Klondike (1932)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Klondike |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1932 |
| length | 68 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Phil Rosen |
| script | Tristram Tupper |
| production | WT Lackey for Monogram Pictures |
| camera | James Brown |
| occupation | |
| |
Klondike is a 1932 film based on a story by Tristram Tupper .
action
The doctor Dr. Robert Cromwell lost a patient in a daring operation. He is charged and loses his reputation. Therefore, he decides to give up his practice and leave his home. On the way he reads a newspaper report that his medical license has been withdrawn. The small plane in which he is traveling with Donald Evans gets into trouble in the Vancouver area . It loses height more and more, finally races into a forest in the blowing snow and crashes into a tree. Evans is killed, Cromwell survives injured and sets off on foot to seek help. In fact, a man on a dog sled discovers him and takes him to the Armstrong family home in Klondike . This consists of Mark Armstrong and his son Jim as well as his fiancé, the blond Klondike, who serves the Armstrongs in the shop and looks after Cromwell until he is better.
Jim, a technically gifted young man, has a similar condition as the patient Cromwell lost. He is already in a wheelchair, can no longer use one of his hands and can only use one eye. His death is foreseeable if he does not have an operation. The Armstrongs and Klondike heard about the plane crash over the radio . After finding out that it was not Evans, as they initially believed, but Cromwell ended up under their roof, they penetrate him to operate on Jim. Cromwell initially defends himself by arguing that he is no longer licensed and that the operation is very risky. Mark accuses him of having an eye on Klondike and therefore not wanting to help Jim; Klondike explains that she loves Jim and that she will marry him when he is cured. Finally, Cromwell lets himself be persuaded and performs the operation on the patient's head under primitive conditions. Klondike and an acquaintance named Tom assist him. Jim survives the operation. While he is waking up, he overhears Tom say that Cromwell only operated on him because he did not want to fight a helpless man. But if Jim is well, Cromwell will surely fight him for Klondike.
Jim therefore pretends to have lost his speech after the operation, which Cromwell astonishes because he cannot explain it medically. Over the next few days, disturbing news was heard over and over again from the radio loudspeaker: It was known that the murderer Cromwell was hiding in Alaska. Cromwell wants to leave the Armstrong's house, but Klondike persuades him to stay for the time being. One evening when Cromwell was looking through his notes on the Jim Armstrong case, he noticed a passage in which he noted that Jim's breath and other noises could be heard through the thin walls of the house and that he muttered to himself in his sleep. He begins to listen on the wall and finally perceives strange noises. He then checks Jim's room and finds that he is not in his bed. He finally finds him in his workshop - without a wheelchair and, as Jim proves right away, quite able to speak. Jim electrified the doctor and gagged and handcuffed him. He explains to him that it was he who uttered the alleged radio news with a disguised voice and shows him the switch that you have to flip in order to operate the microphone. Now he will torture him to death as punishment for experimenting with people. In an unobserved moment, Cromwell manages to flip the switch for the microphone, so that Klondike is alerted by the sounds emanating from the radio loudspeaker. Desperate, she rushes to the workshop door and asks Jim to open it. Finally, Jim meets her, followed by the doctor, who explains that Jim is now back in body and mind.
In the final sequences of the film, Cromwell can be seen again in his practice in conversation with a journalist who tried to get an exclusive story from him during the scandalous story about the deceased patient. He explains to her that he found gold in Klondike , and introduces her to this gold in the form of Klondike, whom Jim Armstrong has apparently left and opted for the doctor.
distribution
The film was released in the US on August 30, 1932; in London a few weeks later. In the United Kingdom it was shown as The Doctor's Sacrifice and in Denmark as Klondyke .
reception
Tara Neilson particularly highlighted the performance of Priscilla Dean , who played the journalist and whose last film was Klondike . She also listed numerous errors in the film in the Alaskan Movie Review . It is completely unrealistic to let the heroine act lightly dressed in huge rooms during a winter in Alaska, which are only heated with kindling in tiny stoves (“The lodge is operating full scale deep in winter, with huge, spacious ceilings and wide open rooms which they're heating with small armloads of small sticks of wood in a small stove as the heroine drifts about the place in thin, short dresses and skimpy negliges. Fail "). Less remote is the accumulation of amazing things on the basement floor of the hut, including the mad scientist who does not shy away from performing "experiments" on guests and even killing them, even a guest who has just restored health and mobility, just for that To get courted girls ("The lodge has a basement full of crazy gizmos complete with a mad scientist who doesn't balk at" experimenting "on and even killing the guests of said lodge, even a guest who just restored him to health and mobility , in order to get the girl. PASS !!! "). This compensates for the mistakes that have been made with regard to the location and makes the film's "Alaska character" completely believable. ("You might think that failing four out of five points would make the movie utterly un-Alaskan, but you'd be wrong. The final point makes up for all the rest and completely sells the Alaskan-ness of this film.")
The material was filmed again in 1942 under the title Klondike Fury by William K. Howard with Edmund Lowe .
Web links
- Klondike in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ George A. Katchmer: Eighty Silent Film Stars . McFarland, 1991, ISBN 978-0-899-50494-0 , p. 610 ( limited preview in Google book search)
- ↑ Tara Neilson, Klondike (1932) in: Alaskan Movie Review 3/30/2018 (online at www.alaskaforreal.com )
- ^ Alan Goble: The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film. Walter de Gruyter, 2011, ISBN 978-3-110-95194-3 , p. 467 ( limited preview in the Google book search).