North to the Klondike

This Northwesterner starts out by telling you how it will turn out by having Andy Devine bookend it, telling it as events fifty years earlier; and then villain Lon Chaney Jr explains to his henchmen that there is gold in them thar hills, but farmers have homesteaded it all; when mining engineer Broderick Crawford shows up to start work, Chaney tells him it's a bust and offers him money for his time and boat fare back.

Crawford turns down the offer. This is his first leading role, and he wants all the B-movie glory that an hour can offer. There's the scandalous comic sidekick in Andy Devine; there's the drunken doctor, played by Lloyd Corrigan; there are the Chinese types, played by Willy Fung, and Keye Luke as his Harvard-educated son; and so forth, including Evelyn Ankers, Dorothy Granger, Monte Blue, and so forth. As Chaney's machinations to run the homesteaders off advance, Crawford is on hand to rattle off his lines, discover the plot, and court Miss Ankers.

Supposedly, it's based on a Jack London story. Well, they might have paid the estate for the rights. The result is an ok timewaster.