Charlie Chaplin’s most famous film, the one he wanted to be remembered by, is The Gold Rush. It was not only sensational then but it’s amazing how well it holds up now. Fashionable though it is to be slightly down on Chaplin these days, The Gold Rush is the one doubters should see – inventive, dramatic and funny, it’s well made enough to convince all but the most prejudiced.
I’d urge the Criterion version on you if you’re going to shell out for a physical copy. It contains the 1925 silent original and also the 1942 re-release, which Chaplin re-edited, rescored and overdubbed with a narration (an approximation of newsreel bombast done by Chaplin himself) to help his film appeal to a generation of film-goers who wanted their movies with sound.
It’s the 1925 original I’m looking at today and it looks good – decent image, fine contrast, mostly scratch free. You can tell what’s going on without having to use your imagination to plug the gaps.
Chaplin considered the 1942 version definitive and wanted to destroy the 1925 original. This didn’t happen, but when it came to restoring the film in the 1990s, original prints of the 1925 film were in poor shape. They were good enough to act as a reference point, though. Using them, the 1942 version – which was fine – was plundered for its footage, with missing bits added from fragments found in archives and the intertitles (removed from the 1942 version) recreated anew.
Apart from the score (again from the 1942 version), this is as near as makes very little difference to The Gold Rush audiences would have seen a century ago. It’s a film that exemplifies Chaplin for good and ill.
Following his familiar Little Tramp figure – here called the Lone Prospector – it heads into snowy Alaska for adventures with a bear, a fellow gold prospector called Big Jim, wanted villain Black Larsen and Georgia, a dancer with an eye for the main chance, with Chaplin’s Prospector somehow coming out on top in each situation, in spite of his tendency to turn every situation into a catastrophe in the short term.
Chaplin works on a smaller scale than Keaton but there are set pieces from this film that you will know even if you haven’t seen the film – the bit where he’s so hungry he boils a shoe and eats it (the sole as a steak, the laces as spaghetti). Or where he makes bread rolls dance the can-can in an attempt to impress Georgia and her friends. Maybe the bit where, in the dancehall, he somehow ties himself to a dog as he’s dancing with Georgia, the woman of his dreams. Perhaps also the starvation scene where Big Jim fantasises that his cabin mate, the Lone Prospector, has turned into a giant chicken.
Throughout, Chaplin’s eye for visual storytelling is obvious and his use of old-school mime means he can get his plot across without excessive use of intertitle cards.
He also has an eye for the picturesque, the visible manifestation of Chaplin’s tendency towards the sentimental. This has worn least well down the decades. Chaplin’s coyness and winsome shyness when he catches sight of a woman he likes the look of is particularly off-putting. The comedy of low self-esteem – a tough sell in a dog eat dog world.
But you cannot doubt Chaplin’s sheer physical ability. Like Keaton he was a small man, and while his size is useful as a shorthand for a character of low status (none lower than a tramp), it comes into its own in physical scenes. Perhaps the best of these is a simple no-tricks one where Lone Prospector comes to the mistaken conclusion that Georgia loves him (she’s stringing him along to amuse her friends) and does cartwheels around the cabin. An astonishing display of athleticism.
Georgia is played by Georgia Hale, the use of the real name suggesting that Chaplin had had an “I’ll make you a star, kid” conversation with her before filming started. He did make her a star, and also had an affair with her while his own 16-year-old bride was pregnant with his child. But Chaplin’s private life is a whole other story.
Hale is very good – bright, funny, versatile, suggesting that here is a go-getter who is thoughtless but not heartless and humane enough to realise at a certain point that the Lone Prospector, whose buttons she has unwittingly pushed, isn’t such a bad guy after all.
The standout scene is Big Jim and the Lone Prospector waking up in their cabin in the morning, unaware that it’s blown away in the night and is now teetering on the edge of a cliff. It’s Chaplin doing Keaton really, and it’s quite brilliant. So good it’s been re-purposed a thousand times, most recently by Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. Where they hang out the back of the plane? That bit.
And, for those who see silent movies as unsophisticated or even primitive, look out for the last shot, when Chaplin delivers a meta ending that manages to break the fourth wall and yet not break it. “Oh, you’ve spoiled the picture,” says a photographer to the Lone Prospector and Georgia. When in fact they’ve made it. Genius.
The Gold Rush – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
