "I've Got You On the Top of My List."

All that glitters here is fool's gold.

[mark.waltz · 2/10 · 23 June 2022]

The problem is the shell of a story that interrupts card games, moronic ranting by the blowhard character played by Harry Green, and "Tamimg of the Shrew" antics by leads Claire Trevor and John Boles. She's a New York nightclub singer who heads to Nevada, encounters Boles, fights with him, discovers that she's the errors to a gold strike and appears in a show to raise money to get the gold out. Green hosts the show that Trevor sings in, and it's obvious that they should have paid the audience to sit there.

Fox studios, in their struggling last days before adding 20th Century to their name, had many incomprehensible films, and this one by far is one of the most bizarre. Trevor as a New York nightclub singer isn't very good, and was better when her non-talent was part of the character like it was for her in her Oscar winning role in "Key Largo".

Boles and Trevor don't exactly get a great first meeting, with her running him off the road, seemingly deliberately on the curvy Nevada streets, and refusing to help him, and when she has car trouble, he gets even with her and probably the best moment of the film. A truly creaky mess. Trevor had done better in earlier films, and would go onto great success at Warner Brothers, but if this had been my introduction to her, I would have been very unimpressed. Boles is bland, but they are Lunt and Fontanne compared to the obnoxious character Green plays.