Tonight my friend came over and we decided to go for #136 on the IMDB Top 250, Charlie Chaplin’s famous 1925 hit, The Gold Rush. Of course we were a little skeptical at first.
I’ll be the first to admit that I had never seen a Charlie Chaplin film before, and the only silent film I had ever seen was The Artist… but I kept myself openminded and started the movie.
Now I watched the Netflix version, the 1925 original, but Chaplin would later go on to rewrite his own original score and add narration. He rereleased the remake in 1942 (and it was nominated for two Oscars). I think that watching a film as old as this one is a great way to remind everyone how far we have come in the field of cinema. Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, scored, starred in, and edited this masterpiece, which is basically unheard of today (I think Woody Allen comes about as close to that as possible in modern cinema). So The Gold Rush is pretty impressive just from that standpoint, but I haven’t even gotten into the plot yet.
The film stars Chaplin as a “The Tramp,” a wandering vagabond who goes to Alaska during the gold rush of the late 1890s. Due to a storm, he ends up getting trapped in a cabin with a wanted criminal and a prospector who has just discovered millions of dollars in gold, but can’t get back to his land because of the storm. The three later part ways, the convict and the prospector getting in a fight that would later leave the convict dead and the prospector with amnesia. Chaplin’s character moves to one of the gold rush towns, where he takes up a job as a house-sitter for a new prospector. At the town dance hall he meets the beautiful Georgie, whom he later mistakenly believes loves him back after they dance. A whole mess of confusion later, the Tramp and the original prospector rediscover his gold mine and end up multi-millionaires, which finally allows Georgie to fall for him and have it be socially acceptable… or something like that.
Yeah we get it Kanye, she’s a gold digger because the movie is about The Gold Rush.
All kidding aside, the film is beautiful. As soon as I saw the Roll dance, I instantly recognized it, as many consider it the most famous scene in film history.
Also, you can immediately recognize a serious mastery of storytelling that Chaplin brings both as a director and as an actor. The scene where the house is tipping over the edge of a cliff is by far my favorite, both because of how long it takes Chaplin and the prospector to figure it out, and also because of the cutting between the house tipping side to side and the characters running around the house to fix it.
Finally, as my friend pointed out, some of the shots are just beautiful. It’s always great to see an old film and be like “this story really speaks to me, I feel as if I’m there.” The dance hall where most of the town socializes is our modern… okay so we don’t socialize in person anymore, but maybe a playground if we were still kids in the 90s. And every shot conveys that idea of Chaplin’s character being an outsider, and yet somehow I’m still laughing because everything he does it so comedic and awkward.
Even when looking sad, Chaplin still manages to look ridiculous. Here he is wearing a sack for a shoe because he ate his right shoe during the blizzard. I can honestly say that during most of the film my friend and I looked like this.
Overall, the film definitely earns its spot in the Top 250, and I wish the Oscars had been around in 1925 to give this film the credit it deserves!
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