This review is
based on the original 1925 version of The Gold Rush with accompanying music provided on the DVD. In 1943 Charles Chaplin
personally supervised a re-release version with original musical score and
voiceover narration provided by Chaplin himself.
It’s hard enough these days to get easily engrossed in a
silent feature film. The classics are worth watching, especially if you’re at
all interested in understanding the development of narrative form on screen. It
takes a great deal of mental focus and a commitment that you’re going to stick
it out through more than an hour of silent viewing. Surely, just as with
subtitled films, the more you watch them, the easier it gets. But I find
Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush to
be, at times, tedious viewing. It has great classic bits, but the story that
holds it together is occasionally thrown together in a ramshackle way.
