Directed by Charlie Chaplin

Oh my God, The Gold Rush is good. Not just good, great. Brilliant. Unbelievable. It is not only hilarious, and an amazing showcase for Chaplin’s varied talents, and an amazingly innovative film in terms of technical and directorial invention, but it is also the first film on this list to realize how closely allied are the principles of tragedy and comedy. Folks, this film is dark. It’s hilarious, but it’s dark. It was (famously) inspired by stories of the Donner party, and Chaplin thought, yeah, I can make that funny. And so he did.

The film is both gleefully chaotic (watch out for the bear if you decide to watch it) and also brutally pessimistic, and plumbs the horrors of starvation, exposure, and greed for comedy gold. The human relationships on display are all astonishingly cruel and heartless, again plumbed for comedy. Pretty much everyone in this movie is despicable, but we’re laughing about it! The Little Tramp persona is not nearly so uniform as many people seem to think. While always driven by instincts, there is a wide range of instincts that are explored. In some films that becomes an unaffected simplicity and goodness, but here it’s nothing more than greed and self preservation. Obviously any movie about the gold rush is going to have greedy characters, but I was surprised at how unlikable they made everyone, even the usually lovable protagonist. You still absolutely root for him because he’s the least despicable one (more pathetic than anything else), but it’s a different tone than these usually strike. So far as I know, it’s really the first film ever made that could qualify as a black comedy, meaning that Chaplin was once again innovating what a film could even be. In a time when comedy was seen as disposable and lighthearted, he was dragging it forward thematically, while abandoning none of what makes his movies hilarious.

In addition to its innovation to the nature of comedy, the film also continues Chaplin’s trend of being a technical filmmaker par excellence. It invents, out of whole cloth, a number of iconic images and concepts that comedies are still stealing today. That thing where a hungry person sees another person as food? That’s this movie. Teetering precariously on a cliff, seemingly defying physics in a way that can be unbalanced by the slightest move? That’s this too. And the scene with the teetering cabin is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen on film, not just for the time period. The technical brilliance of how they accomplished it is only rivaled by how hilarious it manages to be, distracting you from its brilliance. It combines miniature work that’s hard to believe, brilliant set design, and innovative camera work. It has to be watched multiple times to really appreciate, because it’s so funny that it’s hard to focus on all of the minute decisions that are going in to making it so effective a scene of comic tension. And that’s not to mention the animal stunt work, or the sheer scale of the movie, where a couple thousand extras (mostly homeless people from the Sacramento area) were bused up to the Sierra Nevada mountain range to accurately recreate the lines of prospectors heading up the mountain. The film is a technical triumph, and one of the most challenging shoots of Chaplin’s career.

It’s also very different from Keaton’s work, which relies far more upon the traditions of acrobats and circus performers. Keaton does stunts that are conceptually excellent, but Chaplin here does movie magic, stuff that only movies could do. I think, ultimately, that’s why his reputation is greater in the modern perspective. While I find Keaton’s movies (and persona) funnier than Chaplin’s, I think there’s an argument to be made that Chaplin moved film forward more significantly, at least from a technical standpoint. Some of the superimposition that he does here is brilliant, and required such specific timing (including developing film of miniatures while the set was still hot so that they could get accurate actor placement for the splice) just baffles me that it was even possible. Chaplin also (much later in 1942) wrote a score for the film and even a voice-over narration that is really impressive and adds a huge amount to the film. Check it out with that audio track if you can find it. The man constantly displayed a seemingly effortless artistic genius in just about every field he applied himself, and this film is a great showcase for basically all of those talents.

Another really notable and wonderful thing about this movie is that it’s one of the first comedies that feels like it actually has a well-written ending. It’s still definitely a little too neat (because comedies even today are fighting that battle), but it at least feels like it makes sense. There’s a reason that the events happen that bring about a happy ending, as opposed to a deus ex machina of some kind. It’s still coincidence, but it at least feels like they made an effort. An incredibly strong recommendation, and only short a perfect four because I legitimately believe that Chaplin will make even better films down the line, and that they are more deserving of the perfect score than this admittedly brilliant film. This movie is excellent, and can easily be recommended to absolutely anyone without reservation.

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