A Closer Look At The Gold Rush (1925)
By the mid-1920s, Charlie Chaplin had spent nearly a decade being one of cinema’s most beloved performers, a familiar face to movie lovers across the globe. His humor and performance style transcended cultural boundaries and set standards for many comedians to follow. He was also coming to a crossroads. Having concentrated mainly on short films since starting his own production company, he had challenged himself and scored wild successes with his first two features: the World War I comedy Shoulder Arms (1918) and his heart-tugging The Kid (1921) co-starring little Jackie Coogan. With the industry changing and fellow top comedians like Harold Lloyd switching exclusively to features, it seemed time for the great Chaplin to follow suit.
Naturally, Chaplin first insisted on following the beat of his own drum. In 1923 he started releasing films through United Artists, which he had co-founded along with fellow major names Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith. Much to the surprise of many, his first UA product was the drama A Woman of Paris (1923) starring Edna Purviance, where he only appeared in a brief cameo. While it received critical praise, many of the Little Tramp’s fans were understandably disappointed. It was clear that Chaplin’s next film needed to be a return to form, and it needed to be extraordinary.
The seeds for The Gold Rush (1925) were planted in the fall of 1923, around the time A Woman of Paris was released. While visiting his friends Fairbanks and Pickford at their stately home, Chaplin was looking at some stereoscope pictures (early 3D images) and was drawn to a particular image of gold prospectors struggling in an endless line through the snowy Chilkoot Pass. Later on he was further intrigued by a book on the ill-fated Donner party, which had infamously resorted to cannibalism after being snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in 1846. Chaplin took these unlikely sources as sparks of inspiration for a new comedy. He’d always felt that laughter was one of mankind’s greatest strengths in coping with sorrow or tragedy, and placing his resourceful Little Tramp in the harsh white North would both raise the stakes of the story and make the gags truly cathartic.
Chaplin wasted little time crafting a story for his new film, initially called The Lucky Strike. His character, referred to as “The Lone Prospector,” is shown taking part in the Klondike Gold Rush when he gets lost in a blizzard. He’s forced to take shelter in a cabin alongside wanted criminal Black Larsen (played by Tom Murray) and fellow prospector Big Jim (played by Keystone veteran Mack Swain), where they’re soon faced with starvation. Nearly going mad, they resort to eating one of the Prospector’s shoes. After a series of fraught adventures involving an avalanche, the Prospector ends up at a nearby mining town where he becomes enchanted with a beautiful dance hall girl.
Initially the little-known Lillita McMurray, who’d had a bit part as the “Flirting Angel” in The Kid, was signed to be Chaplin’s leading lady. She was given the name Lita Grey and the press was allowed to think she was nineteen, but in reality, she was fifteen. Within a year she would discover she was pregnant and Chaplin would arrange a discreet marriage. He did an equally discreet search for a replacement leading lady, settling on the lovely brunette Georgia Hale.
Starting production in early February 1924, Chaplin had hoped to shoot most of the Klondike scenes in the cold mountain town of Truckee, California, not far from the infamous Donner Pass. In the end only the famous long shots of the gold prospectors climbing up the snowy mountain pass were used–real-life recreations of the stereo gram that had intrigued Chaplin so much. The steep pathway was 2300 feet long with steps cut in the snow by professional ski jumpers. Equipment for recreating the mining camp at the mountain’s base had to be hauled nearly ten miles from the nearest railroad station. Employees of the Southern Pacific Railway were enlisted to help find extras, and in the end around 600 men would sign on to hike up the frigid pass.
The remoteness of the location and the real-life blizzards that were prone to coming through made for miserable location shooting, and by May Chaplin brought his company back to Los Angeles. Ironically, many of the scenes involving the freezing cabin and its snowy surrounding were shot in the intense July heat, with confetti, plaster, salt and flour standing in for the snow. A miniature icy mountain range was ingeniously created on the studio backlot with wood, chicken wire and burlap.
Other studio magic included the in-camera special effects, most notably the Big Jim’s hunger-induced hallucination of Chaplin transforming into a giant chicken. Chaplin would perform the same scene twice, once as the Prospector and once in the oversized chicken costume, making the same precise movements each time. The film would be rewound between takes and the “fade in” technique was used to smoothly morph the Prospector into the chicken. And there was certainly magic in some of the gags, especially Chaplin’s beloved “bread rolls” dance that, once seen, can’t be forgotten.
The Gold Rush was finished in the spring of 1925, shortly after Charlie and Lita’s son Charles Chaplin Junior was born. It had taken Chaplin two months to edit down from an incredible 230,000 feet of footage. The film, advertised as “a dramatic comedy,” had a sparkling premiere on June 26th at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, attended by a parade of celebrities.
The film soon became a runaway success, reportedly grossing over $6 million–making it one of the top ten biggest box office hits of the silent era. When he began the production, Chaplin had hoped The Gold Rush would be the film he’d be remembered for. As he’s certainly an icon in his own right, in a sense, we could also say that his wish seems to have come true.
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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.
Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.
