The Gold Rush (1925) is Charlie Chaplin's most famous film. Until recently, it was hard to see in anything like it's original form: Chaplin re-released the picture which he directed and owned in 1942 as a sound version with full orchestral score, no intertitles, and narration that he provided. He seems to have re-edited the film slightly and, in any event, the picture's rhythm would have been decisively altered by excising the titles. In the last ten years, Ritrovota Bologna together with Criterion have restored the film, primarily by using a 35 mm copy of the 1925 original found in someone's private collection. The Criterion/Ritrovata version is startlingly clear throughout much of its length and, in fact, some of interior shots probably look better today than they did in 1925. Chaplin stages much of the film as if it were a Victorian entertainment on proscenium stage -- the sets for the cabin interiors where most of the action occurs look like opera sets for the David Belasco version of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West or any number of other theatrical presentations and melodramas around the turn of the century. Chaplin uses very few close-ups -- in fact, he has no tight close-ups in the whole film. He moves the camera once, during a dance scene in a saloon. He is fairly clever about staging action in depth, utilizing the deep focus of the cameras existing at that time -- this is particularly evident in scenes in the saloon: it's a big set with a upstairs balcony and Chaplin can stage something happening in the foreground and, then, reveal that the event was witnessed by those high above on the balcony. He uses intentionally dated effects to achieve a nostalgic atmosphere -- the film is set in the dawn of the age of movies, that is, the Klondike gold rush around 1900. To enhance nostalgia, he irises in on one shot to isolate his heroine, the saloon girl Georgia upstairs on the balcony overlooking the dance-floor. Chaplin's special effects are very poor. Most of so-called outdoors scenes take place on a stage with painted horizons and piles of white, sleek snow (most likely flour mixed with salt) The big climax in which a log cabin gets blown to a precipice where it perches, balanced like a teeter-totter is so poorly staged and so obviously fake that it spoils the whole movie. When Harold Lloyd dangles from a clock-face, he seems to be working at a dangerous height above the city streets and the comedy has a sizzling frisson of danger -- the viewer actually fears that the comedian will fall to his death. Chaplin takes no such care in staging his sequences involving apparent danger -- the sets are fake and the little dolls dangling, for instance, from the cabin at the climax are laughably unrealistic. There is an odd clash between some scenes that I know were shot in the Sierra Nevada above Lake Tahoe -- real scree slopes with slippery snowfields and nasty-looking basalt cliffs (the little tramp marches with weird aplomb through this dangerous-looking landscape) -- and the cheap-looking theatrical sets and the outdoors scenes that are obviously shot on a stage under hot lights. This clash in styles is further aggravated by the elaborately documentary-style opening -- the film contains iconic images of miners trudging up and over Chilkoot pass, long ant-like files of men staggering uphill in the snow. Although these scenes were staged for the movie (at Truckee, California with 2400 extras)-- the most impressive Chilkoot Pass scenes have obvious matte-painted mountains in them -- they, nonetheless, look icy and cold enough and establish a base-line for realism at the outset of the movie. Within five minutes, however, the movie has progressed (or should I say devolved) to Chaplin's gags, generally shot from mid-distance using proscenium arch staging. As I have earlier suggested, I think Chaplin works in an intentionally archaic style consistent with the overblown pathos and melodrama that much of his plot requires and, further, redolent of the era of the great Gold Rush. But the fact that an effect is intended doesn't mean that it necessarily works -- and much of the movie is so obviously fake that it detracts (and distracts) from the film's more effective moments. (A good example involves a bear. We see Chaplin as the Little Tramp plodding along side a terrifying, but obviously, fake precipice. It's a painted precipice with painted icicles on the declivity's craggy cliffs. As the Tramp passes a cleft in the cliff-side a big bear ambles out and follows him -- the joke is that he doesn't notice the bear just a few yards behind him. This works pretty well because the animal is obviously a real bruin. In a later scene, the same bear enters a cabin and fights with a man -- the bear is real up to the point of the duel with the cabin-dweller. As soon as the fight begins, the bear is replaced by a man in a grizzly suit -- it's a jarring cut, because the man in the bear-suit looks completely fake.) I don't mind stylization if it serves the plot and characters and seems to be intended by the director -- but many of the stylized effects in The Gold Rush appear to me to be the result of ineptitude or laziness or a low budget.
