Our film correspondent revisits a flawed-but-worthy attempt to transfer to celluloid the famous tale of 1924 Churchill Downs hero Black Gold and the colt’s Native American connections
Black Gold (1947)
directed by Phil Karlson; starring Anthony Quinn, Katherine DeMille, Lawrence ‘Ducky’ Louie
The Kentucky Derby always produces a great story, although some of them don’t last longer than two weeks, when the Derby winner comes a cropper in the Preakness and the star search begins anew.
Then again, how about a Kentucky Derby legend that is still robust after more than 100 years?
The Derby was celebrating its golden anniversary when Black Gold took breeder and owner Rosa Hoots to the top of the racing world in a wild-and-woolly 1924 renewal that threw 19 horses into a Churchill Downs arena packed with more than 80,000 raucous pilgrims. Ridden by 22-year-old J.D. Mooney, Black Gold finished half-a-length ahead of a four-horse scramble for second money.
Hoots, a member of the Osage nation, owned 2,000 acres back in Oklahoma and was receiving royalties from mineral rights on her property.
Useeit, the dam of Black Gold, was a whirlwind of a racehorse for Al Hoots, Rosa’s late husband. Her pedigree would have to improve to be called obscure, but Rosa Hoots had the gumption to get U
seeit to E.R. Bradley’s Idle Hour Stock Farm in Kentucky, where she was bred to the promising young stallion Black Toney.
‘The Indian horse’
By the time Black Gold went to the post in Louisville, he already was the leading three-year-old of the season, as his odds of $1.75 on the dollar confirmed. Still, he was forever referred to in the press as ‘the Indian horse’, who just happened to be bred in Kentucky.
The Black Gold story seemed ripe for a Hollywood movie treatment, although it took a while for the idea to sink in. The 1930s and early 1940s were crammed full of racing movies anyway, so the Indian horse had to wait his turn until September 1947, when Black Gold was released into a gritty film noir landscape that included Nightmare Alley, Dark Passage, and Kiss of Death.
Liberties were taken, as movies tend to do. At the center of Black Gold is a Native American couple, Charley and Sarah Eagle, who farm a plot of land they own in Oklahoma. Charley spends months away from home hustling around bush tracks with a fast mare named Black Hope, while Sarah stays in their childless home and tends to the gardens.
As the Eagles, future two-time Oscar winner Anthony Quinn and his wife, Katherine DeMille, gave the film serious billing. Cost-conscious Allied Artists Studio provided the unheralded director Phil Karlson with a significant $450,000 budget and color film stock.
Word of mouth
The screenplay was written by Agnes Christine Johnston and Caryl Coleman, from a story by Coleman that sourced both word-of-mouth and contemporary news reports. Johnston had been writing for the movies since the dawn of the silent era.
Al Hoots did not live long enough to see Black Gold born to Useeit, who produced only one more foal of record. The film’s Black Hope, on the other hand, dies after giving birth to her
Black Gold, a sure fire way to tap into the orphan angst so successfully deployed by Walt Disney in the animated Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
Unlike Hoots, Charley Eagle survives to savor the sight of the young Black Gold spooking at the sound of the first booming oil gusher erupting on the Eagle homestead. There follows a dizzying time jump to the nouveau riche Eagles throwing a party for the local gentry in a magnificent house on a sprawling, white-fenced ranch, while a more mature Black Gold and Davey train for the races.
In the film world of the late 1940s, most actors playing Native Americans were burdened with dialogue that came to be called ‘Tonto talk’, a reference to the stilted English lexicon deployed by the Lone Ranger’s sidekick in their long-running radio and television series.
Innocent charm
After a while, Charley’s assault on the language becomes cartoonish, despite Quinn’s attempt to leaven the simple-minded side of the character with a streak of innocent charm. His favorite exclamation seems to be “Chihuahua!” in a cross-cultural touch of Mexican slang that's on his lips as he dies in Sarah’s arms, with Black Gold nearby.
