Review of The Gold Rush (1925) by Mjs M — 08 Aug 2009

Of all the Chaplin movies, this is the one I?ve been most excited to revisit. This may not be the best of his movies but it is the one with the most iconic moments, as a comedy it?s his definitive work.

Among the highlights are a sequence where a hungry man imagines Chaplin as a Chicken and tries to eat him, a scene where Chaplin cooks and tries to eat a shoe, a scene where Chaplin makes a pair of dinner roles attached to forks dance, and a scene where a house teeters on the edge of a cliff.

The humor here actually has something of a dark streak; Chaplin (who believed that the line between comedy and tragedy is very thin) used the story of the Donnor party partly as inspiration for this silent comedy.