ID a movie (western, hunt for treasure or a gold mine)

[AuntiePam]

It’s not Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Lust for Gold.

Someone in the Classic Movie Fans Yahoo group is trying to ID this for a friend. The friend thinks the movie was from the 30’s or 40’s. He doesn’t recall any of the actors’ names or character names.

The movie sounds familiar to me too.

It was about a search for a lost gold mine, maybe the Lost Dutchman. An old man comes into a town in the early 20th century with a map. He meets a young man who helps organize a party to look for the mine. On the way, everyone except them is killed in accidents or in fights with each other. When they arrive at the place indicated, the young man kills the old man.

Then he realizes that the location is to be shown by the shadow of a mountain at a certain hour, but the map doesn’t say what day of the year. The old man knew and now he is dead. The horses run off and he is left without water in the desert. In the last shot the camera pulls slowly away until he is just a speck in the desert.

Googling “movies with treasure hunts” and “movies with gold mines” didn’t help.

[BMalion]

MacKena’s Gold 1969 with Gary Cooper?

[AuntiePam]

Good guess! That was suggested and he said no, because it’s too recent. Also, he says there were no women in the movie he saw (there’s a romance in McKenna’s Gold) and no one survived.

I’m thinking the guy maybe has his movies mixed up. McKenna has the shadow thing going for it, and Sierra Madre has the gold-seekers fighting and killing each other.