The Gold Rush (1925)

Starring: Charlie Chaplin
Grade: Classic

The Gold Rush is one of the very few films rated 100% by Rotten Tomatoes and a “Classic” by me. I can’t argue it. It’s one of the greatest films of all time.

Summary

We open with a caption talking about how “During the Great Gold Rush of Alaska, men in thousands came from all parts of the world. Many were ignorant of the hardships before them, the intense cold, the lack of food – and a journey through regions of ice and snow was a problem that awaited them”. The area of the Chilkoot Pass is even tougher and many have left because of the extreme conditions. At the top of the pass, we see the Lone Prospector (Chaplin). At the same time that he calmly walks alongside a mountain, a bear wanders behind him, but he doesn’t notice. It leaves before he turns around. Somewhere in the snow, “Big” Jim McKay (Mack Swain), another prospector in the area, manages to find a “mountain of gold”. As he walks the snowy landscape, the Lone Prospector gets caught in a storm and finds a lone cabin owned by the “wanted” Black Larsen (Tom Murray).

Elsewhere, McKay’s camp gets destroyed by the storm. He tries to hold onto his small tent, but the wind whisks him away with it.

Immediately after the Lone Prospector knocks on the cabin door looking for temporary shelter, Larsen brings out his shotgun, preparing to kill. He then hides once the Prospector enters through the back entrance. As he eats some leftover meat he finds in the room, Larsen puts down his shotgun, realizing the Prospector isn’t a threat. Next, Larsen demands he leaves. However, as he opens the door, the wind is so strong that the Prospector can’t move forward. As they argue, McKay, still holding the tent, flies through the doorway and right out the side door. Now, the wind is blowing from both sides. Because of this, the Prospector flies out the side door. At the same time Larsen closes the main door, the Prospector crawls back in from the side and re-opens the main door, with the wind sending Larsen out the side door.

This is a lot easier to follow if you watch the movie.

Anyway, after closing the main door, the Prospector continues to eat the leftover meat. Following this, McKay comes back in and snatches the food out of the Prospector’s hand, just as Larsen comes back in to tell them both to leave. He fires a shot in the room to threaten them, but McKay (completely unfazed by the way) starts fighting Larsen. Eventually, he beats him and continues to eat. Later, the three are stuck in the cabin together but are starving. Following the Prospector eating a candle (at least he put salt on it, right?), McKay suggests they cut some cards and whoever draws the lowest will go out in the storm to get food. Larsen is the unlucky one and heads out. Soon after, he kills two random people that recognize him from his “wanted” poster and steals all their stuff. For Thanksgiving, the Prospector and McKay share the Prospector’s cooked shoe. Elsewhere, Larsen manages to find McKay’s claim of gold.

Back at the cabin, the two are still starving to the point where McKay starts to hallucinate that the Prospector is a chicken. After McKay tells him about it, the Prospector gets worried and hides the knife that was on the table. McKay falls into the hallucination a couple of more times, eventually leading to the Prospector being chased outside with the shotgun until McKay comes to his senses. He apologizes, but the Prospector hides the gun in the snow to make sure nothing else can happen. Even after apologizing however, McKay decides to eat him anyway, so the Prospector digs up the gun from the snow and stops him for the time being. They both go to sleep, but the Prospector is on edge. Back at McKay’s claim, Larsen is calmly cooking bacon. As soon as McKay wakes up the next morning, the Prospector wakes up too, pointing the shotgun at him as he waits for McKay to make a move. They eventually start wrestling over the gun until the bear from the opening wanders through the back entrance and scares McKay out of the door. Following this, the bear leaves through the main door when McKay gets back in, so the Prospector shoots and kills the bear.

Finally, they have food!

After sharing the meal and becoming friends, they part ways. McKay runs into Larsen’s camp, and the two fight. This time, Larsen bashes McKay’s head with a shovel, knocking him out. Larsen escapes but soon after is killed by an avalanche. The Prospector travels to a city in the far North that was “built overnight during the great gold rush” and sells off his pick and shovel for a bit of money to survive on. In this city, he will meet the pretty Georgia (Georgia Hale), a woman he becomes infatuated with. He also meets Jack (Malcolm Waite), a dickhead that wants Georgia and will stop at nothing to get her. It all starts at the Monte Carlo Dance Hall, the place where Georgia works.

