The Kaiser of California (Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, sometimes also rendered in English as ''The Emperor of California) is a 1936 film from Germany, written and directed by alpinist Luis Trenker.
It's a biopic of John Sutter (here always referred to by his original German name of "Johann", and with his last name spelled "Suter"). Johann Sutter (played by Trenker) is a German-speaking Swiss who, as the movie opens, is getting into trouble with the local government. Faced with jail for his political activism, Sutter escapes to the United States. After a difficult journey across the deserts of the West, Sutter arrives in the Sacramento Valley and badgers the local government to give him a lease to a tract of land.
Sutter prospers, building an empire that involves both cattle and sheep ranching as well as extensive farm land. However, on January 24, 1848, his employee James Marshall finds gold in a riverbank on Sutter's property. The California Gold Rush then proceeds to destroy Sutter's empire.
Filmed at least in part on location in the USA (Sutter overlooks the Grand Canyon, and the last scene was shot on the steps of the U.S. Capitol). Nazi propaganda is largely absent from the film, other than a general message of how Germans are awesome, and perhaps a plot that extols agriculture and working the land.
Tropes:
- All Deserts Have Cacti: Naturally there's a standard saguaro cactus in the deserts of, um, Sacramento.
- Artistic License – Geography:
- Sutter looks out from the south rim of the Grand Canyon and sees California.
- The Sacramento area that Sutter gets the Mexicans to let him develop is said to be a desert. In fact, once you get over the mountains the Sacramento Valley has plenty of water from rivers that run from the mountains to San Francisco Bay. Death Valley and the deserts of California are in the southeastern region.
- Connected to the above, Sutter builds a canal to offer his holdings access to the sea. In real life all those rivers drain to the sea and it would have been perfectly easy at the time to sail a boat from Coloma to San Francisco.
- Artistic License – History:
- A proclamation regarding the American takeover of California is signed "Lincoln." In 1848 Abraham Lincoln was a junior Congressman (who, ironically, strongly opposed the Mexican War).
- This film has Sutter founding the town of San Francisco. This is not true; the Spanish settlement at San Francisco dated back to the 1770s, although it was still an insignificant village of a few hundred people until the Gold Rush.
- No, Sutter's children were not murdered by gold prospectors.
- Big "NO!": Anna Sutter's reaction to finding out about the death of her young sons is to say "Nein! Nein! Nein!"
- Book Ends: At the beginning, Sutter has a vision of a spirit which tells him to go West. At the end, he sees the spirit again as he dies, this time telling him that America will grow to be a vast empire.
- Desert Skull: In fact it's an entire horse skeleton, signaling to Sutter and his men that they have entered the Thirsty Desert. Soon after, they have to shoot their own horse.
- Distant Finale: The ending doesn't actually say what year it is, but it's an old and stooped Sutter who dies on the steps of the Capitol. (In Real Life he died in a DC hotel room in 1880.)
- Dramatic Shattering: A gold prospector takes a shot at Sutter as the contentious meeting about his lawsuit devolves into a riot. The bullet shatters a glass carafe.
- Gold Fever: It destroys Sutter's life. Marshall immediately quits his job upon finding gold in the river, and all the rest of Sutter's men quit working and instead start panning for gold. Sutter loses his lands to an invading horde of gold miners. If that isn't bad enough, one of them shoots Sutter's young sons for daring to pan gold by the river.
- Historical Hero Upgrade: Sutter flees to California because his political pamphlets have pissed off the authorities. In real life, he was escaping a lot of debts.
- Imagine Spot:
- Early in the movie Sutter, running from the local Swiss authorities, climbs a high church tower. He has a vision of a spirit which tells him to go to the American West to make his fortune.
- At the end the spirit returns to a dying Sutter, and shows him a vision of modern (1930s) America, with all of its huge cities with skyscrapers, and vast industrial might.
- The Ken Burns Effect: The opening credits play out over a slow camera pan up an old-timey map of the Californias, from Baja California to Alta California.
- Literal Ass-Kicking: Sutter and his two sidekicks have been robbed of their horses by bandits. One of Sutter's men is still lugging a heavy saddle over his shoulders, until Sutter kicks him in the butt and tells him to leave it.
- Match Cut:
- A match dissolve from a line of officials, standing at a table and toasting Sutter on the occasion of his land grant, to a line of people bidding his wife and family goodbye as they leave Switzerland.
- The film cuts from a shot of a sun-dappled stream to an elevated shot of one of Sutter's fields, dotted with pumpkins.
- Murder Is the Best Solution: Sutter's two young sons start panning for gold by the river. One might think that all the prospectors by the riverbank could ignore two schoolboys with one pan each. But no, one of them shoots and kills the kids.
- "Pan Up to the Sky" Ending: The last scene is a shot of the Sacramento Valley, panning up to the sky.
- Thirsty Desert: A long sequence shows Sutter and his two men making a desperate journey on foot across the desert. They are on the point of death when they meet a pioneer wagon, but that's only temporary as the wagon train is itself in dire straits. Finally it's Sutter himself who climbs a mountain and finds water.
- Title Drop: A junior official objects to the governor's decision to give Sutter a big land grant, asking if they really want to "watch him almost behave like the Kaiser of California?"
- Translation Convention: Some of the laborers on Sutter's land are said to be German immigrants, but that doesn't really explain why Englishman James Marshall and Mexican governors speak German, or why American government proclamations are printed in German. Oddly however, when Sutter meets some Native Americans, they talk in English.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Heavily fictionalized, and the opening title crawl admits it, saying "the script to this film is loosely based on existing records."
- The X of Y: The Kaiser of California.
