surviving without prospects
by
Douglas Messerli
Charles
Chaplin (writer and director) The Gold
Rush / 1925
The
other day, when I had determined to revisit Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush for the first time since
childhood, I poked into my favorite movie guide, Time Out, to discover what I presume was a younger reviewer arguing
that it was “hard to see it was ever taken for a masterpiece.” So I somewhat
feared what my reviewing of the film might actually reveal. Would I love the
film as much as I remembered I had?
In fact, I had even more affection for it
that I can imagine I had in my youth. Chaplin’s film was not only loveable, but
it was brilliantly shifting in its representations of cinematic presentation.
Certainly, at moments it is a bit maudlin, clearly sentimental throughout (that
is, after all an important element of Chaplin’s appeal), but also—and
importantly—witty and, at moments, even a bit cynical. The first moments of the
film—supposedly at the Yukon’s Chilkoot Pass, filmed in California’s Truckee
near the original Donner Pass, in which 600 extras climb up over the trail to
Sugar Bowl—represent significant filmmaking, with the long lines of would-be
gold prospectors shuffling off into their near-certain death from cold and
starvation. That scene alone should reveal that this was no ordinary comedy.
It is hardly surprising, however, that
soon after Chaplin retreated to his Los Angeles studios to portray the rest of
the work with a mixture of flour and yeast to represent the snowy landscape of his
cinema. The icy reality would surely have frozen Chaplin’s balletic movements
in its tracks, delimiting the frantic comedic enactments of the little tramp.
The first amazing and highly comedic
element of this film concerns the derby-topped, cane-bearing fool, Chaplin’s
persona, in a world we cannot even imagine that he possibly might survive, a
completely alien planet where cane and hat are totally out of place. As he
slips and slides around impossible mountain vistas, a bear follows him, luck
alone allowing him from sliding to the abyss or being immediately consumed by
the beast. A following snowstorm allows Chaplin to play against nature the way
Buster Keaton would time and again a few years later. Again luck is with the
tramp as he stumbles into the villain’s cabin, the evil Black Larsen (Tim
Murray) who has just been seen busily burning his own wanted posters. Larsen
orders him out, but nature will not even permit the Lone Prospector’s—as
Chaplin’s character is defined—exit, as he is continually blown back in and out
of the ramshackle wooden construct. The preposterousness of these scenes is
resolved with the sudden appearance of yet other prospector seeking shelter,
Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain), who has just discovered a mountain of gold.
After a battle between the two
heavyweights, with the Chaplin figure rushing in an out of range of the loaded
rifle over which they are battling, a kind of ménage-a-trois is established,
the three of them desperately living together—but without anything left to eat.
A draw of the cards sends Larsen into the cold to seek out food, while the two
others are left behind to eat the Lone Prospector’s left shoe, their Thanksgiving
dinner, during which, in a nearly peerless pantomime of the extremes of
starvation and one of Chaplin’s most brilliant set-pieces, he sucks the
leathery meat off the nails of his shoe.
Meanwhile—a period of time which one
might describe defines this episodic movie—Larsen has discovered the hole-up of
two other would-be prospectors, killing them for their foodstuffs and, soon
after, discovering McKay’s claim, with no intentions of returning to his former
cabin.
If the following scenes, in which Chaplin
is seen by the starving McKay as a larger-than-life chicken, is a piece right
out of burlesque, while nonetheless entertaining, allows Chaplin to present his
usual British disdain as he hides his compatriot’s knife and buries his
gun—while still about to be attacked for the meat his puny body might contain.
He survives only because a bear enters their domain and, upon killing it, they
now have other things to consume.
The now-partners split up, with McKay
discovering Black Larsen having usurped his claim. Once again Larsen attacks,
attempting to murder the other. Larsen again escapes, but “cruel” nature takes
care of him, as he falls into a chasm after an avalanche.
Meanwhile again….back in town the little
tramp dares to enter the local bar, where he encounters the beautiful dance
hall girl, Georgia. This entire scene, however, represents an entirely other
kind of genre, which is what perhaps so confused some Chaplin admirers. The New Yorker, for example, found
Chaplin’s 1925 film out of character:
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 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.
In fact, the scenes that follow are not as
comedic as Chaplin might once have appeared to be. The women in the bar are
clearly tough prostitutes, ready to take on any frontiersman they might meet;
they drink, lure in the men, and even suggest somewhat more than intimate
female relationships. If previously the Lone Prospector was ludicrous, in this
wild-west saloon he is completely absurd. Suddenly in love with the mocking
Carmen of the bar, the Chaplin figure is surely no longer funny, despite the
fact that he (accidently) defeats the dangerous ladies’ man, Jack Cameron
(Malcolm Waite). To toy with Cameron’s affections, Georgia determines to dance
with the tramp in one of the most wonderfully comic dance numbers in all of
film history (a scene I describe in my essay on film dance in My Year 2000).
And it is here that the film stops even
attempting to be a comic film, bringing Chaplin into a far more dramatic
context, as the bar-women visit him in his new cabin, mocking him at the very
moment they pretend their love and admiration. The outlandish jubilation he
expresses after they pretend to plan a meeting with him early on New Year’s
night, which he celebrates by showering himself with pillow feathers—a symbol
obviously of his own cuckolding—is no longer funny; and Georgia, witnessing it
when she returns to retrieve her gloves, is obviously appalled. The director
has moved into other territory, and some of his former admirers clearly did not
know what to make of it; yet it would define many of the shifts he would take
in his later works. The clown had indeed become a kind of comedic prophet—a
fool who, nonetheless, had something to say about the world in which he lived.
Sure, the Pierrot he often represented
might still play out the “Dance of the Potatoes,” but, as the film itself predicted,
this fool was soon to be very rich—after a moment back at the cabin (a symbol
throughout the film as uncomfortable home) where the two “heroes” find
themselves at the edge of another abyss, this time balancing their bodies and
even the household furniture against the inevitable disastrous fall into
eternity. They escape “home” only because they are now rich and can endlessly
travel—an ability during the decade which, we should recall, the Fitzgerald’s,
the Hemingway’s, the Porter’s and, yes, the Chaplin’s much admired.
The final scenes of The Gold Rush, which reveal the little tramp as now a
multi-millionaire represent a Chaplin whom we had not yet met on screen—a
character basically freed of the truly maudlin and sentimental elements of his
earlier, and often, his later films. Finally, the tramp is a true survivor—even
without the prospects he had never truly been expected to achieve. Even if he
is required to dress up again like the tramp, he is no longer the same foolish
being.
Yes, The
Gold Rush has elements of that former actor-director, but it represents
something different, far more experimental, and resulting in a much more
masterful work than any film comedian before had achieved. To dismiss The Gold Rush is to ignore film history.
Too bad Chaplin himself seemed to want to
revise that very history when in 1946 he issued another version, with 20 minutes
cut, excising the original’s misunderstanding between Georgia and the Lone
Prospector when she sends a love letter to Jack, who vengefully passes it on to
the Chaplin character—some of the elements which defined his 1925 version as so
original, and so much more naturalistic—as opposed to the sentimental figures
to whom Chaplin was so devoted. In fact, the Monte Carlo bar represents
Chaplin’s own version of what later became Rick’s American Café—a far more
complex world than the little tramp had ever conceived.
At least the music of his later version
was better. The VHS I saw, clearly a cheap Canadian knock-off which featured a
completely baroque organ score that had nothing all to do with what was
happening on the screen, made me want to turn off the sound and truly see it as
the silent film as it was originally was conceived. Yet Chaplin’s vision still
came through, which says a great deal about its true power.
Los Angeles,
April 13, 2016
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