The Gold Rush

The Gold Rush is a 1925 American comedy film written, produced, and directed by Charlie Chaplin. The film also stars Chaplin in his Little Tramp persona, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Henry Bergman, and Malcolm Waite.

Chaplin drew inspiration from photographs of the Klondike Gold Rush as well as from the story of the Donner Party who, when snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, were driven to cannibalism or eating leather from their shoes. Chaplin, who believed tragedies and comics were not far from each other, decided to combine these stories of deprivation and horror in comedy. He decided that his famous rogue figure should become a gold-digger who joins a brave optimist determined to face all the pitfalls associated with the search for gold, such as sickness, hunger, cold, loneliness, or the possibility that he may at any time be attacked by a grizzly. In the film, scenes like Chaplin cooking and dreaming of his shoe, or how his starving friend Big Jim sees him as a chicken could be seen.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Various memorable sequences, such as Chaplin's "Oceana Roll" dance and the scene in which the Lone Prospector and his fellow prospector, Big Jim McKay, are forced to eat a shoe to survive.
 * 2) In fact, the "dancing feet" scene, pretty much captures the essential tone of the film, as "the Lone Prospector" survived near-starvation, privation, and isolation. There is a hint of fancy in the way that Chaplin manipulates his improvised props, a celebration of food in a world of want. The display he puts on is a show; and a show requires an audience, the creation of relationships. In a way, the film underlines its deconstruction of the American pioneer, reveling not in grand adventure, but the lived experience of the impoverished and the desperate.
 * 3) In 1942, Chaplin re-released the film with music and narrative sound tracks -- the re-release was nominated for two Academy Awards, Sound Recording and Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.
 * 4) It was also the longest and most expensive comedy film produced up to that time.
 * 5) This film is noticeably more serious than a lot of Chaplin's other films. Despite the film's name, there's very little wealth on display in the film. There are dilapidated cabins, worn and broken equipment, and weather-worn faces aplenty but little evidence of that around which the film ostensibly revolves. Indeed, the early part of the film evidences murder, abandonment, and abject desperation - albeit wrapped in masterful and ironic comedic routines. The sight of Chaplin and his equally desperate interlocutor sharing a meal of boiled footwear with imagined and forced delight certainly adds laughter to the desperation; but it never entirely erases the underlying trauma at the heart of the scene. Behind every chewed piece of leather, every begrudging bite, lies murder in the Arctic wastes and an uncertain future. Seeing Chaplin turn into a chicken before the eyes of his starving companion is deeply humorous; the implied attempt at murder which it predicts, less so.
 * 6) The superb quality of the film relies more than just its comedy sequences but on these scenes being so fully integrated into a character-driven narrative. The American frontier, the pioneering experience -- is here broken down into a study of depression, of the human spirit pressed against the limit of reasonable endurance. Naturally, Chaplin finds comedic gold in the situation, but so too does he explore other facets of the human experience. Friendship and comradeship is forged in the heart of desperation, the essential interpersonal spirit is reinforced even in the face of abject failure, but rarely is it glorified. Chaplin's prospector survives but he can hardly be said to flourish - and when he does it is the product of blind luck rather than skill, an uncharacteristically sympathetic world bending to accommodate its most lovable buffoon. It is a fortuitous turn of events, and an extraordinary one. In the end, the pioneer succeeds. He attains riches, finds hope for the future and, of course, gets the girl. But that attained happiness feels like a fevered dream, the delirious, self-indulgent fantasy of the starving and desperate pioneer first encountered by the audience
 * 7) A fair and great amount of symbolism throughout various points of the film. The singularity of the escape, and the harshness of the climate in which the pioneer searches for riches provides an analogy with the desperation of poverty. The inhospitable snow-topped mountains provide the metaphor for hopelessness and isolation; the crisp white snow and the searing storm provide little hope of food, nor shelter. The power of the elements and the frailty of the cabin, coupled with the danger of the appearing bear allude to the human struggle for material gain. Much of Chaplin’s work is replete with biography and lived experience. Chaplin’s childhood themes are replicated in “The Gold Rush” – help is a distant dream; Chaplin's pioneer is marooned on the storm-swept mountain teetering on the edge of a cliff, secured only by the knot of a rope and the placement of a rock. Chaplin's skillful use of imagery betrays the struggle for life while living on the edge, often oblivious to the lurking perils. The unsustainability of life, the lack of food, company and love speaks of the perennial movement around poverty stricken East London that Chaplin experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a child.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) For all its successes, the film doesn't always succeed in attaining the depth of some of Chaplin's other feature length films. It is certainly funny, and it has a heart - but not one as large as 1921's The Kid; There is a social commentary, but it does not cut with the same razor sharp acumen as 1941's The Great Dictator nor does its pathos come close to touching 1952's Limelight.

Trivia

 * 1) Produced under a working title of Lucky Strike, The Gold Rush was the first Charlie Chaplin feature released through United Artists, a company he co-founded with D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
 * 2) The Gold Rush was inspired in part by the infamous Donner Party - wagon train emigrants who met with tragedy when they encountered a blizzard while crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains. The scene in which Chaplin's "Lone Prospector" eats his boot was influenced by tales that the Donner Party members were forced to eat their moccasins; during production, the Prospector's boot was made of licorice with rock-candy nails.
 * 3) Originally released in 1925, the film was re-imagined by Chaplin himself and re-released in 1942 - re-edited, subtitles replaced with spoken narration and with an added musical score. The 1942 release received two Academy Award nominations, one for Achievement in Music (Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) and one for Achievement in Sound.

The Film
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