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Tramp in Alaska: The Gold Rush
The Gold Rush has been acclaimed by critics and the general public for so long it's hard to say anything new about it. The danger is that we have laughed so hard at Charlie boiling his shoes for Thanksgiving dinner and plunging forks into buns to dance the Oceana Roll that we are in danger of thinking it all just slapstick. But by 1925 Chaplin had learned to use humdrum pieces of comic business to deepen a scene's emotion. The movie opens on a long line of prospectors trudging wearily through the snow-capped mountains of the Klondike, recalling an important event in American history. Charlie appears as almost an after-thought, trudging along in his oversize shoes, defiantly twirling a cane to demonstrate his spirit. Chaplin had read about the Donner Party, which got lost in the snow and was reduced to cannibalism. The Gold Rush is especially successful because it is enmeshed in material that is scary; the clown is driven by an inner necessity to seek out the most dangerous places. When Charlie arrives at the lone cabin during the storm, he has to share it with Big Jim McKay and Black Larsen, a wanted criminal. After dangerous days together - during struggles between Larsen and McKay the gun always ends up pointed at Charlie - Larsen is sent out for food, murders two territorial policemen, and takes off with their sled. Amazingly, this brutality is followed by the delicious insanity of the Thanksgiving dinner. Chaplin's secret is that, as always, the nonsense is performed with total seriousness. Charlie cooks one of his enormous shoes with careful expertise; when Jim chooses the uppers, he contentedly sucks the nails and the laces. As he begins to cook another shoe, Jim goes mad and imagines Charlie is a plump chicken. Again the scene is funnier because it is scary: Charlie becomes the chicken and then changes into a man again. The emotional tone changes radically the next day after McKay sets out to find Larsen and Charlie finds his way to a boom town bar where he is captured by the smile of Georgia, a cabaret singer. His pain when he realizes she is smiling at someone behind him is almost unbearable to watch, but later he picks up a torn photo of her, left on the bar room floor. Just as chance determined the struggle with Jim, it changes Charlie's life when he looks out from his shack and is hit with a snowball thrown by Georgia, passing by with friends. Inside, she notices her photo under his pillow, and Charlie invites her and her friends to a New Year's dinner. There follows his wonderfully funny yet tender preparations--a newspaper torn to resemble a lace table-cloth, place cards, paper favors. Imagining his guests present, he entertains them with his bread roll dance, a master-stroke of pathos and farce. Then he wanders back to the town bar, looks at the celebrants through the window and feels the misery of rejection. He does not realize Georgia has belatedly remembered; by the time she comes to the shack Big Jim has dragged Charlie back to the hut, from which he hopes to locate the mountain of gold. Chaplin shifts again - from tenderness to terror: the shack is tilted over an abyss. As Charlie melts icicles for breakfast, the men are only half-aware of their danger, and at last they crawl up a slope on their bellies to safety. Some critics say the ending is sentimental: Charlie and Big Jim have found Larsen's gold and are returning to America as millionaires on the same ship as Georgia, who is in steerage. Such complaints fail to see how Chaplin had constantly combined chance and the search for gold throughout the film or that Charlie was never as interested in gold as in overcoming loneliness. The photographers want to take the millionaire's picture; after shedding two fur coats, Charlie tumbles off the promenade deck into coils of rope in the steerage. When an officer wants to arrest the apparent stowaway, Georgia offers retribution for her New Year's Eve forgetfulness: she will pay Charlie's passage. The happy ending may be unusual in Chaplin, but it grows logically out of the film's rhythm, which teeters constantly from tragedy to farce. Joseph Cunneen, founder and long-time editor of the ecumenical quarterly CROSS CURRENTS, is film reviewer for NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER and author of ROBERT BRESSON: A Spiritual Style in Film (Continuum, 2003). © Joseph Cunneen
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