THE GOLD RUSH (1925)

It’s almost the end of the 19th-century. In 1896, gold is discovered in great quantities in Yukon, North-western Canada. Poor folk from Seattle and San Francisco are leaving their home towns in droves, travelling north and traversing treacherous terrain and inhospitable weather to get their clutches on a few pieces of precious metal. Starvation threatens. Blizzards loom. Yet none will be thwarted: the great Klondike Gold Rush has begun.

Among these hopeful prospectors is our lone hero, a little unimaginatively named the Lone Prospector (Charlie Chaplin). Much like the 100,000 or so other adventurers sallying forth to Klondike during the 1890s gold rush, he has designs on amassing a great fortune. However, he must contend with adversarial prospectors, great hunger, snowstorms, wild animals, poverty, and worst of all, the pang of unrequited love.

Frequently hailed as a masterpiece, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush is a film I’ve always enjoyed, but never one I would laud so highly. To claim it’s a piece of genius would be excessive. To dismiss it as being mediocre would be rash. Instead, I have always found that this influential piece of cinema probably lies somewhere in the middle: a good film, an entertaining film even on re-watches, but perhaps not a great one, and almost certainly not a masterpiece.

One aspect of Chaplin’s film that undeniably excels is its simplicity: both conflict and our principal character’s motivation are kept perfectly simple. Modern silent comedy successes, such as Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers (2022), have followed this formula to spectacular effect, employing the bare minimum of motivation, conflict, and resolution to maintain a healthy economy of plot. In Chaplin’s seminal The Gold Rush, the aims of our protagonist are made transparent from the title alone: get the gold, preferably before anyone else can. From there, our hero’s motivation becomes slightly more sentimental, but by no means more complicated: get the girl. At other times, the aim of everyone involved is merely avoiding imminent starvation, which is also immediately comprehensible and deserves little explanation.

This was Chaplin’s formula, and it worked absolute wonders for him. By 1918, seven years before this film’s release, he was already one of the world’s highest-paid figures, and this was before he made any of the works he’s best known for today. The blueprint for Chaplin’s success more often than not involved Chaplin being paired opposite a brute, a big man who can render the small Chaplin even smaller. Visual humour was key in silent cinema; Chaplin was excellent at ridiculing his own size for the sake of a gag.

This can be seen as early as The Champion (1915), in which Chaplin faces a litany of taller, beefier foes as a young pugilist. Chaplin’s boxing instinct returns in The Gold Rush, with a similarly unbelievable David-and-Goliath outcome, but we can predict with increasing ease how such conflicts will unfold. In the same vein, Chaplin almost always wins the girl too, particularly when competing for her heart against a brutish, insensitive oaf, like Jack Cameron (Malcolm Waite). With the con artist being a stalwart of silent cinema and the nickelodeon era, extolling the moral, human virtues of the little man and the downtrodden, it’s no surprise that Chaplin’s characters—whether they be the Tramp or the Lone Prospector—became such universal sensations.

The Gold Rush also was given a 1942 re-release, with music, narration, and some hammy sound effects to boot. You’ll have people in each camp claiming one is far superior to the other. On the one hand, there’s an argument that silent films should remain silent. One can’t quite picture Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) being interrupted by an announcer describing in detail the characters and personalities of those on screen. Part of the magic of these silent gems is precisely the fact that they are hauntingly quiet; in a world of excessive stimulation, the pervasive silence that hangs over these films renders them wholly different cinematic experiences. Taking that away, or colourising classic films, like the unholy attempt to modernise It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), expunges a unique quality that should be preserved, not amended.

On the other hand, the 1942 revised version benefits from better pacing, with Chaplin’s stentorious broadcast voiceover affording the final runtime more concision. Yes, his commentary may be needless or excessive at times, but it’s also humorous at others. Moreover, once watched with the inclusion of music like “Flight of the Bumblebee”, it’s difficult to imagine The Gold Rush without an accompanying orchestra. After all, even silent films were rarely actually silent, with pianists or violinists forming entire careers from performing at these travelling bioscope shows.

Whether you prefer the shorter, punchier version with music, or the original, your choice. However, what’s vaguely undeniable is that Chaplin’s classic remains deeply funny in either version. The image of a bear waddling passively after the Lone Prospector through a sheer mountain pass, and then again through the cabin, as Chaplin and Big Jim (Mack Swain) are engaged in a fiery brawl, is great visual comedy.

