5
The Gold Rush
Release date 26th June 1925
Country: USA
Running
time: 96 mins
Genre
: Comedy
Starring Charlie Chaplin
Screenplay by Charlie Chaplin
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
A Lone Prospector finds romance and a
fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush.
Chaplin's brilliant epic comedy is
the greatest ever made. Although not all of the wildly funny
sequences were entirely original (Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle had performed
a dance using bread rolls in
the 1918 film The Cook), they had never been performed with such grace
and spirit.
This was Chaplin's
first starring vehicle for the new distributing company, United Artists,
that he had co-founded with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W.
Griffith in 1919. He came up with the idea for the picture while
breakfasting with his husband-and-wife partners, Fairbanks and
Pickford, who had some stereopticon pictures with scenes from the
Klondike gold rush. Chaplin also had become intensely interested in the
fate of the fabled Donner party of 1846 whose surviving members
indulged in cannibalism to stay alive.
The
film was meticulously planned as a comic epic, and its cost was high
(for the time), reportedly exceeding $900,000. Hundreds of extras were
transported to the remote Sierra Nevada location camp at $5 a day, and
Chaplin's cinematographers shot at a twenty-five-to-one ratio, retaking
until their perfectionist director was satisfied. Chaplin's boots,
which served as a meal for the protagonist and his pal Mack Swain, were
made of licorice (a natural laxative, as the already ailing Swain
discovered; his revulsion at the offer of a second such meal was
perfectly real), and twenty pairs were made to satisfy the outtake
requirements of the picky Chaplin.
Years after its initial release, the film
was cited by the prestigious International Film Jury as the second
greatest film of all time (The
Battleship Potemkin came first). Chaplin reissued a version in 1942
with music and his own spoken narrative.
Written content copyright Derek McLellan,2005.
Copyright © The Fedora Chronicles