The film's plot is also contrived, basically a string of "bits" or gags, tacked together without much rhyme or reason. Characters are always inexplicably appearing and, then, vanishing. Chaplin doesn't want any one to interfere with the pathos of the Little Tramp and, so, secondary roles are underwritten and, when a character is no longer needed for the progression of gags, the character just vanishes from the screen without much explanation. For instance, the second half of the film involves a lot of action at a cabin near the dance hall. The Little Tramp is too poor to afford a cabin and so the actual occupants of the place, after a few gags, get on their dog sled and simply depart from the film -- this is so the Little Tramp can make the place his own for the scenes required in that area. A main character Big Jim McKay, a huge man who is comically twice Chaplin's height and volume, gets his brains scrambled by a blow on the head and spends three-fifths of the movie just tramping around in the snow -- we see him at one point staggering, crazed-looking, straight for the camera. But when McKay is needed for the plot, he conveniently turns up. Here's the story in a nutshell: the Little Tramp inexplicably seeks his fortune in the Gold Rush. He shares a cabin with Big Jim. They run out of food and Big Jim turns cannibal -- this is after the famous, and rather revolting scene, in which the Tramp cooks and eats his boot. (After he has eaten his right boot, he spends the rest movie limping around with his right foot encased in thick filthy rags.) A claim jumper kills a couple of Mounties and, then, beats up Big Jim who has discovered a mountain of gold. Big Jim wanders through ice and snow in a semi-comatose, bewildered state. (The bad guy is killed when a cliff of snow where he is standing calves off the glacier and plunges into an abyss -- there's enough mayhem in the film to qualify it as a Romance, that is, a comedy in which deaths occur; indeed, there's a Shakespearian edge to this Romance embodied by the bear who makes various appearances when needed: it's a bit like The Winter's Tale in which an unneeded character is disposed-of by being eaten by a bear.) The Tramp turns up in a village. He falls in love with s saloon girl who completely ignores him. He invites her to a New Year's Eve dinner at his cabin -- but, of course, she works in a Dance Hall and New Year's Eve is a big pay-day for her. The girl and her friends don't turn up. The Tramp falls asleep and there follows the one genuinely weird and startling sequence in the film: the Tramp skewers two potatoes one with each fork and has the potatoes dance like big feet on the edge of the table: all the time the potatoes are performing the Tramp makes strangely simpering expressions, pursing his lips into a bee-sting, as if impersonating a crazed Mary Pickford. This scene is indelibly strange, not really funny but grotesque, and its certainly memorable. The girls don't ever show up and the Tramp goes to the dance hall where he sees his beloved in the arms of a caddish baby-faced miner. He and the miner clash and threats are exchanged. Then, Big Jim reappears having forgotten the location of Mountain of Gold. The two men find the cabin in the wilderness and, during a frightful blizzard, the building is blown onto the precipice over the canyon where the climactic teeter-totter house scene takes place. Big Jim finds his gold and two men become millionaires. On the ship back home, Georgia is in steerage. She meets the Tramp who still looks impoverished although he is now fantastically wealthy. She offers to pay for his passage -- he is accused of being a stowaway and, thus, we see that she is now, finally, worthy of the hero's love. He reveals that he's a millionaire, kisses her and the movie ends. I've left out a few clever gags, including a dance with Georgia in the saloon in which the Tramp has somehow got himself entangled with a dog who prances along side him as he tries to woo his lady-love. In general, the film is dated and not very funny at all. In fact, I think it will be very tedious to most modern audiences and, in fact, my guess is that it was tedious when first released as well.
Admirers of silent comedy tend to divide into those who are fans of Laurel and Hardy (this is where I place my allegiance), fans of Buster Keaton, and those who praise Chaplin to the highest heavens (often I think as a misguided homage to his left-leaning politics). Laurel and Hardy's comedy is still funny and grimly anarchic -- it's very cruel but rooted in the bizarre relationship between the two men, probably the most penetrating portrait of a marriage ever filmed. Despite the surrealism in Laurel and Hardy's movies, they are generally staged in lower middle class environs that have instant credibility with the audience and the emotional charge invested in the relationship between the two men gives their picture an additional patina of realism. Buster Keaton's films involve elaborate family relationships -- in Steamboat Bill, he's the bullied son a vicious steam boat captain; in other films, he has entire families with which to content. Keaton is also surreal but with a hard documentary edge -- his film about the Civil War, The General, is often compared with the war photographs of Matthew Brady. The Little Tramp has always seemed to me to be more than a little mawkish and self-indulgent -- this is particularly true with some of the gags (for instance, the minuet of the potato's skewered on forks.) Chaplin's very athletic -- you can see that in the scenes simulating a tempest that blows him off his feet -- but his art feels overtly nostalgic, and much too sentimental. Chaplin seems to be trafficking in emotions that he is too sophisticated to feel but which he has no trouble projecting for rubes in his audience. (Nonetheless, there's one very effective scene of pathos in The Gold Rush: in the saloon at midnight, someone sings "Auld lang syne" -- and we see the whores and grizzled old prospectors suddenly silent, abashed even, thinking back upon their remote, lost families. It's very moving, and purely generous in the context of the film -- the scene is unnecessary and doesn't advance the chaotic story but it feels very real unlike most of the rest of the movie.)
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