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50-867: The Gold Rush is a 1925 American silent comedy film written, produced, and directed by Charlie Chaplin . The film also stars Chaplin in his Little Tramp persona, Georgia Hale , Mack Swain , Tom Murray , Henry Bergman and Malcolm Waite . Chaplin drew inspiration from photographs of the Klondike Gold Rush as well as from the story of the Donner Party who, when snowbound in the Sierra Nevada , were driven to cannibalism or eating leather from their shoes. Chaplin, who believed tragedies and comedies were not far from each other, decided to combine these stories of deprivation and horror in comedy. He decided that his famous rogue figure should become

100-478: A Pierrot 's endeavor to draw your tears.... Instead of the rush of tears called for, one reaches for his glycerine bottle.... We do not wish to deride Chaplin. He is as deft as ever and far and away a brilliant screen master. He has made a serviceable picture in The Gold Rush but it seems that he is not as funny as he once was. Nevertheless, The New Yorker included The Gold Rush in its year-end list of

150-723: A camp sensibility lay behind the successful Carry On films , while in America subversive independent film-maker John Waters made camp films for college audiences with his drag queen friends that eventually found a mainstream audience. The success of the American television show Saturday Night Live drove decades of cinema with racier content allowed on television drawing on the program's stars and characters, with bigger successes including Wayne's World , Mean Girls , Ghostbusters and Animal House . Parody and joke-based films continue to find audiences. While comedic films are among

200-529: A gold-digger who joins a brave optimist determined to face all the pitfalls associated with the search for gold , such as sickness, hunger, cold, loneliness or the possibility that he may at any time be attacked by a grizzly. In the film, scenes like Chaplin cooking and dreaming of his shoe, or how his starving friend Big Jim sees him as a chicken could be seen. The Gold Rush was critically acclaimed upon its release, and continues to be one of Chaplin's most celebrated works; Chaplin himself cited it several times as

250-536: A separate genre, but rather, provides a better understanding of the film. Love at first sight In the classical world, the phenomenon of "love at first sight" was understood within the context of a more general conception of passionate love, a kind of madness or, as the Greeks put it, theia mania ("madness from the gods"). This love passion was described through an elaborate metaphoric and mythological psychological effect involving "love's arrows" or "love darts,"

300-562: Is a film genre that emphasizes humor . These films are designed to amuse audiences and make them laugh. Films in this genre typically have a happy ending , with dark comedy being an exception to this rule. Comedy is one of the oldest genres in film, and it is derived from classical comedy in theatre . Some of the earliest silent films were slapstick comedies , which often relied on visual depictions, such as sight gags and pratfalls, so they could be enjoyed without requiring sound. To provide drama and excitement to silent movies, live music

350-479: Is knocked out by Larsen with a shovel. While fleeing with some of the mined gold, Larsen dies in an avalanche . Jim recovers consciousness and wanders into the snow, having lost his memory from the blow. When he returns to the town, his memory has been partly restored and he remembers that he found a large gold deposit, that it was close to a cabin, and that he stayed there with the Prospector. But he knows neither

400-399: Is overpowered by Jim, and the three agree to a truce allowing them all to stay in the cabin. When the storm is taking so long that food is running out, the three draw lots for who will have to go out into the blizzard to obtain food. Larsen loses and leaves the cabin. While outside looking for food, he encounters Jim's gold deposit and decides to ambush him there when Jim returns. Meanwhile,

450-447: Is that the attractiveness of a person can be very quickly determined, with the average time in one study being 0.13 seconds. The second is that the first few minutes, but not the first moment, of a relationship have been shown to be predictive of the relationship's future success, more so than what two people have in common or whether they like each other (" like attracts like "). Infatuation , not to be confused with love at first sight,

500-563: The Provençal troubadour poets of southern France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and became part of the European courtly love tradition. In particular, a glimpse of the woman's eyes was said to be the source of the love dart: This doctrine of the immediate visual perception of one's lady as a prerequisite to the birth of love originated among the "beaux esprits" de Provence. [...] According to this description, love originates upon

550-413: The contiguous United States on a ship on which, unknown to them, Georgia is also traveling. When the Prospector agrees to don his old clothes for a photograph, he falls down the stairs, encountering Georgia once more. After she mistakenly thinks he is a stowaway and tries to save him from the ship's crew, the misunderstanding is cleared up and both are happily reunited. Chaplin attempted to film many of

