Has Cinema Been Fair to Gold?

What 100 Movies Tell Us About Gold, Greed and Human Nature

Cinema has not always been particularly kind to gold.

For more than a century, filmmakers have surrounded it with thieves, prospectors, pirates, gangsters, dictators, adventurers, crooked businessmen and increasingly unstable treasure hunters. Men have crossed deserts for it, betrayed their friends over it, robbed heavily guarded vaults to obtain it and occasionally died while trying to carry too much of it. Fantasy has gone even further. Kings have killed for gold, entire civilisations have been built around it, and dragons have apparently concluded that the most sensible thing to do with a sufficiently large gold reserve is to sleep on top of it.

The message appears obvious: put enough gold in front of a human being and something unfortunate is likely to happen.

But is that really what these films are telling us? Or has gold simply become one of cinema's favourite ways of exposing something that was already there?

Before greed, there was hope

One of cinema's earliest great encounters with gold came almost exactly a century ago. Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925) follows prospectors into the Klondike, where thousands had travelled in the hope of finding something capable of changing their lives. Chaplin naturally found comedy in the misery of it all, but underneath the comedy was a very real historical phenomenon.

The people who joined the great gold rushes were not necessarily greedy. Many were poor. Others were farmers, labourers, immigrants or businessmen who saw gold as a chance to escape the limitations of the lives they already had. What they wanted was often remarkably ordinary: a home, independence, security or simply the possibility of beginning again.

This distinction matters because the best films about gold rarely begin with monsters. They begin with perfectly understandable human desires. A person wants enough money to solve a problem. Then enough to feel secure. Then enough never to worry again. Somewhere along the way, the definition of enough can become surprisingly flexible.

Cinema discovered very early that gold was an excellent way of exploring that transition.

The greatest psychological experiment in gold cinema

If one film deserves to sit at the centre of this story, it is John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).

Humphrey Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, a penniless American surviving in Mexico. He is not introduced as an especially powerful or wealthy man, nor as an obvious villain. He simply needs money. Together with Bob Curtin and an experienced prospector named Howard, he heads into the mountains in search of gold.

Eventually, they find it.

In a conventional adventure film, that might have been the happy ending. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it is when the real story begins.

Finding gold creates a new problem: now there is something to lose. The men must divide it, hide it, transport it and trust one another not to take it. Dobbs gradually becomes suspicious of the people around him. Ordinary actions acquire sinister explanations. Friendship becomes competition, and competition becomes paranoia.

The remarkable thing is that the gold itself does absolutely nothing throughout this transformation. It does not change in value from one scene to the next. It does not deceive anybody or threaten anybody. It simply sits there while the people around it begin to change.

This may be one of cinema's most perceptive observations about wealth. Acquiring something valuable does not merely create pleasure. It can create an entirely new anxiety: the fear of losing what has just been acquired.

Dobbs wanted gold because he believed it would make him free. Once he possessed it, he became its prisoner.

That is considerably more interesting than simply saying that greed is bad.

From the prospector to the supervillain

By the 1960s, cinema's ambitions had grown considerably. Apparently three prospectors becoming paranoid in the mountains were no longer enough. Gold now required international conspiracies, private aircraft, heavily guarded vaults and James Bond.

Auric Goldfinger's relationship with gold in Goldfinger (1964) is almost comically unsubtle. Even his first name comes from the Latin word for gold. He surrounds himself with it, trades it, smuggles it and ultimately develops a plan centred on the gold reserves of Fort Knox.

Yet Goldfinger represents an important evolution in the way cinema depicts gold. The prospectors of earlier films ask whether they can find it. Goldfinger is interested in whether he can control it.

Gold has moved from the wilderness into the financial system. It is no longer simply a route out of poverty. It represents economic power.

This transformation mirrors something real about gold's place in society. A nugget discovered by a prospector, a wedding ring, a central-bank reserve and a 400-ounce bullion bar are manifestations of the same element, yet the meaning humans attach to each is entirely different.

Goldfinger simply takes the logic to its cinematic extreme. Once you have accumulated more wealth than you could reasonably spend, the next logical step, at least according to Hollywood, is apparently to acquire several henchmen and develop an unnecessarily complicated plan for world domination.

The perfect thing to steal

Cinema soon discovered another useful property of gold: it is an exceptionally convenient object around which to build a robbery.

