Gold (1974)..... Set in the gold mines of 1970's South Africa, and designed as a crowd pleasin', popcorn muncher, this action drama avoids any depiction of the toxic racism generated by the country's apartheid policies.
The film seems to depict a South Africa where whites and blacks, though still segregated, live in relative harmony with each other. Incredibly, there's only one rabid racist on display in the entire film, a vile miner who regularly beats and abuses the black miners who work under him.
Even worse, this bigoted creep (Bernard Horsfall, the other British agent of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service") is in league with the film's main villain (Bradford Dillman) the oily, conniving son-in-law of the mine's crusty CEO (Ray Milland).
Dilllman's merely a minion of a London-based wheeler-dealer cabal (headed by John Gielgud) who task him with flooding the company's gold mines.......which will send the value of their own gold holdings soaring to new heights.
But who can put a stop to this odious conspiracy to blow a hole in the underground lake adjacent to the mines, thereby drowning hundreds and hundreds of trapped black miners......who? who?
It's Slater.....Rod Slater..... the brave no nonsense mine troubleshooter .played with the usual smooth panache by the then newly installed Bond, James Bond......Moore...Roger Moore.
To Dillman's alarm,, the cantankerous Milland makes Moore the new mine boss after the previous guy died trying to execute that evil flooding plan. But fate smiles on Dillman when Moore falls into an affair with Dillman's wife (Susannah York) who's also Milland's daughter. While Moore and York dally in some remote hideaway, Dillman has Horsfall dynamite the wall between the mine and that threatening lake.......thereby jacking up the cabal's profits while giving the trapped miners the shaft....a real watery one. .
Along the way to the big suspenseful spectacle of the finale, there's a variety of good, bad and downright bizarre stuff to sample here. For example.....
As you can already see, there's a load of actors and craftsman borrowed from the Bond films......Moore, Horsfall Nadim Sawalha,, director Peter Hunt (of the immortal OHMSS), editor (and later Bond director) John Glen, production designer Syd Cain, and those striking opening credits by, who else but Maurice Binder.
And BQ would never miss an opportunity to see the always fetching Susannah York, even in a worthless, throwaway role like the one she's handed here. Oh, Susannah, you can read the phone book and I'll be there.........
What's problematic - the way the film deals with its one and only major black character John Nkulu, a.k.a.'Big King', played with gentle gravitas and minimal dialogue by Simon Sabela. He's apparently meant to represent the entirety of the black population of South Africa, a bear-ish but saintly figure who works so hard in the mines, Milland presents him with a golden helmet at a public ceremony. His character resembles the roles Jim Brown played in some of his first film appearances ("The Dirty Dozen", "Rio Conchos", "The Dark Of The Sun").....a noble hero quietly enduring the societal racism and yet willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good.
(Interesting that only a year earlier Moore's first Bond film "Live and Let Die" offered gifted black actors like Yaphet Kotto, Geoffrey Holder and Julius Harris the chance to play a host of evil villains for a groundbreaking change of pace....
Overall "Gold" ends up exhibiting a slight, but evident whiff of that entitled colonialism that hung over many British films set in foreign lands. With a major star and a jumbo budget on the line, the film's only interested in presenting itself as an all-audience-appeal, international action-adventure with little evidence of what's going on in the country where it unfolds. Just eat your popcorn, it implies, and thrill to the sight of villains vanquished and Roger Moore saving the day....
2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).....if you seek it out, you'll find any number of streaming sites that offer it free..(and features a sturdy, muscular Elmer Bernstein score)
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