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600-519: The "arrow's wound" was sometimes used to create oxymorons and rhetorical antithesis . "Love at first sight" was explained as a sudden and immediate beguiling of the lover through the action of these processes, and is illustrated in numerous Greek and Roman works. In Ovid 's 8 AD epic, Metamorphoses , Narcissus becomes immediately spellbound and charmed by his own (unbeknownst to him) image, and Echo also falls in love with Narcissus at first sight. In Achilles Tatius 's Leucippe and Clitophon ,

650-402: The 1942 re-release of The Gold Rush : You see things that are so peculiarly a result of Chaplin's genius you can't explain them…These situations begin with something absurd: a dancer's feet represented by two bread rolls, a house half on, half off a cliff, a meal made of a shoe. But Chaplin's pantomime changes the absurdity into something significant with human feeling—the rolls come alive with

700-501: The 1942 re-release: During the Klondike Gold Rush , in Alaska , gold prospector Big Jim finds an enormous gold deposit on his parcel of land when a blizzard strikes. The Lone Prospector gets lost in the same blizzard while also prospecting for gold. He stumbles into the cabin of Black Larsen, a wanted criminal. Larsen tries to throw the Prospector out when Jim also stumbles inside. Larsen tries to scare both out using his shotgun but

750-567: The Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. Entertainment Weekly voted it at No.15 on their list of 100 Greatest Movies of All Time . The film was voted at No. 97 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008. In the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, it was ranked the 91st-greatest film ever made in the directors' poll. In 2015, The Gold Rush ranked 17th on BBC 's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around

800-623: The US , as Chaplin did not renew its copyright registration in the 28th year after publication in accordance with American law at the time. As such, the film was once widely available on home video in the US. After 1995, Chaplin's estate blocked unauthorized releases of The Gold Rush in the United States by arguing that the film's U.S. copyright had been restored by the Uruguay Round Agreements Act . Regardless, in 2021,

850-519: The dance hall", the Prospector. After encountering each other again, she accepts his invitation for a New Year's Eve dinner, but does not take it seriously and forgets about it. On New Year's Eve, while waiting for her to arrive to the dinner, the Prospector imagines entertaining her with a dance of bread rolls on forks. When she does not arrive until midnight, he walks alone through the streets, desperate. Meanwhile, Georgia remembers his invitation and decides to visit him. Finding his home empty but seeing

900-464: The dramatic class." The New Yorker published a mixed review, believing that the dramatic elements of the film did not work well alongside Chaplin's familiar slapstick: One might be given to expect wonders of Gold Rush burlesque with the old Chaplin at the receiving end of the Klondike equivalent of custard. But one is doomed to disappoint, for Chaplin has seen fit to turn on his onion juices in

950-402: The eyes of the lady when encountered by those of her future lover. The love thus generated is conveyed on bright beams of light from her eyes to his, through which it passes to take up its abode in his heart. In some medieval texts, the gaze of a beautiful woman is compared to the sight of a basilisk . Giovanni Boccaccio provides a memorable example in his Il Filostrato , where he mixes

1000-506: The fact that they are integrated so fully into a character-driven narrative. Chaplin had no reservations about the finished product. Indeed, in the contemporary publicity for the film, he is quoted, 'This is the picture that I want to be remembered by.'" The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited The Gold Rush as one of his favorite films. The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: The Village Voice ranked The Gold Rush at No. 49 in its Top 250 "Best Films of

1050-406: The film for which he most wanted to be remembered. In 1942, Chaplin re-released a version with sound effects, music, and narration, which received Academy Award nominations for Best Music Score and Best Sound Recording . In 1958, the film was voted number 2 on the prestigious Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo, by a margin of only five votes behind Battleship Potemkin . In 1992, the film

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1100-515: The film industry due to their popularity. In The Screenwriters Taxonomy (2017), Eric R. Williams contends that film genres are fundamentally based upon a film's atmosphere, character, and story, and therefore, the labels "drama" and "comedy" are too broad to be considered a genre. Instead, his taxonomy argues that comedy is a type of film that contains at least a dozen different sub-types. A number of hybrid genres have emerged, such as action comedy and romantic comedy . The first comedy film

1150-469: The film is considered one of the more memorable scenes in film history; however, Roscoe Arbuckle did something similar in the 1917 movie The Rough House which co-starred Buster Keaton . Curly Howard made a brief homage to the bit in the 1935 Three Stooges film Pardon My Scotch . Anna Karina 's character in Bande à part makes references to it before the famous dance scene. In more recent times, it

1200-469: The film was shot on the back lot and stages at Chaplin's Hollywood studio, where elaborate Klondike sets were constructed. Lita Grey , whom Chaplin married in November 1924, was originally cast as the leading lady but due to her pregnancy was replaced by Georgia Hale . Grey appeared in the film as an extra. Discussing the making of the film in the documentary series Unknown Chaplin , Hale revealed that

