The Gold Rush Review

Chaplin said this was the picture he wanted to be remembered by, and other films still borrow its set pieces. Snowbound and starving, the Lone Prospector boils his shoe and serves it to Mack Swain's Big Jim with a head waiter's courtesy, twirling the laces like spaghetti and sucking the nails like chicken bones. Big Jim, delirious, sees him as a giant chicken. Alone on New Year's Eve, he spears two bread rolls on forks and makes them dance.

The late cabin sequence, the shack balanced on a cliff edge and tilting with every step, is a studio illusion that still works. The opening, a column of prospectors climbing the Chilkoot Pass, was shot with six hundred extras near Truckee; the rest is studio snow, plainly lit. The romance with Georgia Hale's dance hall girl is thinner, and The New Yorker complained in 1925 that its pathos left one reaching for the glycerine bottle.

This is the 1925 silent version with its brief, functional title cards, not the 1942 reissue that runs 72 minutes with Chaplin's narration instead. Critics at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair ranked it second only to Battleship Potemkin. That overstates it, since the episodes never build the way City Lights does, but few comedies have left so many scenes behind.