Flowing Gold is a tonal catastrophe, oscillating wildly between goofy comedy, crime film and, in its totally unexpected, massively impressively finale, a disaster picture. Ostensibly about Texas oil, it’s instead sort of a bloodless western, full of muddy streets, avaricious bad guys, and comely country girls, but without many horses, gunfights, or cows. What it does have to offer, however, is Milton Sills, an extremely up my alley wry, middle-aged-ish dude, playing a city sharp who is loads of fun when he’s being shady, and a lot less so when he’s revealing he’s really just a hard luck good boy. That said, it’s easy to forgive the film’s broad forgettability when it turns into a disaster picture, and Sills’ character must be rescued from a raging-flood-cum-oil-fire by the nice girl who loves him, and is also, conveniently, strong as an ox. (In the restoration that screened at SFSFF, those scenes were toned a deep crimson, which made the drama and effects all the more striking.)⏩ SFSFF 2023, ranked.
How to blow up an oil well, with capitalist corruption, family melodrama and comedy all in one, as Texan petrolfever breeds and bleeds self-made tycoons, and their ties to fixed riches, while aiming at swallowing the little fish in the pond.After establishing a frontier trail of oil & coins intro director Joseph De Grasse, goes on to set-up a boomtown of suspicious fortunes and backstabbing schemes, smearing a messy affair around, as sticky as the mud that covers the streets.Truth and slander, along privilege and prejudice go head-on with a messy hand over, all of it getting transported to the city eventually, where cosmopolitan family posturing and romance of course, making all of it in execution, a rather uneven cinematic affair. I was kinda pulled in for a minute, by the lesser known name cast, and star power absence, but even for early cinema, it almost felt by the numbers rags and riches joint, forced also by its comedic element, and the moral lesson, "that money simply can't buy everything".What really became a revelation though, was the fact that we were sitting there, watching a movie that actually had a three day run at the same Castro theater from May 26th to the 28th, in 1924!! and now was enjoying a public screening once again, a century or so later, now that's something, Oh!... the magic of cinema, trully transcending time indeed.
Premiere of SFSFF Restoration at The San Francisco Silent Film Festival Friday, July 14, 2023, at 1:00 PMFlowing GoldLive music by Utsav LalDirector Joseph De GrasseCast Anna Q. Nilsson, Milton Sills, Alice CalhounBased on the novel by one-time prospector and Olympic medal winner Rex Beach, Flowing Gold depicts a homesteading family who strike it rich in the first Texas oil boom. Rousing sequences—including terrifying thunderstorms and a massive oil fire—dazzle in this new tinted and toned restoration. The detailed sets are contemporaneous representations of the oil rigs of the time—industrial behemoths that create instantly recognizable Texan vistas. Flowing Gold is Joseph de Grasse’s penultimate film as director, coming at the end of a prolific career in silent cinema.Source Information:SFSFF RESTORATION! 35mm print from the 2023 4K digital restoration by San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Narodní Filmový Archiv, Prague. The only extant elements related to this film were inspected at the Czech National Film Archive (Národní Filmový Archiv) in 2016. The film features numerous instances of tinting, including a spectacular bright red tint used to highlight a thrilling fire sequence. To the best of our knowledge, this film has not been screened in any capacity since the silent era.96 min United States 1924 35mm
