They'd forget their precious gold if they had to dig their own

GOLD

1974

Directed by Peter Hunt

Written by Wilbur Smith and Stanley Price (based on the novel Gold Mine by Wilbur Smith)

Spoilers: moderate

Since the advent of that film series, there have been many attempts to capitalize on the enormous, genre-defining success of Eon Productions' James Bond, so that even by 1974 I wouldn't try counting them.  Over the decades it was not even unheard of for actual Bond film directors to try their hand at movies that wanted to make you think of Bond.  Sometimes such movies would actually have a Bond, which is to say one of the actors to have played Bond.  Remarkable as it seems, however, and I have tried to look, but I don't think there are any others that have both, while I am damn near positive that there are absolutely none that have a Bond, a director of Bond, and a Maurice Binder title sequence, too (not to mention an editor of Bond, who was also second unit director, and a production designer and an art director, and this list may not be exhaustive), which is where we go from "wants you to think of Bond" to "it may genuinely want you to think it's an actual Eon Productions film."  Gold has all of those things, and if you're wondering if the name itself wants you to think of Bond, the plot itself wants you to think of Bond, for it's exactly what you guessed it might be, a thriller revolving around a slightly smaller, somewhat more grounded, and significantly more socially conscious version of the iconic Goldfinger scheme to pump the value of gold by destroying a whole shitload of somebody else's.  It isn't at all shy about it and it's almost strange it doesn't reference Goldfinger in dialogue.  This is, frankly, its single least-realistic feature, for if such a conspiracy really were hatched, I guarantee you that Goldfinger would be invoked with downright annoying constancy.

The Bond director was Peter R. Hunt, who only ever oversaw one Bond—1969's divisive On Her Majesty's Secret Service—though his history with the franchise went incredibly deep, as the editor of each of its first five films, and the second unit director on three.  (So I should clarify that when I mentioned the editor who was also the second unit director, I didn't mean Hunt; I meant Hunt's editor and second unit director on OHMSS, John Glen.)  The Bond himself, meanwhile, was the current one, Roger Moore.  Hunt and Moore had missed each other on the franchise that defined their careers, though teaming up now was closer to a coincidence than anything they'd intentionally planned: pretty famously, the first director to be approached was Steven Spielberg, but as the 20-something filmmaker had not yet made any movie besides telefilms (most notably Duel), one of the potentially great divergence points in film history only went the one way instead of the other because Moore wasn't sanguine about Spielberg's chances on such a comparatively large-scale movie, whereas Hunt, having at least made a successful Bond movie (albeit the least successful Bond movie), and who'd directed Moore on TV in The Persuaders (part-and-parcel to a five year gap in his film career between OHMSS and this), Hunt seemed much more like Moore's man.

Behind it all was one Michael Klinger, a former stripclub owner, then proto-pornographer, and now a major independent producer and distributor thanks to 1971's Get Carter.  It was not, therefore, for no reason that he was now comparing himself to Cubby Broccoli, and over the course of the 70s, Klinger purchased the adaptation rights for several novels by Zambian-born South African author Wilbur Smith.  1970's Gold Mine was the first in the queue thanks to its contemporaneous setting, which despite the size of the production kept things simpler than Smith's period piece adaptations would be.  There's no twist: it was in fact a smooth production, except right at the beginning, when the British ACTT union threatened action due to Klinger's goal of actually shooting in South Africa, something made incumbent upon him as he'd raised the money mostly in South Africa, and that also meant he could take advantage of, amongst other locations, the Buffelfontein and West Rand gold mines.  For obvious reasons, this made people mad, but the dispute settled down (it didn't hurt Klinger's case that the alternative, Wales, would've looked fake as fuck), and the biggest subsequent problem was keeping Moore's co-star, Susannah York, from making her disgust towards the government of the country she was working a problem for the shoot.  I wouldn't necessarily suspect that Smith was too pro-apartheid himself (he lived in Zimbabwe for a spell and left because he disliked Rhodesian Front leader Ian Smith's politics), but it would take some visual illiteracy to think Hunt made a pro-apartheid movie.  Anyway, I'm sure we'll get back to it later.

Or, immediately, since the movie does, with Binder's title sequence and composer Elmer Bernstein and lyricist Don Black's title song, sung by Jimmy Helms very much after the bombastic manner of the best Bond theme songs to date; the sequence tells us where we are by way of its one flubbed gesture insofar as the map of southern Africa we see atop a troupe of Zulu or maybe Xhosa (I would be guessing) performers is composited rather badly, as is the oval over an unnecessarily-labeled Johannesburg that expands to form the "o" or indeed the "O" in "GOLD."

What's this movie called again?

