Few movies are so confident in their confusion or so weirdly prophetic. “Gold,” reissued on Blu-ray by Kino Classics, went into production at Germany’s studio Ufa, in French- and German-language versions, around the time Hitler was appointed German chancellor. The movie opened in Berlin some 14 months later, as the Nazi regime inaugurated a major public works plan with which “Gold” seems oddly in sync.
The premise can be taken literally, as an adventure in pseudoscience, or metaphorically, expressing an inchoate desire for a new German order founded on modern innovation and medieval magical thinking. A brilliant German scientist discovers a means to transmute lead to gold, but before he can bring his experiments to fruition, his laboratory is destroyed and his recipe is stolen by an unscrupulous Scottish industrialist.
Perhaps the first of the evil British capitalists who would become standard villains in Nazi cinema, the industrialist serves to demonstrate the science-fiction bromide that there are some things mankind was not meant to know. Barely surviving the explosion that killed his mentor, the German scientist’s assistant (Hans Albers, a prominent leading man turned stalwart action star) travels to Scotland and terminates the industrialist’s operation before it can wreck the world economy.
Directed by Karl Hartl, whose earlier feature “F.P.1 Doesn’t Respond” (1932) dramatized the fantastical attempt to construct an artificial mid-Atlantic island landing strip, “Gold” has a leaden quality appropriate to its story. As in its obvious model, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927), the movie’s real stars are its enormous sets and totemic machines — designed, like many of the ones in “Metropolis,” by Otto Hunte. The humans (who include Brigitte Helm, who played the saintly Maria and her evil robot double in “Metropolis,” as the industrialist’s rebellious daughter) are often inert, while the laboratories, with their glowing tubes and humming condensers, are almost living things.
“Gold,” however, bests “Metropolis” with two set-destroying cataclysms instead of one, and another dramatized by the news media in the film. Scarcely less exciting than the movie’s grand finale is the sequence following the creation of synthetic gold. The new Golden Age is heralded with a series of newspaper headlines and newsreel clips that condense six days of social chaos, as euphoric mass production gives way to inflation, panic and catastrophe. The moral, if there is one: Only a German scientist can neutralize the German alchemy that has the power to destroy civilization.
In her 1996 book “Entertaining the Third Reich,” the cultural historian Linda Schulte-Sasse describes “Gold” as “a kind of reverse science fiction, invoking the potential of future technology (nuclear energy) to realize an ancient desire, alchemy.” The science may be absurd, but at least one prominent Nazi, Heinrich Himmler, did reportedly nourish that ancient desire — funding a secret unit at the Dachau concentration camp to turn sand into gold — while the movie itself was banned by the Allies after World War II. (According to the film historian David Stewart Hull, it was wrongly assumed that the filmmakers had based their imaginary atomic reactor on an actual one.)
“Gold” impressed critics when it opened in New York in October 1934. “The outstanding merit of the production is to be found on its technical side,” a critic for The New York Times wrote. Some 19 years later, a 10-minute chunk of “Gold” provided the climax for a more modest production, made in Hollywood: “The Magnetic Monster” (also out on disc from Kino).
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