As Smash Mouth once sang, "All that glitters is gold". And in the 19th century, people headed West in the great California gold rush in hopes of scoring a fortune that was located directly below your feet. Even once that gold rush died down, people fervently traveled across the globe to all kinds of biomes in hopes of obtaining financial prosperity beyond their wildest dreams. This concept of striking rich by way of gold was such a ubiquitous idea throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, it was inevitable that one of the most prolific filmmakers of the early 20th century would tackle it in one of his films.
In The Gold Rush, Charlie Chaplin puts his stamp on the entire idea of prospecting for gold with his typical sense of comedy and surprising heart. Chaplin stars as his readily identifiable Tramp persona taking on the role of The Lone Prospector, or The Little Fellow as the narrator constantly refers to him. This Lone Prospector has set out to find fortune in a frosty landscape, only to first become trapped in a cabin with a fellow prospector named Big Jim (Mark Swain) and the nefarious Black Larsen (Tom Murray) and then later entangled in a romantic attraction with Georgia (Georgia Hale), a local townsperson.
Interestingly, this is the 1942 version of The Gold Rush, which takes the original 1925 silent movie version of the same motion picture and makes some tweaks to it, most noticeably having Charlie Chaplin around as a constant off-screen narrative presence to explain actions, character backgrounds and to read off the dialogue characters are saying. It may sound like an intrusive element to the plot, but it's surprisingly easy to adjust to the narration facet of the motion picture, especially since Chaplin makes the wise decision to allow for numerous scenes heavy on physical comedy or moments that need silence for their maximum emotional impact to occur to go entirely without his narrative presence.
Charlie Chaplin is also around, of course, in the lead role of The Lone Prospector, the type of plucky fellow easy to fall into both starstruck romances and precarious situations in equal measure that he would frequently portray in his career. No wonder he'd return to this specific persona so repeatedly in his career as a leading man given how successfully he is even in just the role of The Lone Prospector, handling all of the physical comedy well (just remembering the visual of The Lone Prospector trying to evade the barrel of a gun that keeps getting accidentally pointed at him has me giggling) but also giving a realistic sense of humanity to this plucky individual that makes it easy to get invested in his various plights in the movie.
Production-wise, there's some strong choices in the various sets of The Gold Rush that recreate the type of buildings found in these towns that populate these kind of largely chilly domains in a satisfying manner, while, speaking of smart visual choices made in the movie, there's a fun recurring element in the editing that incites laughter in the viewer before anything even funny has happened. What I mean by that is, occasionally, during a certain situation, the camera will cut to an object or person that is minding its own business for now but will soon invade the tranquil surroundings and bring comedic chaos with them.
For instance, The Lone Prospector at one point ties a rope around his pants in order to keep them up whilst he dances with Georgia....only to realize what he's tied around his waist is actually the leash of a dog. That's already a problem in and of itself but then the camera cuts to a cat, minding his own business. But any given viewer can easily determine what's about to happen next, that the dog connected to The Lone Prospector will soon chase after this cat. We're one step ahead of our lead character in these types of scenarios and that's a good thing since it fits in with the intentional idea of The Lone Prospector always being out of his element in any given situation due to variables beyond his control. The comedy is intertwined with a higher concept related to the underpinnings of the lead characters, which is how you get such thoughtfully crafted laughs like the ones found in plentiful supply in The Gold Rush.
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