1250-635: The film's running time by several minutes. The film was further shortened by being run at the 24 frames per second rate of sound films. Like most silent movies it was originally shot and exhibited at a slower speed. Chaplin also changed some plot points. Besides removing the ending kiss, another edit eliminated a subplot in which the Lone Prospector is tricked into believing Georgia is in love with him by Georgia's paramour, Jack. Literary critic Manny Farber , writing in The New Republic , on

1300-409: The location of the deposit nor of the cabin, and so looks for the Prospector, hoping that he can lead him to the cabin. The Prospector arrives at the town and encounters Georgia, a dance hall girl, and falls in love with her . To irritate Jack, a man who is making aggressive advances toward Georgia and is pestering her for a dance, she instead decides to dance with "the most deplorable looking tramp in

1350-585: The lover Clitophon thus describes his own experience of the phenomenon: "As soon as I had seen her, I was lost. For Beauty's wound is sharper than any weapon's, and it runs through the eyes down to the soul. It is through the eye that love's wound passes, and I now became a prey to a host of emotions..." Another classical interpretation of the phenomenon of "hunger at first sight" is found in Plato 's Symposium (c. 385-370 BC), in Aristophanes ' description of

1400-419: The marriage had collapsed during production of the film; the final scene of the original version, in which the two kiss, reflected the state of his relationship with Hale by that time. The Gold Rush was a huge success in the US and worldwide. It is the fifth-highest-grossing silent film in cinema history, earning more than $ 4,250,000 at the box office in 1926 (~$ 58.6 million in 2023). Chaplin proclaimed at

1450-409: The meticulously prepared dinner and a present for her, she has a change of heart and prepares a note asking to talk to him. When the Prospector is handed the note, he goes searching for Georgia. Jim finds him and drags him away to go search for the cabin, giving the Prospector only enough time to tell Georgia that he will return to her as a millionaire. Jim and the Prospector find the cabin and stay for

1500-754: The most popular with audiences at the box office, there is an 'historical bias against a close and serious consideration of comedy' when it comes to critical reception and conferring of awards, such as at the Academy Awards . Film writer Cailian Savage observes "Comedies have won Oscars, although they’ve usually been comedy-dramas, involved very depressing scenes, or appealed to stone-hearted drama lovers in some other way, such as Shakespeare in Love ." According to Williams' taxonomy , all film descriptions should contain their type (comedy or drama) combined with one (or more) sub-genres. This combination does not create

1550-661: The next year in As You Like It : 'Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: "Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?"'. These images of the lover's eyes, the arrows, and the ravages of "love at first sight" continued to be circulated and elaborated upon in the Renaissance and Baroque literature, and play an important role in Western fiction and especially the novel , according to Jean Rousset . Research has shown two bases for love at first sight. The first

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1600-410: The night. Overnight, another blizzard blows the cabin half over a cliff right next to Jim's gold deposit. The next morning the cabin is rocking dangerously over the cliff edge while the two try to escape. Jim eventually gets out and pulls the Prospector to safety right when the cabin falls off the cliff. One year later, both have become wealthy, but the Prospector never could find Georgia. They return to

1650-568: The original film definitively entered the public domain in the United States as 95 years had passed since its release. In 2012, both the reconstruction of the 1925 silent version and the 1942 narrated reissue version were released on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection . This set included a new audio commentary track by Chaplin biographer and scholar Jeffrey Vance . The "roll dance" that the Little Tramp character performs in

1700-408: The outstanding gem of all Chaplin's pictures, as it has more thought and originality than even such masterpieces of mirth as The Kid and Shoulder Arms . Variety also published a rave review, saying that it was "the greatest and most elaborate comedy ever filmed, and will stand for years as the biggest hit in its field, just as The Birth of a Nation still withstands the many competitors in

1750-410: The personality of a dancer, the house, for all its triteness, becomes a stirring reality, and what happens to the shoes is unbelievable. An absurdity has been made real and enormously significant, and this is where you feel whatever emotion was intended by Chaplin… The new music score by Max Terr and the sound recording by James L. Fields were nominated for Academy Awards in 1943 . The Gold Rush

1800-527: The scenes on location near Truckee, California in early 1924. He retained only the film's opening scene. For two weeks the unit shot on location at Truckee in the snow country of the Sierra Nevada. Here Chaplin faithfully recreated the historic image of the prospectors struggling up the Chilkoot Pass. Six hundred extras clambered up the 2300-feet pass dug through the mountain snow. The rest of

