Laughing in the face of helplessness: The Gold Rush celebrates a century of defiance

Released only a few years before the Great Depression, The Gold Rush finds comedic inspiration in unconventional, but timely, sources—namely in real-life accounts of starvation and poverty. The idea came to Chaplin while visiting Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, where he viewed stereographic photographs of prospectors hiking up the Chilkoot Pass across a sea of thick, white snow. This image would later serve as the inspiration for the opening scene, which was shot on location in the Sierra Nevadas and utilized 600 extras to recreate the miners’ arduous climb. Also around this time, Chaplin read a book on the Donner Party. Their harrowing tales of cold and hunger, which led members of the party to eat their own moccasins and eventually turn to cannibalism, inspired two of the film’s most memorable scenes: One in which Big Jim (Mack Swain), on the brink of starvation, hallucinates the Tramp as a giant chicken and attempts to shoot him with a double-barreled shotgun, and the other when the prospectors, starved and unable to retrieve food in the middle of a winter storm, boil and eat a leather boot.

In the latter sequence, the Tramp is in a cabin, hovering over a pot on a stovetop when he pulls a soggy boot out from the boiling water, places it on a plate, and limps back to the dinner table with dark circles under his eyes and only a measly, worn-out sock on his right foot. After cutting the boot in half with a knife and fork to share with Big Jim, the comedian uses his utensils to swirl the black shoelaces into his mouth as if they were spaghetti and sucks the metal nails embedded into the base of the boot as if they were chicken bones. Chaplin’s Tramp—with his singular physicality, expressive facial movements, and charming naivete and optimism—brings a sense of wonder and lightheartedness to what is otherwise a bleak situation. In his autobiography, Chaplin says of The Gold Rush, “In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose, is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature—or go insane.” 

The filmmaker’s position can be accredited to his own upbringing, which began in the slums of Victorian London and was riddled with economic hardship. According to biographer David Robinson, Chaplin, like his Tramp character in the film, experienced “the most dramatic of all the rags to riches stories ever told.” The great success of the picture, and others of Chaplin’s oeuvre, is that they marry the auteur’s personal experiences and political leanings with masterful filmmaking and storytelling, which combine to create cinematic masterpieces with equal parts heart and craft. 

In the case of The Gold Rush, the film was made over the span of 17 months and produced on a budget of $923,000, nearly $17 million by today’s standards. Its production value and artistry is most apparent in its set design, which used materials such as flour, barbed wire, and hundreds of wooden planks to bring the Alaskan winter to the warm climate of California once Chaplin and his team ceased shooting on location due to unpredictable weather conditions. In 2025, these sets are still enchanting and immersive. What’s more, these set pieces spring to life through the superb application of practical effects, which create a sense of delightful cartoonish magic throughout the picture.

But of all the visual splendor and comedy present in the film, the image that captivates most is of Black Larsen’s (Tom Murray) cabin rocking back and forth on the edge of a cliff after being blown away in a blizzard. In this scene, the Tramp and Big Jim struggle to balance the home as their every movement causes the building to seesaw over certain doom. The Tramp slips through the door, almost falling to his death in what appears to be a giant valley. Achieved through the use of miniatures, the sequence is everything one still wants from a big-budget blockbuster: exhilarating, awe-inspiring, nerve-wracking, and hilarious. The scene captures the brilliance of The Gold Rush and Chaplin’s larger filmography, which manipulates time, space, and the human body to create a timeless visual poetry.

The immortality of The Gold Rush is solidified in its latest restoration by mk2, Roy Export SAS, and La Cineteca di Bologna, which attempts to return the film “a step closer” to its 1925 version, which Chaplin re-edited in 1942, adding voiceover narration, removing original intertitles, and cutting down its length. At the premiere of the mk2 release last month, on the opening day of the 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, it was introduced by two of Chaplin’s grandchildren, Kiera and Spencer Chaplin, and Arnold Lozano, the director of Roy Export SAS. Before the screening, Thierry Frémaux, the Delegate Général at the Festival, asked the audience for a show of hands of who had seen the film prior and who had not. The theater was split roughly 50/50. 

Those in the audience who had never seen the film before laughed all the way through, just as this critic did, just as the eager moviegoers and Hollywood insiders did in June of 1925, just as millions of people around the world have done for a full century, and just as a new generation will do for decades to come. On its centennial in 2025—an era characterized by political turmoil, climate crisis, social unrest, and unprecedented economic disparity—The Gold Rush still represents cinema’s profound ability to capture resilience and to create moments of intercultural, intergenerational connection. As Kiera Chaplin said in Cannes, “Our grandfather would be really proud to see this, a hundred years later, to see all you here and interested in seeing the film.”