With a plot partially lifted from The Towering Inferno, Gold is a man made disaster of a film in every sense of the word.
Ray Milland is the hard as nails South African gold mine magnate, Harry Hirschfeld. He's done something to get the gold traders mad at him because they're planning to do him dirt. John Gielgud is head a gold buying syndicate and he's planning with the connivance of Bradford Dillman who is Milland's grandson-in-law, to blow a hole in the Sonderditch mine that Milland owns, letting in the ocean and flooding the mine. The price of gold will go up because of the sudden shortage. The fact that a thousand men might be killed is of little importance to Gielgud and company.
Nor is it to Dillman who's found out that his wife Susannah York has been cheating on him with Roger Moore the new mine general manager.
The film is a sanctioned glimpse at the former Union of South Africa as the old apartheid government would like to show you. The mining sequences are quite well done and I wish that they had stuck to a simple disaster film instead throwing in the romance.
In fact Roger Moore, intrepid hero that he is, looks ridiculous because when the ocean flood starts, he's out having a romp with Susannah York. Instead of applauding him for his eventual heroism, Milland should have had him canned and banned from the industry.
Unless you like Roger Moore, I'd give iron pyrites a pass.
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