The Stuff Of Dreams#27- Ida Lupino’s “Lust For Gold”- A Film Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Lust For Gold, starring Ida Lupino, Glenn Ford, MGM, 1956

Philosophers and social thinkers from Plato to Marx have commented in their various treatises on the hold that gold has held for a significant portion of humankind. Whether to wear it, carry it, or to miserly hoard it that quest for the yellow fever stuff had animated more than one human saga. And it does so here in a saga of the Old West, the old American West, Lust for Gold, a title that says it all, and that saw more than one feverish dream go up in smoke or vanish under an off-hand bullet. The road west was paved with the litter of the whitened bones of many such dreams.

This little black and white 1950s B-film is done in a flash- back as a grandson of the man on whom the story is centered, Jacob Walz, is knee-deep in his own exploration of the quest for the yellow stuff, stuff that his grandfather allegedly found in the hills of the West, the Arizona west. The idea behind the film is to show that, once again, men, and women, can get their thinking skewed by the desire get rich quick with a little strike, a little yellow stuff.

Now this Jacob Walz (played by Glenn Ford) is not your typical Western cowboy of film lore, some waspy John Wayne, but a tinhorn, although a tinhorn quick on the trigger and quick with the back of his hand, a German, from back East who came west, like a million others, to find his place in the sun. His place in the sun was to strike it rich in the gold fields not by digging and sweating himself but by finding a version of El Dorado, finding the lost mine gold fields which some earlier Spanish adventurers had mined, and lost, after being massacred by the Comanches who took exception the desecration of their burial ground where the gold was found . And he does find the end of the rainbow after getting rid of (killing off) his partner and a couple of wreck-less ghost sons of the Spanish conquistidores who got the madness which had started way back when looking for the oro that drove their forebears across that dangerous Atlantic in search of treasure.

Of course those finds were only the start of Jacob Walz’s problems, his everyday problems, as everybody in the greater Arizona area began to take dead aim at him to find out where his stake was and take their own shots at it. And of course this being a film, a romance of the Old West film, a dame (played by Ida Lupino), a married dame, enters into the plot to bring Brother Walz down. Ida was tired, tired unto death of her nickel and dime existence out in the arid West and tired unto death of her ne’er-do-well husband so she used her vast feminine wiles to snag Glenn in order to get that gold dream of hers into shape . In the end though Ida’s perfidy, extreme perfidy, Glenn’s mania, and the natural elements combined to close out our saga on a down note. The found lost goldmine was lost once again for that itchy grandson (and others) to pick up the trail. Yeah, the stuff of dreams, yet again.