In April 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, US President Franklin D Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, effectively confiscating privately-held gold from American citizens. This is the catalyst for Padraic McKinley’s tough and gruelling thriller, which traces the progress of a group of labour camp prisoners who have been tasked with carrying gold from the Black Hawk Gold Mine in Oregon to keep it out of the government’s clutches.
The story boils down to a battle of wills and wits between corrupt camp warden JJ Clancy (Russell Crowe) and Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), with Clancy planning a massive payday for himself and his co-conspirators while Murphy and his companions have been promised their freedom. Oddly enough, not everything goes entirely according to plan.
We’re introduced to Murphy as a single father struggling to make ends meet in an economy that’s dead on its feet, and he’s primarily concerned with the welfare of his young daughter Penny (a heartbreakingly cute Avy Berry). He’s a veteran of the battlefields of the First World War and is evidently a skilful mechanic and handyman, but he runs out of luck when he gets embroiled in a fight and is arrested. What really starts gnawing at him is the prospect of his daughter being taken away by the state and put up for adoption, so he’s going to grab any opportunity to get out and get back to her (pictured below, Julia Jones, Ethan Hawke, director Padraic McKinley and Austin Amelio).
He ends up in a labour camp in Oregon’s remote Deschutes County, where he impresses Clancy with his coolness and problem-solving skills. For instance, when the prisoners run out of explosives for clearing the path for the road they’re building, he devises a different method of moving a huge rock by means of brute force and applied physics. He also does a slick job of repairing Clancy’s ailing automobile. The menacing but smooth-talking Clancy (Crowe is chillingly plausible here) concludes that Murphy is the man he needs for his gold-removal gambit.
Murphy and a little group of co-prisoners thus set out on a 60-mile trek through dense forest, mist-shrouded mountain panoramas, rivers and ravines, lugging rucksacks crammed with gold ingots. It’s like Deliverance meets The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as the going gets steadily rougher in the beautiful but forbidding landscape. Personal relationships inevitably begin to fray, not least thanks to the presence of two thuggish minders.
The screenplay by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines makes space for some character-development among the convicts, who include the socialistically-inclined Singh (Avi Nash), the loud-mouthed Rankin (Austin Amelio) and the mild-mannered Scandinavian, Olson (Lucas Lynggard Tonnesen). The late arrival of an American Indian woman, Anna (Julia Jones), brings a spot of welcome contrast to the testosterone-heavy climate, and Anna isn’t liable to back down (“I think men who talk big usually ain’t big,” she snorts at one point.)
Dramatic highlights include crossing a steepling ravine via a tattered old bridge that’s falling to bits, an onslaught of huge logs which come thundering down the river, and one menacing scene lit solely by lightning flashes from an approaching thunderstorm. You even get Lynyrd Skynyrd playing “Call Me the Breeze” for a bit of light relief, although The Band’s classic “The Weight” is conspicuous by its absence. This is muscular, no-frills filmmaking which keeps the tension tight and the action rolling. Pretty darn good.