1850-413: The separation of primitive double-creatures into modern men and women and their subsequent search for their missing half: "... when [a lover] ... is fortunate enough to meet his other half, they are both so intoxicated with affection, with friendship, and with love, that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant." The classical conception of love's arrows were elaborated upon by

1900-435: The silent-film era. He writes: " The Gold Rush is arguably his greatest and most ambitious silent film; it was the longest and most expensive comedy produced up to that time. The film contains many of Chaplin's most celebrated comedy sequences, including the boiling and eating of his shoe, the dance of the rolls, and the teetering cabin. However, the greatness of The Gold Rush does not rest solely on its comedy sequences but on

1950-407: The source of which was often given as the mythological Eros or Cupid , sometimes by other mythological deities, such as Pheme . At times, the source of the arrows was said to be the image of the beautiful love object itself. If these arrows arrived at the lover's eyes, they would then travel to and 'pierce' his or her heart, overwhelming them with desire and longing ( love sickness ). The image of

2000-617: The ten best films of 1925. At the 1958 Brussels World Fair , critics rated it the second greatest film in history, behind only Sergei Eisenstein 's Battleship Potemkin . In 1992, The Gold Rush was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance considers The Gold Rush to be Chaplin's greatest work of

2050-476: The time of its release that this was the film for which he wanted to be remembered. It earned United Artists $ 1 million and Chaplin himself a profit of $ 2 million. Critics generally praised the original 1925 release of The Gold Rush . Mordaunt Hall wrote in The New York Times: Here is a comedy with streaks of poetry, pathos, tenderness, linked with brusqueness and boisterousness. It is

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2100-470: The tradition of love at first sight, the eye's darts, and the metaphor of Cupid's arrow: "Nor did he ( Troilus ) who was so wise shortly before... perceive that Love with his darts dwelt within the rays of those lovely eyes... nor notice the arrow that sped to his heart." William Shakespeare pays a posthumous tribute to Christopher Marlowe , who himself wrote "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" in his 1598 poem Hero and Leander , by citing him

2150-413: The two remaining in the cabin get so desperate that they cook and eat one of the Prospector's shoes. Later, Jim gets delirious, imagines the Prospector as a giant chicken and attacks him. A bear then enters the cabin and is killed, supplying them with food. After the storm subsides, both leave the cabin, the Prospector continuing on to the next gold boom town while Jim returns to his gold deposit. There, he

2200-512: The use of comedy film to make social statements by building their narratives around sensitive cultural, political or social issues. Such films include Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb , Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and The Graduate . In America, the sexual revolution drove an appetite for comedies that celebrated and parodied changing social morals, including Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Fanny Hill . In Britain,

2250-447: The world. The film was voted at No. 25 on the list of The 100 greatest comedies of all time by a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by the BBC in 2017. In 1942, Chaplin released a new version of The Gold Rush , modifying the original silent 1925 film by adding a recorded musical score, adding a narration which he recorded himself and tightening the editing, which reduced

2300-414: Was L'Arroseur Arrosé (1895), directed and produced by film pioneer Louis Lumière . Less than a minute long, it shows a boy playing a prank on a gardener. The most notable comedy actors of the silent film era (1895–1927) were Charlie Chaplin , Harold Lloyd , and Buster Keaton , though they were able to make the transition into “ talkies ” after the 1920s. Film-makers in the 1960s skillfully employed

2350-417: Was played in sync with the action on the screen, on pianos, organs, and other instruments. When sound films became more prevalent during the 1920s, comedy films grew in popularity, as laughter could result from both burlesque situations but also from humorous dialogue . Comedy, compared with other film genres , places more focus on individual star actors, with many former stand-up comics transitioning to

2400-620: Was replicated by Robert Downey Jr. in his lead role as Charles Chaplin in the 1992 Chaplin , which briefly depicts the production of the film; Johnny Depp 's character in the 1993 film Benny and Joon ; Grampa Simpson in the 1994 The Simpsons episode " Lady Bouvier's Lover "; and Amy Adams 's character in The Muppets . The "hanging cabin on the edge of the cliff" sequence (starting at 1:19 in video inserted above) has been used in two Indian movies : Michael Madana Kama Rajan and Welcome . Comedy film The comedy film

2450-402: Was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 1953, the original 1925 version of the film entered the public domain in the United States because the claimants did not renew its copyright registration in the 28th year after publication. The following is the plot of

2500-415: Was the first of Chaplin's classic silent films that he converted to sound. The 2012 Blu-ray release revealed that the reissue of The Gold Rush preserved most of the footage from the original film. Even the restored print of the 1925 original shows noticeable degradation of image and missing frames, artifacts not seen in the 1942 version. In 1953, the original 1925 film may have entered the public domain in

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