Gold (1974)

(On TV, April 2022) I can’t be the only viewer left uneasy by Gold. It is, after all, a thriller that takes place in South Africa during the Apartheid years, with Roger Moore and other white characters having a jolly good time… and the sole black character sacrificing himself for them. Harrumph. There is, to be fair, an interesting hook to it all – rapacious, psychopathic owners of a gold mine engineering a major disaster (i.e.: drilling into a water reservoir, flooding the mine) in order to boost profits or something like that. The owners are British; the mine is in South Africa and at its best Gold offers a quasi-documentary circa-1974 look at gold mining, going deep on footage that details the mine’s operations without contributing much to the plot. Meanwhile, we have Moore playing an engineer with a shady past (more an attempt at pumping up a character than setting up anything that happens on-screen) who, being a Roger Moore character, is debonair enough to seduce the wife of a superior – but that’s OK, since he’s one of the psychopathic executives out to sacrifice lives for profit. The South African scenery is quite beautiful (especially once the characters fly around the countryside) but there are are many unexamined assumptions in Gold when it comes to black majority portrayal, or even the protagonist’s morality. Much of it probably stems from the control that the apartheid regime imposed on film productions at the time – anything that did not reflect well on the South African regime simply did not get approval to shoot in the country. Some of it probably stems from Moore’s weight as a leading man: newly minted as James Bond, probably central to the film’s financing, it made sense to give him a likable cad role and not ask too many questions. It doesn’t help that much of Gold is low-octane as far as thrills and suspense are concerned: despite the ticking time bomb of deliberate sabotage by the owners, the film is more amiable than urgent. There’s one unexpectedly fun scene involving a small airplane making a difficult landing, but the film then loses itself in an overdrawn underground sequence that leads to a bitter (black) sacrifice and more roses for our impeccable (white) protagonist. Gold, despite some unusual potential, hasn’t aged very well – and as a period piece, it acts more like a reminder of what has thankfully been deemed unacceptable.