General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Trail of '98

The Trail of '98 is a 1928 American silent epic drama directed by Clarence Brown for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, based on Robert W. Service's novel of the same name and set during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897–98. It stars Dolores del Río as Berna, Ralph Forbes as her suitor Larry, and Harry Carey as the villainous claim jumper Jack Locasto, and it follows a large ensemble of fortune seekers from their departure in San Francisco over the Chilkoot Pass to Dawson City.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / studio	Clarence Brown; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer²
Source	Novel The Trail of '98 by Robert William Service³
Cost	Approaching $2 million, an enormous sum for the period¹
Premieres	New York, March 20, 1928; Sid Grauman's Chinese Theatre, May 7, 1928⁴^•⁵
Length	127 minutes originally; surviving prints run about 87 minutes³^•⁶
Format	Silent film with synchronized music and sound effects (Movietone); ten reels, 8,799 feet⁴
Commercial result	MGM lost money on the picture⁶

Spoilers

Story and cast

The film gathers its characters across the United States and follows them north. A preacher turned prospector, Salvation Jim (Tully Marshall), leaves the Nevada desert; Lars Petersen (Karl Dane), a lumberman, escapes his wife; Samuel Foote, "the Worm" (George Cooper), forsakes his home; and the Bulkey couple (Emily Fitzroy and Tenen Holtz) head north to open a restaurant, bringing their poor relation Berna (Dolores del Río) and her blind grandfather (Cesare Gravina). Larry (Ralph Forbes) is a stowaway on the boat to Skagway and becomes Berna's man. The trek over the Chilkoot Pass and down the rivers to Dawson City kills or breaks many of them, and in Dawson the saloon owner Jack Locasto (Harry Carey) jumps Larry's claim and forces Berna into his dance hall before a saloon brawl and fire end his run.⁷^•⁸

The scenario was written by Benjamin Glazer and Waldemar Young, with continuity by Glazer and Young and intertitles by Joseph Farnham. Young, a former San Francisco newspaperman, had witnessed the steamers of prospectors departing in 1898, and MGM's research department supplied the writers with original photographs, letters, advertisements, and paid "sourdoughs" with firsthand tales.⁵ John F. Seitz photographed the film, George Hively edited it, and David Mendoza and William Axt wrote the score, which included the theme song "I Found Gold When I Found You."⁴

Production

A troubled shoot. Brown called it "the hardest picture I ever made." To duplicate the Chilkoot Pass, where prospectors had carried a ton of supplies in grueling relay trips, the main unit filmed in Colorado at an elevation of nearly 12,000 feet for five weeks. Temperatures fell as low as sixty below zero, and cameras had to be rigged with small oil lamps to keep the film from freezing and to control static electricity built up at the camera gate; Brown reported that some scenes were "just streaked with static." Altitude sickness forced him to send crew members down the mountain.¹

For the pass sequence itself, Brown recruited roughly 2,000 extras in Denver, picking up men off the streets, transporting them overnight by train, clothing them in period gear such as rubber boots, heavy underwear, and mackinaws, and sending them up the mountain with packs while cameras mounted on sleds followed. The same men repeated the climb two days later. Brown claimed old sourdoughs who saw the sequence thought it was the real thing.¹

The human cost was severe. Brown told the historian Kevin Brownlow that after he left Colorado, a crew staying for extra footage was caught when "a large section of snow fell and two or three men were killed." A unit shooting a rapids sequence in Alaska lost three more men. The film historian Gwenda Young, writing for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, puts the Alaskan toll at "at least four stuntmen," attributing the losses to extreme cold, terrible living conditions, and dangerous lapses in safety.¹^•⁵

Brown had been signed to a long-term MGM contract after the success of Flesh and the Devil, and The Trail of '98 was intended as his MGM debut before that reassignment. The studio boasted it would be the epic to top The Big Parade and Ben-Hur; instead the production, by Gwenda Young's account, "quickly deteriorated into a nightmare" for those involved. Brown reportedly wanted Pauline Starke for Berna and John Gilbert for Larry, and took a lasting dislike to Forbes, later calling him "the lousiest leading man that ever lived."⁵

Premiere and the Fantom Screen

The film premiered in New York on March 20, 1928, and was launched at Sid Grauman's Chinese Theatre on May 7, 1928, with an elaborate prologue featuring an Alaskan dancehall. Grauman himself had joined the 1898 procession to the Klondike and had learned showmanship in the saloons of Dawson City. When the prologue set parted, it revealed the "Fantom Screen," a widescreen technology carrying the MGM logo.⁴^•⁵

Fantom Screen was MGM's answer to Paramount's Magnascope. A special wide-angle projector lens enlarged and reduced the image without a changeover to a separate projector, while the theater screen itself moved forward on rollers to compensate for the new proportions. Variety called it "a tremendous effect," and The New York Times described the Chilkoot Pass sequence, with the screen tripling in size, as a "startling vision." ¹

Reception and box office

Critical response divided. Photoplay praised the film as a "mighty panorama of the Alaskan gold rush" and a "purely director's picture," while Welford Beaton in The Film Spectator wrote that it proved a budget of millions could be squandered when the director lost grip on coherent story and believable characters. Variety praised the spectacle but called the film "more spectacle than story" and found the love interest lacking; Brown himself agreed, saying, "Story-wise, direction-wise, and acting-wise I was never too happy with it," and later dismissing it as "just one of those conglomerates."⁵^•¹^•⁶

A commercial failure. MGM lost money on the picture. A decision to run it as a roadshow attraction with $2 admission worked against it, and a return to regular screenings did not recoup even the print cost when foreign rentals were added. Proposed explanations include the glut of similar Alaskan stories, audiences drawn to talkies, and a weak story. Timing hurt as well: the film arrived as silent films faded and sound took over, and just eighteen months later MGM released its last silent film.⁶^•⁵

Legacy

The film was released amid a brief vogue for "Northern action stories" alongside titles such as The Michigan Kid (1928) and Tide of Empire (1929), filling a gap while Westerns were at a low ebb, according to the film scholar William K. Everson.¹ It stands as one of the major Hollywood treatments of the Klondike rush that followed Robert Service's 1907 poetry collection Song of a Sourdough and his novel, in the company of Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925) and Winds of Chance (1925).⁹

The original release ran 127 minutes, but later cuts left a surviving print of about 87 minutes.³^•⁶ A print exists, the film is in the public domain in the United States, and it has been issued on DVD; modern assessments single out the avalanche and rapids sequences, the Chilkoot Pass trek, and Harry Carey's villain as elements that hold up.⁴^•¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026