The Gold Rush (Two-Disc Special Edition): Amazon.ca: DVD: DVD

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Additional Features

Disc 1 has the 69-minute reissue version of the film, prepared by Chaplin in 1942, with his own musical score and narration; disc 2 has the 96-minute silent original (some Chaplin fans prefer it silent). Along with photo gallery, posters, and trailers, there's a half-hour documentary that includes Burkina Faso filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo's comments. --Robert Horton

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After the box-office failure of his first dramatic film, A Woman of Paris, Charlie Chaplin brooded over his ensuing comedy. "The next film must be an epic!" he recalled in his autobiography. "The greatest!" He found inspiration, paradoxically, in stories of the backbreaking Alaskan gold rush and the cannibalistic Donner Party. These tales of tragedy and endurance provided Chaplin with a rich vein of comic possibilities. The Little Tramp finds himself in the Yukon, along with a swarm of prospectors heading over Chilkoot Pass (an amazing sight restaged by Chaplin in his opening scenes, filmed in the snowy Sierra Nevadas). When the Tramp is trapped in a mountain cabin with two other fortune hunters, Chaplin stages a veritable ballet of starvation, culminating in the cooking of a leathery boot. Back in town, the Tramp is smitten by a dance-hall girl (Georgia Hale), but it seems impossible that she could ever notice him. The Gold Rush is one of Chaplin's simplest, loveliest features; and despite its high comedy, it never strays far from Chaplin's keen grasp of loneliness. In 1942, Chaplin reedited the film and added music and his own narration for a successful rerelease. --Robert Horton

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15 Reviews

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4.5 out of 5 stars (15 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Gold Rush, Feb 22 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Gold Rush (Two-Disc Special Edition) (DVD)

I agree with one of the reviews above. Go right to the second disc and see the film as it originally appeared. Fantastic! (The first disc with the narration is very nice, but the narration is totally unnecessary). The film still holds up beautifully and the prints of this whole collection are amazing. Particulary if you've never seen this film, the best one to watch is the second disc original release. You won't be sorry!!!

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Tramps Suffering is eased with Brilliant Comedy..., Jan 7 2004

By

Kim Anehall "www.cinematica.org" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Gold Rush (Two-Disc Special Edition) (DVD)

Gold Rush is one of Charlie Chaplin's legendary films about the Tramp who seeks fortune and a better life in Klondike, Alaska, during the gold rush. In his quest for fortune he encounters several questionable characters which often lead to comic situations. Underneath the comedy there is a serious undertone of struggle for happiness and prosperity where the Tramp becomes easy prey as he helps those in need. However, through his kindness he ends up being hurt in several ways. Throughout the film, Chaplin conveys his messages with comedy that makes it easier to look at the hardships the Tramp encounters, and through this comedy he teaches the audience valuable morals. Overall, Gold Rush offers a brilliant cinematic experience that offers something for everybody.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Frustrating!!!, July 29 2003

By

D. Mok (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gold Rush (Two-Disc Special Edition) (DVD)

With two DVDs and a high budget at their disposal, the producers of this DVD should have been able to give us the film as it was originally intended to be seen. But no -- in this set, you get two versions, neither of which even came close to satisfying my memory of this film, watching a crappy TV version which nevertheless had the original score intact and no narration.

The two versions here are Chaplin's own retroactive tampering with his film, adding oodles of unnecessary narration which never tells us anything the images don't. It's strange that Chaplin himself didn't always realize that his was a highly theatrical, demonstrative comic technique of which he is a master, but which holds no element of naturalism whatsoever. Whenever he departed from the silent-film milieu, he never went too far (with the sole exception of Monsieur Verdoux). Chaplin's own dialogue technique is ill suited to film, being too magnanimous and self-conscious; when he employs it in a strange silent-film way (as in the singing sequence of Modern Times, or the "people-talking-gibberish" gag he uses in his later films) he succeeds grandly. When he tries to use sound naturalistically as in the narration here, The Great Dictator and Limelight, he tends to fumble.

Having been shell-shocked by the meddled-with version, I had hopes that the second version on Disc 2, billed as "the original 1925 silent version", would be better. Only marginally: Somehow they felt the need to replace all the titles (yes, the titles matter -- just look at Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo) and, more grievously, redo the score. And this new recording is even more problematic than the overly clean re-recorded orchestral score to the recent DVD re-release of Metropolis. The music on this "1925 version" sounds so digital that it neatly destroys the feel of the picture. The piano sounds like it's a MIDI keyboard plugged direct into a computer, without the percussive feel of a real piano, and the resultant sound is so antiseptic that it's anachronistic to the picture. They should have at least used analog tape to record, to simulate the warmer, older sound that would have accompanied this film both in its day and throughout history. The musical performance also lacks that "soul"; it sounds like a series of notes following sheet music, rather than an expressive entity complementing the film. I don't think they spent nearly enough time drilling the performance and the production on the music here, and it just ruins the picture for me.

I refuse to believe that there isn't a soundtrack to The Gold Rush out there that dispenses with the narration yet includes music that sounds of the same era as the film. I'd rather hear a third-generation transfer of an old Beta soundtrack from a TV station rather than these two versions: One unnecessarily tampered with narration, the other a clean, technically flawless, yet soulless imitation of what the music might have been like in 1925.

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Most recent customer reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars "Fate guided them to a spot where all was calm."
Charlie Chaplin's "The Gold Rush" is a mixed bag. The film itself is uneven as it is entertaining for certain stretches and just adequate in others. Read more

Published on Mar 18 2004 by Steven Y.

4.0 out of 5 stars Not normally a Chaplin-ite....
To be honest, I've never really been a fan of Chaplin. Too much pathos, too mush sentiment, too clever by half. Read more

Published on Oct 28 2003 by Tony Hughes