My Thoughts:

I may have said it before, but it’s hard to rate silent films for modern audiences. With this website, I promised to rate these movies as honestly as possible, not giving passes to old movies just because of “film critic love”. With all that being said, The Gold Rush is without a doubt a timeless classic. When ranking “The Tramp” films, I still have City Lights as the best one, but I think The Gold Rush is fighting with Modern Times for that coveted second spot.

Once again, I was thoroughly impressed with Chaplin’s ability to not only get laughs but evoke so many other emotions in a silent film. You feel everything from the desperation of the three men in the snowy Alaska landscape to the feelings of sadness after losing out on the woman our hero falls for. So much happens at such a quick pace that you’re never bored. The only time the story slows down is for some quick gags or the stuff between Georgia and the Prospector later on in the story, but it never felt like time was wasted at all. This is what I like about Chaplin’s silent films. Though he tries to focus things on certain gags or jokes, it’s all very calculated and fits within the main story very well. The jokes, as crazy as they may get at times, still help tell the story too.

The Tramp finds himself in a captivating adventure in The Gold Rush that is equally funny as it is exciting and emotionally stimulating.

Seeing the Lone Prospector go from almost dying, to scraping by and falling in love, to almost dying again was an immensely entertaining journey to take “The Tramp” on. He goes through a lot throughout the course of this film. After searching for shelter, he manages to find himself in an unwanted three-way friend group that only exists because of the need and want for survival from the cold. One of them is a wanted criminal, the other is a badass, and the other is the lowly Tramp. There’s in-fighting, threats of death and starvation, and very little chance of them coming out of this alive. Chaplin pulls off a masterful performance. When he plainly eats his own shoe like it’s a salad and hilariously offers to cook his other shoe as he shares it with McKay, I was actually laughing. Not only did we know exactly what he was saying without the audio, but his calm expression while going through with this ridiculous reaction made it even better. It’s as if nothing can ever fully defeat the Tramp. Even in the face of gunfighting, a blizzard, an actual bear, or someone trying to fight him, the Tramp never gives up. I think this is why we always fall for him as the protagonist and why he’s such a universally loved character in cinema. He’s innocent, lovable, funny, courageous when he needs to be, and at times, oblivious to what goes on around him.

In terms of comedy, there are so many funny bits. There’s the aforementioned eating of his shoe, McKay and Larsen fighting over the shotgun and the Lone Prospector trying to avoid the barrel, faking frost bite to get into Hank Curtis’s cabin and after getting shelter, immediately putting sugar into the coffee given to him, and there was the dance sequence. Quite honestly, it was pure perfection. I loved this scene, especially because of Chaplin’s ability to make a mundane and simple sequence into something exceedingly memorable, creative, and legitimately funny. He’s one of the true masters of comedy and scenes like this show it. In this sequence, the character is just trying to keep things normal to impress Georgia, but the circumstances around him refuse to let up. When his belt falls off and he uses his cane to hold up his pants as they dance, you can’t help but laugh at the ingenuity. The leash of the dog being used was icing on the cake. Then of course, you have the hysterical scene where the Prospector destroys Curtis’s cabin in excitement following Georgia agreeing to hang out on New Year’s Eve, but she comes back after he does this because she forgot her gloves.

Chaplin’s humor is funny no matter what year you watch it. Don’t let your apprehension to silent films stop you from viewing this masterpiece!