And now it gets really superb: that "GOLD" becomes a splitscreen collage, a cutout of each letter serving as a frame, concerning the production of, well, gold, as a very nearly entirely dehumanized process.  (A visual theme the movie will return to a few times, almost a cross between How It's Made and Metropolis—or for more proximate references, some sort of middle ground between Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi.)  The song—titled, incidentally, "Gold"—lets us know this is bad, rather than merely austere and industrial and beautiful in its way.  It takes the perspective of a miner, whom we can assume is not a white South African, and who is very bitter over his lot.  I rather like Helms's utter contempt in the line, "just to put a charm around a lady's neck," which packs a lot of much more universal sociology into just nine damn words, but before this we do have, "if the falling rock don't get you, you can bet the blackness will," and that's not that oblique, and there's certainly a reason Black chose that over the more standard "darkness," probably not out of a fondness for his own surname.  (It will astonish you to learn that Gold earned Bernstein and Black a nomination for the Oscar for Best Song, yet it was not this song; their nomination was for a romantic ballad arriving later, "Wherever Love Takes Me," which is also nice in its way, but "Gold" is simply outstanding.)

At any rate, this is still a movie made in South Africa in 1974, so we're perhaps fortunate it's ever as explicit as it is—Moore's more heroic white guy will have occasion to beat the shit out of a more racist white colleague (Bernard Horsfall), which was in fact filmed in England at Pinewood, as were the larger part of the action scenes within the mine interiors for what I expect will be self-explaining reasons—but what's maybe a little more striking than this overt expression of politics is how Hunt and Glen are putting together scenes that quietly but sourly comment on apartheid, with almost any group shot not at the mine itself requiring a full reverse angle just to see a different color of skin.  (I think the one that feels wooziest is at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, finding a floor full of white traders shouting chaotically while the JSE's black employees up on the platform have to do the fast and physical work of updating the big board.)  Shots that are at the mine itself are possibly even clearer in their intent, with Moore and maybe one or two other pale forms bossing around dozens of black subordinates:

And that's just the "what the Union of South Africa looks like" part, on top of what's already in the screenplay.  (Though the way things conclude means that if this were a Bond movie and not a 1974 thriller slept on by most everybody for fifty years, there'd be at least a dozen YouTube videos titled "we need to talk about Gold's ending!", not necessarily incorrectly, although I wouldn't bother watching them; and that's a spoiler enough, I guess, though the elements have been arranged in such a way that of the four alternatives still open to Gold at this point, I feel like we'd get those YouTube videos for all three of the ones that would be dramatically satisfactory, and it certainly uses the totem of a golden helmet very well, as you'd far prefer that the man who wore it still be there rather than the gold.)  But as for that screenplay, that kicks off by introducing us to Rod Slater (Moore), the underground manager for Hurry Hirschfeld's (Ray Milland's) Sonderditch Gold Mine, in the midst of dealing with an emergency, a cave-in deep in the mine, which he handles well, as does Johnny "Big King" Nkulu (Simon Sabela, a year away from becoming what my information says was a pioneering black South African, Zulu-language director), though the general manager dies.  That's bad news especially for Hirschfeld's son-in-law and the mine director, Manfred Steyner (Bradford Dillman), because the GM had been instrumental to the globe-spanning conspiracy which Steyner has pulled together to pierce the rock holding back a vast underground reservoir, flooding the mine and destroying the entire business as a going concern, which will spike the price of gold at the same time it sends stocks of other gold mines soaring (and sends Sonderditch's crashing), all of which Steyner and his backers intend on exploiting to the hilt.  Undeterred, Steyner plots to achieve by subterfuge what he had previously planned on achieving by corruption.  Thus he forwards Rod as the new GM, despite his youth (uh-huh) and shabby record, which Hirschfeld is barely willing to consider until Steyner throws his wife, Terry (York), directly into Rod's path, effectively arranging his own cuckolding so that his father-in-law will hear from his own daughter that Rod's good for the job, and when Rod does get the promotion that Steyner's arranged, Terry is likely to keep him too distracted to notice that Steyner has also given him completely bogus reports that say that giant reservoir is actually a giant vein of gold, and that the miners that Rod's hustling towards the breakthrough are in fact tunneling towards their own doom.

Gold is a slightly strange movie: Bondian in much of its vibe and of course its plotting, but not really an action movie, it winds up—presumably by accident, but happy accident—"Bondian" almost as a satire of Bond films, with Rod Slater having the quintessential Bondian characteristics of being reckless and violent with a classy insouciance (also, naturally, promiscuous with a classy insouciance), all things which make him the perfectly wrong man for the job, which is why Steyner is so eager to elevate him as his patsy.  The second act, or the first half of the third act—it would probably be a little hard to diagram Gold—finds Moore's anti-Bond dicking around, quite literally, with Terry at her dad's fake luxury rondavel lost somewhere in the reaches of his immense private game reserve, while his enemies entirely succeed with their plan, so that it's his obligation to try to fix it, or at least save those who can still be saved.