Believing that tragedy and comedy existed somewhere on the same plane—perhaps closer than you and I might think—the subject of starvation is frequently the source of great humour. Morbidly taking inspiration from the Donner Party, Chaplin elicits a good few chuckles as we watch him eat a salted candlestick, boiled boots (with generous servings of boot broth), and the leathery sole of his shoe. He slurps up the laces like noodles, with he and Big Jim fighting over who gets the best cut of the boot.

Inevitably, cannibalism becomes the source of a gag as Jim, so famished he’s driven delirious, begins to hallucinate that our hero is a chicken. As he menacingly unsheathes his knife from his belt, the pair tussle, race all over the room, resolve the misunderstanding, and then repeat. Much of this physical comedy in The Gold Rush still succeeds: Larsen (Tom Murray) and Jim fighting over the gun barrel, which precariously traces our hero as two brutes wrestle over the rifle, garners laughs. Other sequences are genuinely impressive examples of Chaplin’s command over his body, such as when he pretends to be frozen stiff, carried underarm like a ladder into the warm cabin.

However, it must be said that The Gold Rush never reaches the realm of genius, and I would be reluctant to label it a masterpiece. It never attains attempts any of the social commentary that some of his true masterworks did, such as Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). Moreover, there was plenty of room for Chaplin to explore the humanist, egalitarian themes that cemented his cinematic greatness if he had desired. An often-neglected part of the Klondike Gold Rush story is how the Indigenous Hän population were forced off their land by settlers, made to live outside the thriving boom towns on reserves, causing many to perish in the process.

However, even if it was Chaplin’s intention to make something more light-hearted (and there’s nothing immoral about that, either), it never quite reaches the same levels of humour as some of his more beloved works, like The Kid (1921). Some of the gags simply don’t work, like his overjoyed destruction of the cabin after meeting Georgia (Georgia Hale). Truly, Chaplin’s humour here pales in comparison with the likes of Laurel and Hardy’s work from the same period.

Chaplin’s gags never quite demonstrate the same bravery and imagination as did Buster Keaton’s, whose film Sherlock Jr. (1924) from the year prior demonstrated how the impossible could be made possible, both in terms of cinematic technique and humour. Still, it seems like the Great Stone Face might have taken inspiration from the movable house in The Gold Rush for when he created an even more elaborate stunt in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), so it would appear that these giants of silent cinema were iron sharpening iron.

But if there’s one aspect of The Gold Rush that simply falls flat, it’s that the emotional bedrock of the story feels decidedly shaky. The Lone Prospector is smitten with a girl, Georgia, as soon as he sees her in a dance hall. Yet, this budding love story never once feels at all romantic. Compared with some of his stronger efforts, there seems to be little to no chemistry between the two actors, and the characters themselves aren’t shown to care for each other all that much (or at least, Georgia communicates very little interest in our Lone Prospector). This isn’t aided by Georgia Hale’s exaggerated movements, which are frequently overdone to an unintentionally hilarious effect.

Before our Lone Prospector ventures off into the wilderness once more, now closer than ever to locating his fortune, he declares his love for Georgia, assuring her he will return and they will abscond to America. Our hero does indeed find a bounty of gold, and serendipity brings the pair together once more when Chaplin bumps into Georgia on the ferry. However romantic it might be that the universe conspired to unify them against all odds, doesn’t it also mean that our Lone Prospector forgot to take her with him after his dramatic proclamation of love?

This is somewhat worsened by the fact the ending feels quite hollow. Much like in the denouement for another rags-to-riches story in Trading Places (1983), the conclusion for our story here feels thematically discordant with the rest of the narrative. After having watched impoverished, unfortunate souls starve and toil for their chance at fortune, we see that they’ve succeeded—through sheer luck, and nothing else—yet never possess the conscience of investing their wealth into the similarly struggling community that surrounds them. Instead, they swan off back to America, to join the elite upper strata of society.

As Chaplin’s inordinate voiceover assures us: “And so it was—a happy ending.” Well, for some, I suppose. Perhaps the curtain close leaves you satisfied. However, for my money, the ending still feels a little simplistic, a little unimaginative, and a little vacuous, even almost a decade after my first viewing. While it remains an enjoyable piece, I wouldn’t say it’s a masterful one.

USA | 1925 | 95 MINUTES (1925 THEATRICAL) • 72 MINUTES (1942 RE-RELEASE) | 1.33:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH (SILENT)

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Charlie Chaplin.
starring: Charlie Chaplin, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Malcolm Waite & Georgia Hale.