The Gold Rush by Matthew Solomon

Author:Matthew Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: British Film Institute

Most of the daily production reports for October, November and December 1925 indicate that no filming was done, but this one records location shooting in Mexico where Chaplin had travelled to marry Grey in secret. From the archives of Roy Export Company Establishment, scan courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna

The title of The Gold Rush evokes the pursuit of material wealth. But, unlike Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), in which gold is fetishised and its accumulation eventually overwhelms all else, gold appears only briefly in The Gold Rush and the Lone Prospector – despite his moniker – evinces little visible interest in finding it. The relative absence of gold and the labour needed to locate it and extract it from the earth is certainly part of the point of the film, which dispenses almost entirely with prospecting, mining and all the potentially productive activities depicted in non-fiction films about the Gold Rush. Instead, The Gold Rush explores the comic possibilities of ‘putting the wandering picaro, the homeless tramp (or some variation of him) in juxtaposition with a particular social and moral environment. The film’s structure is based on this juxtaposition’, Mast points out.159

The juxtaposition between character and environment emerges most clearly in the scenes in the Monte Carlo Dance Hall. Untutored in its social rules and roles, the Lone Prospector is even more of an interloper in the dance hall than in the snowbound cabin. The cabin scenes in The Gold Rush take place in an atavistic environment where small groups of men concerned primarily with food and shelter struggle for survival, often in close contact with wild, or only partly domesticated, animals. By contrast, the scenes in the dance hall occur among a group of people defined by a hierarchical social order, mutually exclusive gender roles and distinct occupational positions. Entering the Monte Carlo, the Lone Prospector stands on the threshold of the dance floor and lingers there as couples begin dancing, observing everything as an outsider – just as he does when he returns on New Year’s Eve to peer through a frosty window but never enters. His participation in what goes on in the dance hall proves to be incongruous and immediately disruptive. Before leaving the Monte Carlo his first night there, he takes a drink without paying for it, drags a large dog from beneath a table onto the dance floor (mistakenly using its dangling rope leash to hold up his sagging trousers) and is involved in a scuffle.

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