In the wintry world of the Klondike, located in the Yukon territory of northwestern Canada, an influx of prospectors searching for gold brought timeless fame to what was to become the mecca of many pioneers: The Klondike Gold Rush. Competing for immeasurable riches, pioneers and prospectors alike embodied the dueling instincts of avarice and survival, living on the border of fabulous riches and utter squalor. Deriving its setting and incidents from the Klondike Gold Rush and the Donner Party, The Gold Rush chronicles the challenges of The Lone Prospector—The Tramp in his northern form—as he weathers snowstorms and endures starvation in the cabin of a wanted homicide, sidestepping a burly companion trying to survive by cannibalism. A blossoming, youthful woman by the name of Georgia, dwelling in the Yukon mining town and gallivanting with her female friends, catches the eye of The Lone Prospector after he arrives at the dance hall, and the angelic figure of her love hovers as a subplot of the precarious, dogged survival of The Lone Prospector and his desperate colleague, Big Jim McKay.
The elemental opposition of riches and squalor thus takes shape in The Gold Rush, the riches being those of an intangible desire—love—and the squalor that of the invariable environment of desperate, snowbound cabins. It is characteristic of The Tramp that his idealism attaches to women instead of money, and that his utter indifference to money results in his becoming wealthy and obtaining the woman of his love. Among the best of the Chaplin Oeuvre, The Gold Rush contains many of the finest scenes and set pieces in Chaplin’s career—those of the dancing rolls, the tilting cabin, the boiling of the shoe—and exemplifies a crux of The Tramp’s psychology: his idealizing of women of whom he is thereafter never worthy, betraying a perverseness of his desires contributing self-abasement and futility.
Imparting an unbridled joy of the Chaplin wheelhouse comprising slapstick and balletic, inimitable performances, The Gold Rush ranks with such films as City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator as a superlative film. Although none of its set pieces achieve the uncontrollable comedic pinnacle of the Billows Feeding Machine, they are nonetheless impressive, retaining their freshness and verve in the 21st century. The Lone Prospector, waiting in vain for the dinner guests whom he has naively invited, dozes off and has dreams of entertaining these guests, for whom he performs a digital dance with dinner rolls attached to two forks; dancing with Georgia in the dance hall, he tries to remedy his loose waistband by applying a dog leash as a belt, resulting in both hilarity and disaster; Big Jim McKay and The Lone Prospector, searching for the former’s bounty, fall asleep in the cabin that is lifted to a precipice, where it teeters responding to their fraught movements and untimely panic; and The Lone Prospector boils a shoe that he has willingly offered, creating a dish consisting of steamy leather, shoe laces, and nails that he eats as though devouring succulent morsels.
The final scene of his returning by steamship to the conterminous United States, parading his millionaire apparel and coattails before discovering Georgia in steerage, is a dénouement uplifting and cynical; retaining his workaday mining tatters, The Lone Prospector, The Tramp, attains what he has long desired, contriving a picture of the unwieldy romantic kiss trying to plaster over his own inadequacy.
Women and The Tramp have always entailed troublesome, corrosive matters that Andrew Sarris, in the seminal The American Cinema, observes acutely as he writes, “the idea of the actor has always contradicted the idea of the masses, just as the close-up has always distorted the long view of history. Chaplin’s sensitivity to the eternal perverseness of woman further clouded his vision of the world. What, after all, is the final close-up of City Lights but the definitive image of a man who feels tragically unworthy of his beloved?”[1] More than the murkiness of his own subjectivity as an artist, the perverseness of The Tramp’s romantic desire has always presented problems for the convincingness of The Tramp as an “outsider”. Although he is often successfully an outsider attempting to gain admittance to normal society, even in his exclusion he is an individualist, a derelict standing alone even as he resists doing so.
But his romantic idealism presents a different kind of character: servile, self-abasing, and diffident, a man clearly not himself. The perverseness of his desire is the projection of an ideal onto unsuspecting, beautiful women, just as God embodies the projection of a human idealism. Women are thus to The Tramp divine, godlike. But must so sterling, so nonpareil a character as The Tramp have ideals, when he himself is enough for the most ardent idealist? Not seeing himself as viewers see him, as other characters see him, The Tramp contends with this duality of a romantic idealism that is self-abasing and a wheelhouse of individualism that is all his own; and it is this duality that contributes to the curiosity and tension of the character, making him fascinating to observe—as well as prosaic, because his romantic idealism is pro forma and repetitive, while his individual variety as The Tramp is bottomless.
Despite the invoking of this romantic idealism that is a paling Chaplin staple, The Gold Rush enlivens its love with the picturesque steamship kiss, and the quality of its many set pieces living up to the greatest of the Chaplin oeuvre. The tenor of the film is magical, whimsical, and tortuous, yanking the story through its pitfalls and dangers, and rising finally to a satisfied summit. The romantic idealism and the inimitable Chaplin, the set pieces and the snowy Yukon, the hominess of the mining town and the ramshackle dance hall—the components themselves are wondrous and stimulating and imperfect. But the final product is perfectly Chaplin, purely what he is. Affirming what The Tramp is not, his perverse romantic idealism, Chaplin also affirms what he is, creating an idiosyncratic art that is impressive. But one would do better to call it timeless.
- Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. Da Capo Press, 1996. ↑
