The Trail of ’98 (Clarence Brown, 1928) and the Klondike Gold Rush:  The Last Big road show of Hollywood’s Silent Film Era

Carmen Guiralt Gomar

doi:10.14591/aniki.v4n2.290

Carmen Guiralt Gomar Independent scholar

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14591/aniki.v4n2.290

Keywords: The Trail of ’98 (Clarence Brown 1928), Klondike Gold Rush, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Fantom Screen, road show

Abstract

This paper consists in a study of The Trail of ’98 (1928), a film directed by Clarence Brown for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, whose plot deals with the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada, in 1898. Although this was one of the last great epic films produced by Hollywood in the late 1920s, it remains Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s biggest commercial failure to date. As a result, it is largely unknown and still undocumented today. This paper will aim to create a historical reconstruction of the shooting, establishing its chronology and researching the extreme circumstances of its location shooting. It will also scrutinise the merits of a new, albeit short-lived, widescreen process called Fantom Screen that was used specifically for its exhibition, and its distribution under the concept of road show. Finally, it will analyse the reasoning behind the film’s structure and the specific Hollywood context that led to its commercial failure.

Author Biography

Carmen Guiralt Gomar, Independent scholar

Carmen Guiralt received her degree and PhD in History of Art from the Universidad de Valencia, and her MA in History and Aesthetics of Cinema from the Universidad de Valladolid. She published over a dozen articles in national and international journals in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences, such as Film History: An International Journal (USA), Observatorio (OBS*) (Portugal), Zer: Revista de estudios de comunicación, L’Atalante: Revista de estudios cinematográficos, Revista de Comunicación de la SEECI, Fonseca: Journal of Communication and Fotocinema: Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía, amongs other. Since 2007, she is a regular contributor of the journal Secuencias: Revista de Historia del Cine, where she published several articles and reviews. She also presented various papers in international conferences. Among her collective works, she highlights the book Ciudades de Cine (Editorial Cátedra, 2014), where she contributed the article about Washington, D.C. She has just finished a monograph about the director Clarence Brown for Editorial Cátedra, which is the first book ever published about this director, and was published in the series “Signo e Imagen/Cineastas” in 2017.