Blast From The Past: The Gold Rush

It’s not very often I watch a movie that is a hair shy of being one hundred years old, but here we are, reviewing Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 classic, The Gold Rush. I’m pretty bad at watching films that pre-date, say, the 1980’s, honestly, but I’m trying to get better at it. Letterboxd helps because it gives me the ability to keep track of what I view, so I can check it out and shame myself for only having logged two movies from the entire 1960’s, for example. This gives me the impetus to occasionally add more flicks to the older decades even though, yeah, I still mostly watch stuff that has come out since I was born.

I originally got into Charlie Chaplin when a patron of SWOProductions (Julio) demanded I watch Modern Times. I went into Modern Times having no idea what to expect. Prior to watching it, I’d never seen a movie that old that wasn’t part of the Universal Horrors classics. I came out of Modern Times recognizing it as, to this day, one of the funniest things I had ever seen. If you have never seen Modern Times, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

From there, I willingly–without being demanded–moved on to City Lights, another reported classic of Chaplin’s. And it was another homerun. The boxing scene alone–a cinematic classic moment that even I had seen somewhere and somehow out of context of the rest of the film–is worth checking the whole picture out for.

After City Lights, I went next to The Kid, another of the actor/writer/director’s best regarded films. And that’s where I kind of hit a wall. It’s charming and has a good heart, but I didn’t find it as uproariously funny as my first two ventures into Chaplin’s career. I would still recommend it, but if you only have time for one, I’d push for Times or Lights.

And then I kind of fell into a Chaplin lull for a year or so. What finally motivated me to get into this next feature was, of all things, a poster hanging up in a theater I don’t normally go to. I was invited by my family to see Deadpool & Wolverine with them, and outside that theater was a poster for The Gold Rush. Recalling my love for two other films of Charlie’s, I found it on Max and gave it a spin.

Apparently there are two different versions of The Gold Rush! The 1925 original, and a 1942 restoration as a “Talkie” picture. The version on Max is the former, so that’s what I got. The plot of The Gold Rush is simple: Chaplin, as his Tramp character, makes his way to Alaska to mine for gold. While there, he meets a wanted criminal (Black Larsen), another prospector (Big Jim), and a pretty dancing girl (Georgia).

The Tramp does his best to make a way for himself in the frigid Alaskan wilderness, quickly running into Black Larsen and Big Jim and having to survive a snowstorm with them in a cramped cabin. After the storm, he makes his way into a nearby town and falls for Georgia. Can the poor, unlucky, prospecting Tramp make her his? And will he find his riches?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Charlie Chaplin is always an up, as he is likely the greatest physical comedian who has ever lived. His mannerisms are absolutely hilarious, and his ability to sell his every emotion without a word is unimpeachable.

Chaplin can turn simple strutting about into an incredibly funny joke, and his reactions to other characters are always humorous… especially when confronted with the much larger threats of Big Jim and Black Larsen. He was an absolute treasure.

+ Let’s not focus on just Chaplin the actor, though, because he was usually the everyman behind his productions. He also wrote and directed them! And the technical aspects of The Gold Rush are superb, too. The extended one-take shots that really display the actors’ abilities to carry a scene without needing multiple cuts to get their actions correct are excellent.

The score choices and the usage of sound/music to emphasize the moments on screen, are also perfectly chosen. Chaplin was not just an immensely talented actor, but a highly skilled director.

– So here is the biggest problem I had with The Gold Rush in the small selection of Chaplin films I have seen: it’s not nearly as laugh out loud funny as Modern Times or City Lights, and it doesn’t have quite the same heart as The Kid. It just kind of does a little of everything while excelling at none.

This is not to say it doesn’t have humor or a soul to it. It very much does! It’s just not as heavy in those respects as some of Charlie’s other works.

– Black Larsen seems like he is the antagonist of the piece. You meet him early on, and he is the first threat that Chaplin faces. The escaped criminal is what stands between The Tramp and safety from the storm, and even after Big Jim intervenes and the three try to co-exist, Black Larsen eventually goes out into the storm to find food… and when he does, he abandons his two unwanted roommates.

But then Larsen just… dies out in the Klondike! Unceremoniously, he falls off the edge of an avalanche and that’s it for him. It seems like the film set up a foe, then just dropped him (literally). It’s kind of a waste because I’d have liked to have seen The Tramp encounter him again in town.

7.0

The final score: review Good

The 411

Another humorous outing for Chaplin and The Tramp, I do wish this had been of the caliber or City Lights or Modern Times, but it still stands on its own. I’d probably rank this third out of the four of his movies I’ve seen, edging out The Kid.