Georgia’s characterization did bother me though. I understand she’s supposed to be this upper-class person that is messing with the Prospector for her and her friends’ entertainment, but his innocence wins her over, but I don’t think this is enough. Now, I watched the original version of The Gold Rush and there’s a troubling moment towards the end that changes everything. Georgia decides to apologize to Jack for blowing up on him and sends him a note to do so. Once Jack reads it, he gives it back to the messenger to give to the Lone Prospector to further fuck with his head. After the Prospector reads it, he thinks Georgia is apologizing to him for not showing up to the dinner he prepared for her and her friends while admitting her love for him. He’s then all over Georgia, and she’s so shocked she doesn’t say anything to clarify the situation. This doesn’t feel right at all. How come she never clears the air? Also, they’re all in the same room. Why send a note? Why doesn’t she just go down and talk to Jack in the first place like a human being? Considering all of this, the ending doesn’t have nearly the same impact as Modern Times or City Lights, which ultimately hurts it when I rank all of Chaplin’s movies. This is because Georgia never actually admits her love for the Prospector. There’s no real love between them. She felt bad for him, so she stopped making fun of him. At the end of the film, she helps him from being thrown off the boat. The film implies that the two love each other in the end, but this doesn’t seem feasible based off of what we know and what was shown to us in the narrative.

This is changed in the re-release of the film in 1942. In the re-release, the entire subplot of Jack tricking the Prospector into believing Georgia is in love with him is dropped and the simpler ending is made instead where they just fall in love naturally. You can argue this should’ve been the ending from the beginning, but since I’m reviewing the original as it was intended (it’s in the public domain as well), I can’t help but fault Chaplin for what he initially put out. Georgia wasn’t a likable love interest. If anything, she started this whole mess just because she wanted to make fun of the poor guy and suffered zero repercussions from it. At one point, she sees he saved a picture of her, and she just starts laughing with all her friends behind his back. Following this, she asks the Lone Prospector why he doesn’t invite them over for dinner.

You see? She started all of this!

She gets his hopes up like crazy and he asks politely, “Will you really come to dinner?”. He’s almost in disbelief that someone actually would take a liking to him, especially someone as pretty as her, and she knows this! She knows exactly what she’s doing and screws him over for the fuck of it. She has no idea how hard he worked going into New Year’s to make money, to pay for the food to serve her and her friends, as well as the gifts he got them. The Lone Prospector is a genuinely good man that wants to do well by this pretty woman that gave him attention (and knowingly teased him), despite her having no intentions to follow through on any of it. She only decides to come over after midnight on New Year’s just to mess with him. There should’ve been a bigger moment in the film where something screwy happens to her, so she wins us over with sympathy, and we want to see the two together. Sadly, this moment never came. The only thing we’re given that is supposed to make us believe she is good enough for the affections of the Lone Prospector is because she felt remorse after everything she did.

Yeah, fuck that.

This is why the ending is lacking. Now, I’m supposed to believe she is worth winning over now that the Lone Prospector is rich? Hell no! I wouldn’t trust her at all. I’m not a vengeful person, but there’s no way I’m buying into her being relationship material without her feeling much worse over what had transpired previously. It would make a lot more sense if the Lone Prospector spurned her advances out of spite, but this would never be an ending to a Charlie Chaplin comedy. This would be an ending to a comedy that came out now. Also, what was up with Georgia’s relationship with Jack? She turns him down constantly because of his overbearingness but out of nowhere, around New Year’s, she’s dating him. Not much time passes between when we are introduced to these characters and the holiday season, so how did he win her over? It looked like she hated him before! Why are they so close all of a sudden?

Even with my frustrations with Georgia and the intricacies of the romantic subplot, The Gold Rush still impresses with its humor as well as its excitement. The topsy-turvy cabin climax is heart-pumping in context and might be one of the most memorable film scenes of all time. The miniature work is incredible for the time period too. There’s also the classic bread roll dance scene that the Lone Prospector imagines while waiting for Georgia and her friends. Though Fatty Arbuckle may have done it first in 1917’s The Rough House, Chaplin made it iconic here. Isn’t that weird? A scene like this has nothing to do with the main story at hand but somehow, it captured the imagination of generations of filmgoers. It’s momentous, a legendary scene in all of its simplicity. There’s no other way to put it.

When you watch The Gold Rush as a whole, it feels special. Then again, maybe I’m just a biased Chaplin fan.

In the closing moments, the Lone Prospector’s photographer takes a picture of him standing and smiling with Georgia as he exclaims, “Gee! This will be a wonderful story”.

Well, isn’t that the understatement of the century.