From The Italian Job and Kelly's Heroes to Three Kings and Die Hard with a Vengeance, filmmakers have repeatedly returned to gold bars as the ultimate prize. There is a practical storytelling reason for this. Gold requires almost no explanation.

Imagine a film in which thieves break into a vault and discover a complicated portfolio of bonds, derivatives and structured financial instruments. Someone would probably need to spend several minutes explaining to the audience exactly how rich everyone had just become.

Open the door to a room filled with gold bars and everybody understands immediately.

Gold is visual wealth. Its meaning crosses languages, countries and generations. A director can show it for two seconds and move on with the story.

There is, however, a recurring practical difficulty. Gold is extraordinarily dense. A standard large bullion bar weighs roughly 12.4 kilograms, which means cinema's successful gold thieves frequently encounter a problem their planning sessions appear to have overlooked: becoming fabulously wealthy is one thing; carrying the wealth out of the building is quite another.

The result is one of the more amusing recurring themes of gold cinema. Characters spend enormous amounts of ingenuity getting into the vault, only to discover that physics has joined the security team.

Pirates, lost cities and the promise of discovery

Gold has another cinematic identity that is rather different from greed. It represents discovery.

Treasure maps, lost mines and forgotten civilisations appear throughout film history because gold provides a physical destination for adventure. Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, Mackenna's Gold, The Goonies, Indiana Jones, National Treasure and countless other films use treasure as the excuse to send their characters somewhere they would otherwise never go.

In these stories, possession is often less important than the search itself. The treasure represents the possibility that the world still contains secrets. Somewhere beyond the map, beneath the ruins or behind the next mountain, something extraordinary may still be waiting to be discovered.

This is arguably a much older idea than cinema. Stories of hidden gold existed long before moving pictures, and many were based on real historical events. Armies really did move treasure. Ships carrying precious metals really did sink. Rulers really did hide wealth during invasions, and prospectors really did disappear while searching for legendary deposits.

Cinema inherited those stories and gave them landscapes, music and treasure maps with conveniently placed dotted lines.

Then fantasy removed the last traces of subtlety

If ordinary cinema sometimes uses gold metaphorically, fantasy tends to dispense with the metaphor and simply pile the gold to the ceiling.

Smaug in The Hobbit may be one of the purest representations of possession ever committed to the screen. He has accumulated a mountain of treasure so enormous that he can physically disappear beneath it. He does not spend the gold. He does not invest it. He does not use it to build anything. His relationship with wealth has reached its logical endpoint: possession for the sake of possession.

From a modern investment perspective, Smaug's portfolio is perhaps excessively concentrated. His security arrangements, on the other hand, are difficult to criticise.

Fantasy repeatedly returns to the same imagery. Golden crowns represent power. Golden cities represent impossible prosperity. Cursed gold punishes those who take what does not belong to them. Treasure corrupts kings, attracts armies and motivates entire quests.

Television has embraced the symbolism too. Game of Thrones gave us one of the more memorable variations when Viserys Targaryen finally received the "golden crown" he had demanded, although probably not in the form anticipated.

It is hardly subtle, but that is precisely why gold works so well in fantasy. The storyteller does not have to establish its importance. Thousands of years of human culture have already done the work.

The costumes change. The story doesn't.

Watching gold films across different periods reveals something curious. Almost everything surrounding gold changes, while the psychological story remains remarkably stable.

The prospector becomes a mining corporation. The pickaxe becomes geological technology. The horse becomes a helicopter. The treasure map becomes confidential information. The dusty pouch of nuggets becomes a numbered bullion bar in a vault. The bandit becomes an organised criminal, a corrupt executive, an army or a billionaire.

Yet the human sequence remains familiar.

First comes discovery: there might be gold.

Then desire: imagine if we found it.

Then possession: it's ours.

Possession introduces suspicion: perhaps somebody wants my share.

Suspicion creates fear: what if I lose it?

And occasionally fear becomes obsession: I need more.

The setting can be the Klondike, Mexico, Fort Knox, Iraq, Middle-earth or a modern boardroom. The psychological mechanism barely needs rewriting.

But has cinema really been fair to gold?

There is an obvious problem with a century of films associating gold with greed, paranoia, theft and occasionally murder.

Gold never actually does anything.

It sits there.

Fred C. Dobbs becomes paranoid, but the gold does not whisper to him. Auric Goldfinger develops megalomaniacal ambitions without encouragement from a bullion bar. Smaug could, presumably, have taken up gardening.

