Haunted Gold dvd movie.|
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List Price: $9.98 Our Price: $9.98 Features • Black & White • Closed-captioned • DVD-Video • NTSC In Theaters : 17 December, 1932 DVD Release : 22 May, 2007 |
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Haunted Gold description John Wayne's road to stardom needed some giddyup in the early 1930s; after a leading-man turn in The Big Trail, he quickly fell into B-movie obscurity. While waiting to vault to first-tier status in 1939's Stagecoach, he honed his talent with a set of six B-Westerns at Warner Brothers, shot in 1932-33. The series of snappy little films (under an hour each) allowed Warners to recycle footage (and plots) from a string of silent Westerns made with Ken Maynard, with the young Mr. Wayne stepping into Maynard's saddle. Haunted Gold adds a dose of haunted-house shenanigans to an awkward tale about a hidden cache of gold. The comic relief comes from character actor Blue Washington, who unfortunately has the kind of wide-eyed, scaredy-cat role that too many black actors of the era got stuck with. Wayne, 25 years old, plays the same naively heroic hero in each of the six films. He's lean and handsome and not yet grown into his talent. But you can see how much the camera likes him--as his future director Howard Hawks might have put it--and how much that famous stride is already coming into step. --Robert Horton |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Mixing Genres |
| Plenty of reviews have already mentioned the racial component to this film. I was somewhat surprised that Warners gave this film a DVD release because of it. However, they should be applauded for releasing the film without censoring or burying it, if only to reveal the film as a document of its time.
That said, HAUNTED GOLD is really a fascinating mixture of genres. If Charles Dickens had written a western it might have looked like this. Erville Alderson carries himself like Uriah Heep. The dark house, with its secret passages and secrets in general, looks a lot like the old house in Don Knott's THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN. Throw in an episode of Scooby Doo and you have a pretty good idea of HAUNTED GOLD. The mix of genres--mystery, western, comedy--makes for an interesting novelty picture, if not an interesting western. For a couple of dollars more, this film is also available as a Triple Feature DVD with RIDE HIM, COWBOY and THE BIG STAMPEDE. The Triple Feature DVD, though a double-sided disc with no extras, is certainly the better buy. |
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