Tha
nkfully, there are a few brief flashes of the actor Quinn (left) was to become. Born in Mexico, Quinn already had made nearly 50 films playing a va
riety of ethnic character parts by the time he got top billing in Black Gold. Later, when he soared in movies like Lust for Life, Lawrence of Arabia, and Viva Zapata!, there was nowhere the audience could hide from his dark intellect and raw power.
As Sarah, Katherine DeMille (below left) opts for an aura of loving sincerity rather than long-suffering wife. She also speaks as though educated at Barnard, which is explained away by a brief reference to her attendance at a ‘reservation school’ in her youth.
DeMille, of Scottish and Italian descent, was the adopted daughter of Paramount’s Cecil B. DeMille. By then, her glamorous onscreen intensity had neutralized most talk of nepotism.
Quinn and DeMille were married in 1937 and had five children, including three born during her six years away from acting in the 1940s. She returned to work specifically for Black Gold.
It is a relief to report that the young Chinese-American actor Lawrence ‘Ducky’ Louie is allowed a certain amount of dignity in the part of Davey, who is adopted by the Eagles after his father is murdered in a grim opening sequence. Davey eventually learns to ride well enough to become Black Gold’s jockey.
In its time, Black Gold was considered unusual for its observations of racial prejudice against Native Americans. And yet, the worst offenders are a pack of boys at Davey’s country school who ask if he is “yellow all over” and chant “Chin-chin Chinaman”. Kids can be so cruel.
Viewers will enjoy the sound of Clem McCarthy, the most famous sports announcer of the era, narrating the opening scenes of idyllic Kentucky pastures and then returning for a call of the 1924 Kentucky Derby tailored to the film. Black Gold ends on the Derby winner’s stand, as Sarah Eagle gazes skyward with a smile and a whispered “Chihuahua” to the heavens.
Progressive bonafides
The heroic sight of characters of color – Sarah (with actor in brownface) and Davey – receiving the gold Derby trophy inspired the producers to emphasize the film’s progressive bonafides.
As noted on the TCM website: “American Indians from nine tribes were invited to attend a special screening of the film in Los Angeles, as well as a ‘powwow’ at Farmer's Market, which was proclaimed a temporary ‘Indian reservation.’ To promote the film in Los Angeles, an Indian village with five teepees and twelve Indians was set up at a drugstore near Beverly Hills.”
In an interview years later, Karlson was quoted as saying: “I made such a strong statement that the Indian nations all picked it up. They realized what we were saying in there … to look at something and see the truth, for a change, was something that was unusual in those days.”
For a September release, Black Gold did a respectable $1.8 million in box office. And while critics admired the effort to portray Karlson’s version of the Native American experience in the unwelcoming world of horse racing, they found the quality of the film lacking.
“It has enough pathos to choke a beggar,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “pidgin dialogue that affrights the sensitive ear and a horse-race plot that had long whiskers when silent pictures were just the rage.”
As of 2023, an independent docudrama called Rosa and Black Gold was in the works. A modern studio-quality version of the Black Gold tale also would be welcomed, although not necessarily based on the children’s book from 1957 written by Marguerite Henry, but on the more recent Dream Derby: The Myth and Legend of Black Gold, by the respected historian Avalyn Hunter (University Press of Kentucky, 2023).
• Black Gold is not currently available on major streaming services, although it does occasionally surface on TCM. I found a watchable version on the Russian-based ok.ru website, with so-so video quality but excellent sound.
• Read all Jay Hovdey's features in his Favorite Racehorses series
‘A by-the-numbers skimming of the Thoroughbred world’ – why it’s hard to be sympathetic to Simpatico
Romantic fatalism, honest and free from phony melodrama – Jay Hovdey on Lean On Pete
Henry Fonda double bill: when a celluloid hero tried his hand at horse racing – twice in two years
‘A bulletproof, gold-plated classic’ – Jay Hovdey on Let It Ride
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