The project was developed by Twentieth Century-Fox from a 1951 novel entitled The Nine Days of Father Serra, by Isabelle Gibson Ziegler. At first announced for writer John C. Higgins and producer Charles Brackett, the film ultimately wound up being written by Richard L. Breen and directed by Robert D. Webb, who also produced it with his wife Barbara McLean, a longtime Fox studio film editor.
Webb had begun his career as a prop man before moving up to assistant cameraman at Louis B. Mayer Productions in 1919. In 1935, he started a long association with director Henry King at Fox as an assistant director and later second-unit director. (Webb won the last Academy Award ever given in the category of Best Assistant Director, for 1938's In Old Chicago.) He made a transition to feature film director in 1945 with the B film The Caribbean Mystery. His most famous film as director would be Love Me Tender (1956), starring Elvis Presley.
In 1937, Webb met the film editor Barbara McLean, but it wasn't until they were both working on 1951's David and Bathsheba, and were invited to dinner by leading lady Susan Hayward, that they started seeing each other. Soon they were married, and a few years later they were producing their first of two films together, Seven Cities of Gold.
Webb later said in an oral history interview (held at the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library) that he thought the initial approach to this story was more interesting than what ultimately appeared onscreen. The picture was made under the working title The Gun and the Cross; with that title, Webb said, "you've got your conflict. That's the way I wanted to go after it, [with] that spiritual [element]... I had a beautiful scene with Father Serra sitting on the sand with the Indian, and he said, 'The wind--where does the wind come from?' I had things that would open up the conflict and make you ask who is doing the better, this guy going out and subduing the Indians or the Father bringing them in through a spiritual concept. They cut that out of the picture."
Instead, the studio powers inserted a love story--between a Spanish officer played by Richard Egan and an Indian girl played by Rita Moreno--to drive the story's development and crisis. Webb felt this was contrived, "There [was] no legitimate reason for the love story... It still sticks out like a sore thumb."
Rita Moreno wasn't too crazy about the role, either. The 23-year-old actress was five years into a career that had included memorable small roles in Pagan Love Song (1950) and Singin' in the Rain (1952), after which MGM chose not to renew her contract. She freelanced for a short time, and then in March 1954 Fox chief Darryl Zanuck noticed her on the cover of Life magazine--a sexy shot, Moreno recalled, in which she was "baring my teeth and looking over my bare shoulder." Zanuck promptly signed her to a contract and cast her in Garden of Evil (1954), Untamed (1955), and then Seven Cities of Gold.
"I must have been filed under the category of 'general ethnic,'" Moreno later wrote in her memoir. "I guess they figured that if there was some sort of accent, darker skin, or an exotic look, a little Puerto Rican girl could play the role. Indian maiden roles were popular in the era. [They] became a stereotype--insulting along both sexual and racial lines. The maidens are all captured in some sexy way, and they either love the Indians who capture them (the majority of the time) or not. For years I...played parts that involved...sexily swinging my fringes and once again speaking in my generic ethnic accent.
"The Indian maiden roles had their challenges. For starters, buckskin is one of the most uncomfortable materials to wear; it is stiff and freezing cold during those dawn shoots in the desert... All my maidens had goose bumps."
The movie was shot by ace cameraman Lucien Ballard in color and CinemaScope in Mexico--in the badlands around Guadalajara and the beaches and hills surrounding Manzanillo. During the shoot, Moreno bonded with Anthony Quinn. "He wasn't a big star yet," she recalled, "except at seduction. But his role in that performance didn't get a good review from me. Tony wasn't nice to women. I suffered whiplash from his sudden uncourtly and uncouth departure. But I was attracted to him because we had many things in common despite being years apart in age... Tony was one of the few Hispanic men in my life, and what we shared was the experience of Tony's ethnic stereotyping mangle, which had Tony playing ethnic roles such as Indian and Hawaiian chiefs, Chinese guerillas, Filipino freedom fighters, and Arab sheikhs. Underneath, he and I both simmered with resentment over our stereotypical casting... Tony was a real mentor to me in one important way: as an actor, he always did what he could within the roles he was given." To her credit, Moreno did the same in film after film, which paid off when she landed a major role in a much more prominent picture, The King and I (1956).
Seven Cities of Gold opened to mixed reviews. The Los Angeles Times noted it as "one of the most serious efforts made by film studios to tell a story of the founding of California." The Hollywood Reporter said "Webb and McLean make an auspicious bow," and Variety, despite Webb's opinions to the contrary, deemed it "a thoughtfully made picture that sharply delineates the difference between spiritual and military triumphs."
By Jeremy Arnold
