The Favorites - The Gold Rush (#36)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Gold Rush (1925/USA/dir. Charlie Chaplin) appeared at #36 on my original list.

What it is • A lone prospector (Charlie Chaplin) waddles up an icy Yukon path, a polar bear calmly following in his footsteps. The ambitious tramp will be stalked by many more troubles before the film ends: he is buried in snow, challenged to fights by burly rivals, nearly frozen in a little cabin, starved to the point of eating his own shoelaces like spaghetti, almost shot by his hungry, hallucinating compatriot Big Jim (Mack Swain) who envisions him as a giant chicken, trapped in a cabin that has been blown precariously onto the edge of a cliff during the night, and, perhaps worst of all, heartbroken by the mocking flirtations of dance hall girl Georgia (Georgia Hale). The little guy meets all these challenges with his usual pluck and imagination, and the film features some of Chaplin's most memorable gags: the aforementioned chicken and shoelaces, of course, but also the frantic balancing act required as the cabin nearly topples over that cliff, and, on a more delicate note, his bread-roll dance number (featured above). The usual mix of pathos and comedy applies, especially in the original, longer cut which Chaplin shortened seventeen years later. Though City Lights and Modern Times provide close competition (and are a bit more complex), this may be Chaplin's most beloved film - it was certainly one of the biggest hits of the silent era.

Why I like it •

Silence is Golden: the two versions of The Gold Rush

In the famed Kuleshov experiment, conducted in the Soviet Union immediately after the Russian Revolution, it was demonstrated that audiences would react differently to the same exact shot depending on what shots followed or preceded it. The actor in close-up was interpreted as mourning, for example, when intercut with the image of a corpse, or hungry when alternated with food, or even happy when juxtaposed with a child laughing. There were obvious implications for the theory of montage, but it isn't only editing that alters viewers perception this way: camera position, movement of camera, and movement of actors within the frame can all subtly alter an audience's impression of the same scene, while the more circumstantial elements of a film - like art direction, lighting, or color scheme - can ironically have an even stronger effect.

And then there's the soundtrack, one of the subtlest yet most effective ways to manipulate a viewer. It's an especially problematic element in the case of silent films, whose musical scores were often up for grabs - dependent on what the house organist felt like playing, in later years reliant on whatever generic recordings the video distributor was able to use. That's just music - what of an actual narration, imposed upon the material that orginally "spoke visually"; is such an imposition blasphemy or merely a logical, technological update?

When he re-released The Gold Rush in 1942, Charlie Chaplin nervously cut down his 1925 box-office smash, eliminated the intertitles, composed a new score, and added a playful (self-recorded) voiceover. Mindful that audiences used to talkies might grow restless, Chaplin had taken a sharp turn from his earlier position; for years he had been Hollywood's most (ironically) eloquent voice on the lost art of pantomime, resisting the onset of sound so stubbornly that he waited a dozen years after The Jazz Singer before allowing himself to speak onscreen. Yet apparently Chaplin (along with audiences and critics) was pleased with the results, labelling this cut "definitive" and allowing the original version to disappear from circulation.