The Trail of '98

Miners are returning with gold from the Klondike fields. Soon, the news spreads across the country and fortune seekers rush in from everywhere. I like the big innocent guy getting taken by the scamming huckster. I'm less interested with everybody else including the young couple. Of course, they are at the melodramatic center of the movie. Once they get to the snowy north in a storm, I would stop the music and pump up the wind sounds. This wind sound is closer to a siren than actual wind. Generally, I don't like the accompanying music. It doesn't fit the material. I don't know if the music has been changed but I don't like it. On the other hand, I do like the snow scenes. The outdoor shots look impressive including climbing up a mountain and the wild river ride. The fake snow scenes are less impressive but I can see the appeal of some of the special effects for their time. This is a solid silent era drama.

This is one of my favourite films of the late silent era.It has a mixture of drama, suspense,action and comedy to satisfy most tastes. The comedy is provided by Karl Dane, as a Scandinavian saphead who falls for about every con that comes his way. The hero and heroine suit each other well. The villain is about as bad as you could want and the fight scene with the hero is one of the most realistic I have ever seen.There are some pretty good special effects and some strong supporting characters. The way in which people come to accept the fate of their companions tells us how harsh conditions must have been and how hard those prospectors had to become to survive. Add to this a theme song, background music and sound effects....what more could you ask for?

In 1896 gold was discovered on a small creek in the Klondike district of Canada's Yukon region. Despite the extreme remoteness of the location and the tremendous difficulties involved in getting there, over the next four years 30,000 people would travel to the boom town of Dawson City, desperate for wealth. Eventually, $100,000,000 in gold would be discovered by these hardy argonauts. THE TRAIL OF '98 tells their story.

One of the last epic silent films, MGM spared no expense and filmed largely on location. Although almost forgotten today, this is a wonderful movie full of romance & adventure. Its most famous scenes involve the hideous climb over Chilkoot Pass, which separated the disembarkation point of Skagway from the Yukon River, where the gold seekers had to build their own boats and run the rapids down to Dawson. The shots of the long line of men & women, toiling like ants up the steep slope of Chilkoot, with the weak dying along the way, isn't soon forgotten.

The cast is first rate, although many of them are forgotten now: Dolores Del Rio, Ralph Forbes, Harry Carey, Karl Dane, Emily Fitzroy, Roscoe Karns, Tully Marshall & Doris Lloyd. Playing saints or sinners, they help make this film truly memorable.

Tragedy struck during the filming of the short river rapids sequence. A cord was strung across the river, but the safety loops hanging from it were allowed to become knotted & slippery, thus giving the stuntmen nothing to grab and cling to as they swept beneath it. Of the eight stuntmen shown in the film running the rapids, four were to drown; two of the bodies were never recovered.

Would you quit your job working on trains and commit, by what today might be considered, kidnapping and endangerment of a minor? Abandon your wife in Michigan? Abandon your entire family in Kansas? Stow away by train or ship? Abandon the dry gold fields of the Nevada desert--well, sure, who wouldn't do that.... To sail from San Francisco, to slog through the snowdrifts and mountain trails of the North, risk the rapids of the Yukon River, avalanches, freezing and starving to death, only to, then, fear fever, being assaulted, robbed and swindled, raped and forced into prostitution, eaten by dogs, or lit like a human torch... plus mosquitoes? I mean, yeah, gold is cool, but....

Set during the Klondike Gold Rush, "The Trail of '98" is more of an ensemble, rather than star-driven, late silent adventure epic that features a synchronized soundtrack of so-so sound effects and musical scoring (the sentimental lyrics for one smooching scene in particular was too much, and, at other moments, the constant blasts of wind can be grating). Indeed, it's a bit difficult and partly a wasted effort to try to keep track of all the characters--only some of whom ultimately drive the plot forward. The most important is the romance between Berna (early Mexican star Dolores Del Rio) and Larry, as threatened by the baddie Jack Locasto (Harry Carey, a star of Westerns with the moniker "Cheyenne Harry" early on, but who was transitioning to character roles by now). Larry teams up with some other prospectors in his pursuit for gold, but they're hardly worth mentioning and are only occasionally amusing.

It's no challenge to Charlie Chaplin's "The Gold Rush" (1925) as the best film made regarding Klondike yellow metal, but this one does feature some spectacular set pieces, visual effects and stuntwork, which, reportedly, included real-life casualties. The avalanche and fire scenes are especially grizzly, as is the wintry location shooting, and even the rear-projection photography for the rapids is relatively not too bad. On the other hand, there's far too much set-up, including excessive title cards, to get to the good stuff and even much of that is rudimentary, Victorian-style melodrama, while also resembling a wild-Northern Western. Most of the side characters and subplots aren't compelling enough to justify their inclusion.

The director here, Clarence Brown, could be a visually masterful filmmaker. He learned from one of the pioneers of cinematic visual innovation in Maurice Tourneur during the 1910s and into the early 1920s. He's, perhaps, best remembered for directing a few Greta Garbo vehicles, as well as pictures for other famous actresses, but some of them are remarkably lovely pictorially, and the romances are more effective than here, too. "Flesh and the Devil" (1926), in particular, is a masterpiece in these regards. I wonder what a filmmaker better adept at exploiting nature as a character could've done with this film, though--namely, Swedish émigrés Victor Sjöström or Mauritz Stiller, for instance. Or, perhaps, the blind character here could've been exploited to comment on the loss of visual virtuosity in the transition from silents to talkies, as was the flower girl in Chaplin's "City Lights" (1931), or even how blindness was associated with art by Yevgeni Bauer in "Za schastem" (1917). Instead, there is spectacle in "The Trail of '98" to see, but one need overlook the narrative dullness.

Gold is surely what made people most dream of during all civilizations. This is proved again very completely in this film where we discover very different characters who only have one aim : Klondike.

We particularly follow the story of a young girl, played by the beautiful Dolores Del Rio. Clarence Brown alternates dramatic scenes and very funny ones which appeal to you the memory of Gold rush by Charlie Chaplin. It's very to rare to watch such a film nowadays, so don't hesitate if you have the occasion.