As I try to watch through some classics of the silent era, it’s become obvious that one of the major icons of the time was Charlie Chaplin. Indeed, I’ve already covered his 1921 film The Kid, but I’ve also seen The Gold Rush on many “best of” lists, so I was excited to give this one a try too. In fact, one could argue that The Gold Rush is the most important Charlie Chaplin film to see, as he’s gone on record to state that it’s the film that he wants to most be remembered for. My honest opinion is that there are definitely some really great moments in The Gold Rush that I think make it worth watching, but ultimately I didn’t find it to be as enjoyable as The Kid.

As the title probably implies, The Gold Rush is set in the Klondike gold rush of the late 1800s. Chaplin casts himself as The Lone Prospector, who joins the search for gold. Chaplin was apparently enthralled by stories of how prospectors would starve and go crazy during their search, so he tries to tell a similar story here. A lot of the beginning of the movie just involves The Lone Prospector alone in a cabin with a man named Big Jim during a bad winter storm. The two begin to go hungry, which leads to some tensions. From there, the story dives more into the actual search for gold on the part of Big Jim, and The Lone Prospector meeting a girl named Georgia that he falls for, but doesn’t have the feelings reciprocated.

Honestly, my biggest problem probably was the story itself. For starters, the time period of the gold rush has never interested me, and so I wasn’t really as invested in a story about searching for gold as I was with Chaplin having to take care of an abandoned child. It’s just not as exciting to me, but maybe that’s just personal preference. Regardless, I don’t feel like the story’s faults stop there. My biggest problem is that the beginning of the movie goes on for way too long. It’s hard to convey starvation well without showing a long passage of time, but the stuff at the cabin in the beginning of the movie just wasn’t all that interesting. The movie definitely does pick up after that, but even then I take issue with the Georgia storyline at times. Still, a big barrier to entry of silent films for a lot of people is that they’re just harder to watch because of how slow they are, and The Gold Rush is an example of that for about the first third of the movie. Like I said, this problem definitely does decrease as the movie goes on, but it still makes it harder to recommend for an average viewer.

My biggest praises for the movie come from the second half of it. In general, I feel like Chaplin does comedy way better than he does drama, and so maybe that’s why some of the dramatic parts are a bit awkward for me. Some are really effective, such as The Lone Prospector’s lonely walk through the streets at midnight, but conveying things like starvation just didn’t work as well. The comedy, however, is always spot on. This comes even in smaller scenes such as The Lone Prospector getting in a fight with a man at a club, but the best example to me is in a dream sequence where Chaplin performs a dance number on the kitchen table using knives as legs and bread rolls as feet. It’s a really endearing scene, and one that’s been replicated many times. I think the best blend of comedy and drama comes toward the end of the movie (minor spoilers for a century-old movie coming up ahead). There’s a scene where The Lone Prospector and Big Jim are stuck in the cabin again, but this time it’s been carried away towards a cliff. The two men wake up and don’t realize that the cabin is teetering over the edge, and so they start to walk from one side of the cabin to the other, while us as the audience witness the cabin tipping back and forth as they do so. It’s simultaneously hilarious and nerve-wracking at the same time, and for me this and the bread dance scene are the standout moments of The Gold Rush.

In the end, The Gold Rush hasn’t been one of my absolute favorites of the silent era, but I still think it’s pretty great, and really groundbreaking for its time. If you can get past the early stages of the movie, it definitely gets better. I’d still recommend other movies of the era over this if you’re interested in watching a silent film, but you can also do much worse than The Gold Rush. It’s definitely a good movie to watch for any Charlie Chaplin fanatics, but it’s a bit harder to recommend for people that aren’t as invested in film history.

4/5