Delicate, comical, sad, tender … are adjectives that can be applied to a large part of Charlie Chaplin’s works but especially ‘The Gold Rush’ (1925), the film that the actor and director considered its greatest achievement, for which he wanted to be remembered and whose premiere is one hundred years this Thursday.
It was his fourth feature film as director after ‘The Kid’ (1921), ‘The Pilgrim’ (1923) and ‘A Woman of Paris’ (1923) and the first in which he was the absolute protagonist. The tape was a turning point not only in its career, but in the cinema in general.
‘The Gold Rush’ demonstrated a cinematographic language of enormous maturity, so much that posters with such common explanations in silent cinema were not necessary.
The story of a gold search engine that everything goes wrong is perfectly understood with few phrases thanks to the careful narrative care and the importance that Chaplin gave to the assembly, something until then unusual.
That same 1925 would be released ‘The battleship potmkin’, of another genius, Sergei Eisenstein, who would lay the foundations of the assembly that from that moment would use all film directors, but Chaplin had already begun to establish his own a few months before.
Because the Eisenstein film arrived at the Salas in December and Chaplin’s premiere on June 26 in the new and extravagant Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, built following the fashion imposed by the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, three years before.
At that premiere was all Hollywood – from Mary Pickford to Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, Gloria Swanson or Cecil B. Demille – and was a resounding success.
Klondike’s gold fever
It was the culmination of a work that began when Chaplin saw some photos of the so -called ‘Klondike Gold Fever’ of 1896, which caused a strong migratory movement in this region of the Canadian Yukón.
But he decided to transform those stories, often dramatic, into a hopeful comedy that put a humor point in any situation. As in the famous scene in which Chaplin eats the sole of a boot elegantly and makes his spaghetti a spaghetti.
Chaplin reserved the leading role, that of a gold search engine with a vagabundal air similar to that of ‘The Kid’, which starts in search of the dreamed Eldorado to face rather a host of hardships.
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The filming was going to be developed in Alaska, but finally two different locations were chosen, the Sierra Nevada de California and Mount Linkoln, Colorado, according to the American Film Institute (AFI) on its website.
Chaplin used special effects, such as miniatures, and a rudimentary double printing technique to merge two images. And for the scene in which the cabin hangs on a cliff, cables were used and a pivoting base to balance it.
A filming that began in February 1924 with Lita Gray, fifteen, as a female protagonist. But the actress and the director, who then had 35, began a relationship of which two children would be born.
The filming was interrupted by Gray’s first pregnancy, which was replaced by Georgia Hale, and resumed a filming that ended in April 2025, the AFI requires.
Restrane with music in 1942
But Chaplin had not finished the film and, with the boom of sound cinema, he decided to re -enter it after replacing the subtitles with spoken narration, altering some scenes slightly and adding a soundtrack, in whose composition he participated.
And he also included pieces of classical music, such as the ‘Vespertina Star Song’, from the Opera ‘Tannhauser’ by Richard Wagner; ‘The flight of the Moscardón’, of the opera ‘The story of Zo Saltán’, by Rimski-Kórsakov, or part of the Ballet ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, by Tchaikovsky.
The new version of the film won two Oscar nominations, for better sound and better music, but did not get any award.
The most notable change was in the end. In the 1942 version the final kiss before the photographer’s camera is replaced by an image in which Chaplin is seen and Georgia leaves together.
‘The Gold Rush’ was included in 1992 in the National Registry of Film of the United States for its cultural, historical and aesthetic relevance. And figure in 58 of the 100 best films in the history of the AFI.
With EFE information.
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