#225: The Gold Rush

Release Date: June 26th, 1925

Format: Theater (The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, CA)

Written by: Charlie Chaplin

Directed by: Charlie Chaplin

4 Stars

As if seeing Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film The Gold Rush on the big screen wasn’t enough, Dakota and I got to watch it tonight at the very cinema in which it premiered 100 years ago, The Egyptian Theatre, in Hollywood. 

I’m happy to report that its magic hasn’t diminished over the past century.

In this film, the beloved Little Tramp is a lone prospector in the Klondike. He hilariously braves outlaws, frigid cold, and starvation before striking gold and becoming a millionaire. Of course, being a Chaplin film, he also meets a girl along his travels and falls in love. 

Has any filmmaker been able to capture the raw emotion of love and loneliness as well as Chaplin? At first it might seem odd that Chaplin places the typically city-bound Little Tramp in the middle of Alaska, but on second thought, what better locale to capture the feelings of these two Chaplinian emotions, love and loneliness? There’s our little friend, trudging through the snow, alone, thinking of the girl he loves and hoping that one day she’ll love him back.

My eyes welled with tears in these moments.

At the end of the film, when the Little Tramp is headed back to the continental US on a giant steamship after striking gold, decked out in a three-piece suit and luxurious overcoats, a magazine man asks if he’d be willing to don his old prospector clothes for the cover photo of an article they want to write about him. The Little Tramp agrees.

The autobiographical parallels shouldn’t be ignored. Like his character in the film, The Gold Rush made Chaplin a millionaire (and the most famous movie star in the world, if he wasn’t already). But also like his character, Chaplin could never fully disassociate from the terrible poverty and desperation of his past, no matter how big his bank account got.

Like the magazine man on the steamship, we’re not really interested in a mild-looking Englishman in a fine wool suit.

No, we want something real. We want him to put on that funny little hat and those big floppy shoes and tap into our deepest pathos. Make us laugh for the next 100 years, Little Tramp, then make us cry.