Phantom Gold (1937)

Harold Lasseter claims he knows the location of a gold reef and in 1930 manages to raise funds for an expedition to discover it. He discovers the reef but dies of thirst.

Date of release
1937-06-23
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 4m
Genres
Adventure
Director
Rupert Kathner

Casting

Interesting facts

Phantom Gold is a 1937 Australian adventure film about the search for Lasseter's Reef. It was the first feature from director Rupert Kathner.

Production

In April 1936 Sydney businessman H.V. Foy led an expedition to discover Lasseter's Reef in central Australia. He took two filmmakers with him, Rupert Kathner and Stan Tolhurst, to record the trip. Along the way they encountered several people who knew Lassester, including Bob Buck, the bushman who found his dead body, and Old Warts, an aboriginal who befriended him.

The expedition retraced Lasseter's steps, including visiting the cave where he died, but found no trace of gold. Foy, Kathner and Tolhurt decided to make a feature film based on the story of Lasseter's expedition instead. Tolhurst was cast in the role of the prospector and grew a beard.

Filming went on for around three months in central Australia. Another expedition was taking place at the same time to find the reef. They reported spears had been thrown at them by aboriginals in war paint. When Kathner and Tolhurst arrived in Broken Hill in July they revealed these aboriginals had been painted up to appear in the film but they had believed them to be docile.

Kathner and Tolhurst then returned to Sydney and shot additional sequences. Among these were re-enactments of Captain W.L. Pittendrigh's real life attempted rescue of Lasseter.

None of the film had synchronous dialogue apart from an opening interview with Foy. Sydney radio personality A.C. Stevens offered a narration.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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