Virginia City is a 1940 American Western film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Miriam Hopkins, Randolph Scott, and a mustachioed Humphrey Bogart in the role of the real-life outlaw John Murrell.

Union officer Kerry Bradford stages an escape from Confederate Libby Prison run by the commandant, Vance Irby.

Bradford reports to Union headquarters and is sent to Virginia City, a Nevada mining town, to find out where $5,000,000 in gold that Southern sympathizers plan to ship to the tottering Confederacy is being kept.

On the westbound stagecoach, he meets and falls in love with Julia Hayne who, unbeknown to him, is in fact a dance-hall entertainer and a rebel spy, sent by Jefferson Davis to assist in the transfer of the gold by wagon train.

Bradford follows Irby to the rebels' hideout behind a false wall in a blacksmith's shop, but the gold is moved before he arrives.

Drewery, scornful of Bradford as a soldier, does not take his advice and ends up following a false trail, causing the pursuit to fall further behind the rebels, who are themselves fighting thirst, privation, and the unforgiving terrain.

During the night, knowing that in the morning both Murrell's men and Drewery's command will arrive, Bradford takes the gold from the wagons and buries it in the canyon to prevent its capture.

[4] It was originally called Nevada and was to star basically the same director and cast as Dodge City: Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Sheridan, Donald Crisp, Guinn Williams, and Alan Hale.

[13][14] Frank Nugent of The New York Times, despite criticizing the acting talents of Flynn and Hopkins, wrote that "there is enough concentrated action in [Virginia City], enough of the old-time Western sweep, to make it lively entertainment".

[15] Filmink magazine called it "a big, expensive, noisy movie which aims for size and spectacle over, say, suspense and thrills – I don't think director Michael Curtiz was any more excited by Westerns than Flynn, but both do professional jobs, as does Scott.