Mustache Marathon 2: The Gold Rush (1925, 1942)



At around this time last year, I was typing up a little something about the Charlie Chaplin classic, The Great Dictator.  It was a movie filled with fun comedy.  The comedy was provided through the dialogue, the physicality, and the situations.  This year I decided to go farther back into the Charlie Chaplin filmography as part of my Mustache Marathon.  The movie I watched was The Gold Rush.

I want to start off by saying that I didn’t watch the original version of The Gold Rush from 1925.  Rather, I saw the rereleased version from 1942.  I don’t know all of the differences, but there is narration in the 1942 version, and some stuff was cut out of it.  The plot of the rerelease, which I think would be about the same as that of the original, involves Chaplin’s tramp character going to the Yukon, running into some prospectors, falling in love with a girl, and searching for riches.

Like in The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin excels when it comes to physical comedy.  There’s something about him that makes the physicality of the performance much more than anyone else I’ve seen.  There is fluidity to every movement that isn’t normally seen in choreography.  It feels natural.  Yet it was all preplanned.  It’s astonishing that Chaplin could produce this quality of visual comedy at such an early stage in the history of filmmaking.  I’m not sure that anyone today could produce something of this quality, and there have been a lot of major advances movies.

This is going to be a rather short writeup.  I don’t want five paragraphs of me talking about how great the physical comedy was.  I liked the cabin stuff at the beginning.  I liked the cabin stuff at the end.  I liked the bar stuff.  I liked the dancing food.  I don’t need to make a paragraph describing each set piece.  It wouldn’t do justice to the movie.  To fully understand why I like the scenes, you would need to watch the movie.

The overall story didn’t captivate me too much, which leaves me at liking the movie rather than loving it, but each of the comedic moments worked.  Having now seen two Chaplin movies, I understand how he could become as popular as he became.  The man was a comedic genius.  He knew how to use a setting to the full potential.  He used as much as he possibly could in order to fill his movies to the brim with comedy.

Coming up soon will be the final movie of the second annual Mustache Marathon.  The movie is This Is Spinal Tap.  There’s no better place to go at the end of a marathon than Stonehenge.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

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