Meanwhile, Gold very much feels like a movie directed by a guy who had recently graduated to the position and had spent more than two decades as an editor by trade, but it's the converse of what one would usually mean when they said that.  The movie is incredibly patient, and extremely procedural, something prefigured by Binder's title sequence, and carried over into its opening scene: shots that, with tamped down anxiety, go over what indicator lights mean, shots that find the opening to the elevator shaft becoming the tiniest rectangle of light inside the Panavision frame as we descend for tens of seconds (an eternity in a movie!) into the pit, shots that plunge us even further into darkness in the horizontal part of Rod's ride towards the emergency, which goes on for I think an actual full minute, just the camera pointed upwards out of the minecart towards pipes that would take your head off and which frequently vanish so that significant stretches of that shot are literally black.  But this is, after all, a "procedural" scene; maybe the most exemplary moment in Gold is how the extramarital affair itself is rendered as a procedure of its own, with Terry counting down in anticipation of her husband's airplane taking off so she can go bang her new boyfriend.

It's meticulous, but the great thing is that it is not ever bogged down by it even when the point is, in fact, its own storytelling inefficiency, which is how it hits 124 minutes despite not really having much plot.  The Spielberg version would probably have a much more elaborate finale, though the finale we get is great—Terry, surprisingly, winds up playing a big role, as the rich girl impressing her boytoy with her personal airplane, who finds an appropriate use for her anger when he (logically enough) assumes she's a mine-flooding whore—and if there would've been any improvement in the Spielberg version, I expect it would probably only be that he'd have figured out a way to move up or cross-cut the actioniest thing in this frequently-still-thrilling not-an-action-movie, the admittedly-awesome denouement for Steyner's villain and his henchman/handler (Tony Beckley, doing a remarkably buttoned-down 70s thriller evil queer, cf. Diamonds Are Forever), so that it wasn't so swamped by the emotional fallout of an already-concluded story.  The finale we get, on the other hand, works as well as it does because Hunt and Glen are trying to be as procedural with it as everything else, but the sheer chaos is overtaking their effort.  So I don't think I'd trade, honestly; I think Spielberg's Gold would probably look like 1941. I like the romance here, too—not Spielberg's strongest suit—and Moore and York have a wonderfully playful rapport that we get to soak in for longer than the description "conspiracy thriller" would usually dictate.

The meticulousness, anyway, means that everything gets detail, and this is one extraordinarily textured movie: the romance, as noted; the geometries of the mine (both real and soundstage); Dillman playing a primness that shades into germophobia, and his villain turning to huffing ether when his going gets tough; a load of social observation, silently judging apartheid but also capable of exploring the company town as a community; and a big-ass aerial date montage through the natural beauty of, I believe, the Drakensbergs in today's KwaZulu-Natal province.  Accordingly, that texture brings out a lot of humanity that might not have made its way in otherwise, and is not altogether in the screenplay.  Hunt and Glen's editing is often narrative in its intentions, sickeningly in the juxtaposition between the mine disaster and Hirschfeld's dipshit lawn bowling tournament, and there's a penchant for neat matching—so actually my least-favorite thing in the movie is a somewhat-muddied cross-cut sequence of Terry and Rod going to bed with their husband and hook-up, respectively, which still gets across the main idea (that Terry is already thinking of Rod), it's just that Steyner does not really come off like a guy who fucks his wife.  (Actually, my least-favorite thing is one of York's dresses—most of her costumes are good, but that one is a pastel nightmare.)

There is, of course, the sheer presence of South Africa, and Hunt gets everything possible out of it—the mine is obviously impressive, as is the landscape, but so is, like, the airport—and cinematographer Ousama Rawi is approaching it with an appealing looseness dictated by the task, not in the compositions so much as just not sweating the control of the light much if at all, hence those big swathes of darkness in the mine, but also hence one of my favorite shots in the movie, York sitting at the wheel of her convertible while that bizarro modernist airport's unloading zone and Rawi's lensing turns the background into a series of colorful stripes.  Rawi brings enough of that naturalism into the soundstage shooting too—there's a nasty fight in the mine where you can tell the combatants apart, but which clearly isn't having its lighting set-ups manicured—and in combination with the art department's hefty contribution and a lake's worth of filthy-looking water it all feels real enough (and certainly physical enough) to meet the film's epic pretensions.

This is not to even mention that plane stunt with the mine as a backdrop, or the great little moment of doomy cutting on Moore's meaningful look back at York and hers at him.  For a movie coattailing on Bond—hell, for that matter, coattailing on the 70s disaster cinema wave—Gold surpasses any reasonable expectations; it's got real shit on its mind, without selling short its travelogue or any of its other simpler pleasures, and somehow it's just good, exciting matinee fun, all at the same time.

Score: 9/10