I’m back with another movie review as I attempt to watch every movie featured on Disney’s Great Movie Ride (RIP). The next movie on the list is The Gold Rush (1925), another Charlie Chaplin silent comedy.
At this point in the list, we’ve already seen three Chaplin films, but this one is a departure from the rest where it’s a full-length film (just over an hour long) where the others were all shorts. As its name suggests, The Gold Rush focuses on, well, a gold rush. Chaplin (playing his Tramp character) is in Alaska looking for gold, when he and side character Big Jim get stuck in a blizzard and play out much of the movie in a nearby cabin that belongs to a criminal named Black Larsen. Eventually, the storm passes, and the story shifts toward Chaplin’s focus on romancing a girl he meets.
The Gold Rush features several scenes that are arguably the most iconic shots of Chaplin, including one scene where he eats his leather shoe out of starvation during the blizzard and another with his famous bread dance.
Along with all of the entertaining antics that come with any of the Chaplin shorts, this film has far greater character development, higher stakes, and some very impressive special effects of the blizzard and its aftermath on the cabin, especially by 1925 standards.
It is no surprise that the film is seen as a critical success or that it won several awards and remains the fifth highest grossing silent film of all time. As such, I’m not sure what else I could possibly add to the conversation about The Gold Rush that hasn’t already been said except to say that if you haven’t seen it yet, you probably should.
