The Gold Rush

Showtimes: 

No screenings currently scheduled.

95 min.

Directed by: 

Charlie Chaplin

Starring: 

Charlie Chaplin

Mack Swain

Tom Murray

Georgia Hale

Screenplay by: 

Charlie Chaplin

Rated General.

Silent with musical score.

Chaplin called The Gold Rush ‘the picture I want to be remembered by.’ It may be his most celebrated film, and is the masterpiece with more memorable Chaplin moments than any other. Most of us know it from Chaplin’s 1942 reissue, which added music and narration, but trimmed some 15 minutes from the 1925 original.

Now, for the first time, Chaplin’s complete 1925 version is available on 35mm prints with a musical score. The Gold Rush has Chaplin’s beloved Tramp trekking to the Klondike of 1898 in search of fortune, only to wind up snowbound in a hilariously unbalanced cabin, fending off attacks by bears and ferocious fellow prospectors, and – in one of the cinema’s most famed sequences – staving off starvation by eating his own shoe. The film’s ‘dance of the dinner rolls’ routine is nearly as famous. A 1952 survey of international experts selected The Gold Rush as the second greatest film of all time, after Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

– Pacific Cinematheque

It manages to make high comedy out of hardship, starvation, and greed... In the subtlety of its characterization, the brilliance of its mime, and its blending of comic and tragic themes, The Gold Rush is Chaplin’s most characteristic work.

–David A. Cook