Clarence Brown is best known for his smoldering Garbo classics, Flesh and the Devil, A Woman of Affairs, et al., but he was also one of the great outdoor directors, from the silent The Trail of '98 to the 1946 classic The Yearling. The Trail of '98 is a gold rush drama in which men forsake families and homes, and women forsake everything, to head across the Alaskan wilderness toward dubious wealth in the Klondikes. Striving both toward spectacle and realism, the film's most exciting parts were shot (by the great cameraman John Seitz) on location, the Great Divide outside of Denver substituting for the Chilkoot Pass of the story. There, Brown and his crew led two thousand extras (recruited from Denver's down-and-out) through a "gold rush" in 60below zero weather. In Kevin Brownlow's book The Parade's Gone By, Brown gives an account of shooting at 11,600 feet in fifty-mile-an-hour winds, living in trains and snowsheds, and losing six crew members in the year-long process. "It was my toughest assignment," he recalls, "the hardest film I ever made." The results-a breathtaking avalanche, a rescue among the rapids, and the mass movement of the gold-obsessed across the Pass-made the film a classic of the location spectacle. Long after the story of a young adventurer (Ralph Forbes) and his true love (Dolores Del Rio), left in the clutches of a cutthroat claim jumper (Harry Carey), wears thin, the mountains and their challenges toward life-and filmmaking-remain exciting.