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DVD The Gold Rush (2 Disc Special Edition)
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
Review(s): DVD The Gold Rush (2 Disc Special Edition)
Silence is Golden: Possibly the Greatest Comedy Ever
"The Gold Rush" is proof of what a comic genius Charlie Chaplin truly was. This film is over eighty years old, and somehow it remains timeless. From the dance of the rolls to the boiling of the shoe, just about every scene is a classic.
If only more contemporary comic actors and filmmakers would learn from the master that silence really is golden, we would laugh more at the movies made today.
Chaplin's Klondike Epic
Despite one's preference for "Modern Times," the original release of Charlie Chaplin's "The Gold Rush" remains the best structured of his feature-length films. Everything works beautifully in this epic comedy-drama, with the pathos and humor perfectly integrated. The comic setpieces are too numerous to mention, but a personal favorite is the classic "Dance of the Rolls." Warner's two-disc set is worth owning for the wonderfully restored 1925 silent version -- far superior to Chaplin's mutilated 1942 reissue.
Eternal
This film contains so many timeless skits it isn't even funny!(I mean this film is, it's - well, you know!)
C'mon, you dream about being in a log cabin and the guy next to you turns into a chicken!
You dream about eating your leather shoes and you imitate the dance of the dinner rolls when nobodys looking!
What im trying to say is that this is one of those films that no matter how many viewings, the lighthearted humor and charming sountrack never die.
You can't kill Charlie Chaplin, he's already dead.
Related DVD's The Gold Rush (2 Disc Special Edition)
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Charlie Chaplin is in glorious form in this legendary satire of the mechanized world. As a factory worker driven bonkers by the soulless momentum of work, Chaplin executes a series of slapstick routines around machines, including a memorable encounter with an automatic feeding apparatus. The pantomime is triumphant, but Chaplin also draws a lively relationship between the Tramp and a street gamine. She's played by Paulette Goddard, then Chaplin's wife and probably his best leading lady (here and in The Great Dictator). The film's theme gave the increasingly ambitious writer-director a chance to speak out about social issues, as well as indulging in the bittersweet quality of pathos that critics were already calling "Chaplinesque." In 1936, Chaplin was still holding out against... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Paulette Goddard - Henry Bergman Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The Kid is one of the purest expressions of Charlie Chaplin's art on film. It unites Chaplin with a boy he had spotted in a vaudeville act, 6-year-old Jackie Coogan--whose life would lead to the child-protective Coogan Act and a role as Uncle Fester on TV. The story has the Tramp adopting an abandoned waif and teaching him streetwise survival skills. The gags are flawless, but for Chaplin the huge advance (other than a running time longer than his two-reelers) was the exploration of a rich vein of sentiment; the emotionally wrenching separation of the Tramp and the Kid is probably the most Dickensian sequence ever captured on film. Chaplin drew on his own rough childhood for the material (and may have been inspired by the death of an infant son immediately before beginning the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Edna Purviance - Jackie Coogan Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 02 March 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
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A pivotal moment in film history. After The Birth of a Nation, nothing was the same: not the way audiences watched movies, not the way filmmakers created them. D.W. Griffith's jumbo-size saga of the Civil War expanded the boundaries of storytelling on the screen, conveying a richer, more complicated (and certainly longer) tale than anyone had seen in a movie before. The delicate relationships, the sad passage of time, the spectacular battle scenes all look as fresh and innovative today as they did in 1915. So do Griffith's brilliant actors, most of them--including favorite leading lady Lillian Gish--drawn from his regular stock company. What has become increasingly problematic about The Birth of a Nation is Griffith's condescending attitude toward black slaves, and the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lillian Gish - Mae Marsh - Henry B. Walthall Director(s): D.W. Griffith DVD Release Date: Released the 17 November 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Since Adolf Hitler had the audacity to borrow his mustache from the most famous celebrity in the world--Charlie Chaplin--it meant Hitler was fair game for Chaplin's comedy. (Strangely, the two men were born within four days of each other.) The Great Dictator, conceived in the late thirties but not released until 1940, when Hitler's war was raging across Europe, is the film that skewered the tyrant. Chaplin plays both Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad ruler of Tomania, and a humble Jewish barber suffering under the dictator's rule. Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's wife at the time, plays the barber's beloved; and the rotund comedian Jack Oakie turns in a weirdly accurate burlesque of Mussolini, as a bellowing fellow dictator named Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. Chaplin himself hits... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Paulette Goddard Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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