After the box-office failure of his first dramatic film, A Woman of Paris, Charlie Chaplin brooded over his ensuing comedy. "The next film must be an epic!" he recalled in his autobiography. "The greatest!" He found inspiration, paradoxically, in stories of the backbreaking Alaskan gold rush and the cannibalistic Donner Party. These tales of tragedy and endurance provided Chaplin with a rich vein of comic possibilities. The Little Tramp finds himself in the Yukon, along with a swarm of prospectors heading over Chilkoot Pass (an amazing sight restaged by Chaplin in his opening scenes, filmed in the snowy Sierra Nevadas). When the Tramp is trapped in a mountain cabin with two other fortune hunters, Chaplin stages a veritable ballet of starvation, culminating in the cooking of a leathery boot. Back in town, the Tramp is smitten by a dance-hall girl (Georgia Hale), but it seems impossible that she could ever notice him. The Gold Rush is one of Chaplin's simplest, loveliest features; and despite its high comedy, it never strays far from Chaplin's keen grasp of loneliness. In 1942, Chaplin reedited the film and added music and his own narration for a successful rerelease. --Robert Horton
(15 votes)
2.
This Chaplin classic finds Charlie in the Klondike searching for gold. Maintains a careful balance of masterful slapstick, romantic tenderness, and wry social satire. Also contains the celebrated "dancing dinner rolls" gag. Re-release in 1942 featured sound narration. Academy Award Nominations: 2, Best Sound Recording, Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.
(15 votes)
3.
Only Charlie Chaplin could add the criminal depths to which people will sink in search of gold to the cannibalistic lengths they will go in search of food and come up with a comedy like The Gold Rush. As he said in "My Autobiography", "...we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane."
In his autobiography, Chaplin reported that his first moment of inspiration for the film occurred while he was looking at a stereoscopic view of a long line of prospectors climbing up the Chilkoot Pass in Alaska's Klondike. From this single image, his imagination took flight. "Immediately, ideas and comedy business began to develop," he said. Subsequent reading about the Donner party's experience with cannibalism led him to one of the funniest episodes in The Gold Rush, involving The Little Fellow's own cooked boot and a hallucinatory chicken.
(15 votes)
4.
A lone prospector ventures into Alaska looking for gold. He gets mixed up with some burly characters and falls in love with the beautiful Georgia. He tries to win her heart with his singular charm.
(15 votes)
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