Barbary Coast

Barbary Coast (1935)

Love was a gamble she couldn't afford to lose.

Mary Rutledge arrives from the east, finds her fiancé dead, and goes to work at the roulette wheel of Luis Chamalis' Bella Donna, a rowdy gambling house in San Francisco in the 1850s. She falls in love with miner Jim Carmichael and takes his gold dust at the wheel. She goes after him, Chamalis goes after her with intent to harm Carmichael.

Date of release
1935-10-13
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (40)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Romance, Western, Drama
Director
Howard Hawks

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: San Francisco
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Barbary Coast is a 1935 American historical Western film directed by Howard Hawks. Shot in black-and-white and set in San Francisco's so-called Barbary Coast during the California Gold Rush, the film combines elements of the Western genre with those of crime, melodrama and adventure. It features a wide range of actors, from hero Joel McCrea to villain Edward G. Robinson, and stars Miriam Hopkins in the leading role as Mary 'Swan' Rutledge. In an early, uncredited appearance, David Niven plays a drunken sailor being thrown out of a bar.

Production

The film is based on the bestseller The Barbary Coast (1933) by Herbert Asbury. When the first draft of the script was submitted to Joseph Breen, he commented to Samuel Goldwyn that "The whole flavor of the story is one of sordidness, and low-tone morality."

After months of revisions by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the story changed from a story of an area of San Francisco where men came to find pleasure in drinking, prostitution, and gambling to a love story. Breen commented to Will Hays that it was now a love story "between a fine, clean girl" and a sentimental young man and that there was "no sex, no unpleasant details of prostitution" and contains "full, and completely compensating, value [..…

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