“The Mountain Film is to Germany what the Western is to America, and Luis Trenker as star, writer and director was literally John Ford and John Wayne rolled into one.... Trenker made his first film in 1922, launching an active career that lasted into the mid-1960s, and included work in Hollywood and Britain.... Common to all of the Trenker films is a kind of Wagnerian richness and operatic sweep. While their mountaineering thrills are clearly unfaked, realism for its own sake was never a Trenker trademark.... After a long association with Universal, Trenker expected and hoped to be assigned to their epic Sutter's Gold. But Universal felt that a box office property of such importance needed an American star. So Trenker proceeded to make his own version, Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, with Italy doubling for California, but a good deal of location work actually done in the American West.... Trenker...ignored facts altogether in his infinitely superior version. Sutter, an idealist and rebel, goes to America in response to a ghostly inspirational visitation from Goethe--and the resulting film is a marvelous vision of the European conception of the West, with a photographic beauty that is breath-taking.
“Trenker's independent and rebellious spirit (in Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, his Sutter runs afoul of the local authorities by printing suspiciously anti-Nazi tracts in the mid 1800s) caused him to encounter stiff antagonism from the Nazi regime by the mid-'30s. He was too popular a star to stifle entirely, but eventually he was banned from writing and directing his own films. After the war, however, he was back to his beloved Tyrol, directing again the kind of films he loved....” William K. Everson