Perhaps cinema does not really use gold as a symbol of greed at all. Perhaps it uses gold as a mirror.

The same metal can represent completely different things depending on who is holding it. It can be treasure stolen during a war or savings accumulated over a lifetime. It can sit in a pirate's chest, a central-bank vault, a museum or a jewellery box inherited from a grandmother. It can represent conquest, craftsmanship, security, love, vanity, independence or fear.

Gold is unusually useful to storytellers precisely because it is neutral. Humans supply the meaning.

That may explain why filmmakers have returned to it so often. If you want to discover something about a fictional character, place something universally recognised as valuable in front of them and see what happens.

Some will steal it. Some will share it. Some will protect it. Some will become obsessed with it. Some will give it away.

And one or two will apparently build an underground lair.

Cinema exaggerates almost everything, but perhaps it understood one thing about gold remarkably well. For thousands of years, human beings have never been quite indifferent to it.

The GOLDEXO Gold Film List

100+ films in which gold, the search for gold, treasure or the human obsession surrounding it plays a role

The early years, prospectors and gold rushes: Greed (1924), The Gold Rush (1925), The Trail of '98 (1928), The Spoilers (1930), The Painted Desert (1931), Barbary Coast (1935), Sutter's Gold (1936), Gold Is Where You Find It (1938), North of the Yukon (1939), Northwest Passage (1940), The Spoilers (1942), Alaska (1944), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Lust for Gold (1949), Klondike Fever (1980), Mother Lode (1982), Pale Rider (1985), White Fang (1991), The Claim (2000), The Sisters Brothers (2018).

Westerns, lost mines and gold adventures: California (1947), Yellow Sky (1948), The Walking Hills (1949), The Far Country (1954), The Treasure of Pancho Villa (1955), The Tall Men (1955), Backlash (1956), The Badlanders (1958), Gold of the Seven Saints (1961), Ride the High Country (1962), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Mackenna's Gold (1969), Paint Your Wagon (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Firewalker (1986), City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold (1994), King of California (2007).

Gold robberies, criminals and heists: The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), Plunder Road (1957), Goldfinger (1964), The Italian Job (1969), Kelly's Heroes (1970), The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Hot Rock (1972), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), The Great Train Robbery (1978), The Brink's Job (1978), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Three Kings (1999), The Score (2001), The Italian Job (2003), Fool's Gold (2008), Tower Heist (2011), Black Sea (2014).

Treasure hunters, pirates and forgotten fortunes: Treasure Island (1934), Captain Kidd (1945), King Solomon's Mines (1950), Treasure Island (1950), Against All Flags (1952), Boy on a Dolphin (1957), Treasure of the Four Crowns (1983), Romancing the Stone (1984), King Solomon's Mines (1985), The Goonies (1985), Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Cutthroat Island (1995), The Mummy (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), National Treasure (2004), Sahara (2005), National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007), Fool's Gold (2008), The Adventures of Tintin (2011), Uncharted (2022).

Fantasy, mythology and spectacular quantities of gold: Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), The Hobbit (1977), Dragonslayer (1981), The NeverEnding Story (1984), Aladdin (1992), The Mummy (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).

Gold, greed and human nature: Greed (1924), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Eureka (1983), A Simple Plan (1998), The Claim (2000), There Will Be Blood (2007), Gold (2016), The Sisters Brothers (2018), Da 5 Bloods (2020).

Gold stories from around the world: The Golden Fortress (India, 1974), The Good, the Bad, the Weird (South Korea, 2008), The Thieves (South Korea, 2012), The Taking of Tiger Mountain (China, 2014), Goldstone (Australia, 2016), Golden Job (Hong Kong, 2018), K.G.F: Chapter 1 (India, 2018), Project Gutenberg (Hong Kong, 2018), The Furnace (Australia, 2020), Collectors (South Korea, 2020), K.G.F: Chapter 2 (India, 2022).

And a few more journeys down the treasure-map rabbit hole: The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975), Treasure of Matecumbe (1976), The Deep (1977), The Island (1980), Yellowbeard (1983), Nate and Hayes (1983), Congo (1995), Muppet Treasure Island (1996), Six Days Seven Nights (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Rundown (2003), Into the Blue (2005), The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines (2006), Finding 'Ohana (2021), Jungle Cruise (2021).

More than a century after Chaplin went looking for gold in the Klondike, filmmakers are still digging.

Apparently, so are we.

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