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Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (released in the U.S. in 1937 as "The Emperor of California"), the 1936 Luis Trenker German California Gold Rush mining adventure melodrama (a fictionalized biography of the life of John Sutter, born Johann August Sutter, who caused the California Gold Rush when gold was discovered on his property; interestingly, this German movie changed the Swiss born Suter into a German born man, and altered details of his life!) starring Luis Trenker, Viktoria von Ballasko, Werner Kunig, Karli Zwingmann, and Elise Aulinger. Note that this movie was made at the same time as the Hollywood film, "Sutter's Gold", which starred Edward Arnold as John Sutter. It had been bought by Universal in the 1920s for Sergei Eisenstein, but it was never made then. Universal surely later wished they had forgotten all about it, because their 1936 movie cost $2,000,000 to make, 20 times the average Universal movie of the time, and did terribly at the box office. This German movie biography was made in Germany at the same time, no doubt because Sutter was kind of German (he was Swiss, but that was close enough!), and they likely felt that this would give it strong appeal to German audiences. Also note that star/director Luis Trenker is a fascinating forgotten man in the history of film! He started out helping Arnold Fanck on his mountain movies. He became a filmmaker in the 1930s, making movies about how country life was better than city life, and the Nazis wanted him to make movies for them. He moved to Rome and made two documentaries there. After the war, he was accused of being a Fascist, but the charges were eventually dropped and he started making movies again, but before long, he only made documentaries and writing about mountains, his first love. He died at the age of 97 in 1990!
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