silver nitrate notes

Chaplin's Gold Rush and the Dinner That Gets Eaten

4 jul 2019

Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) directed The Gold Rush (1925) over fifteen months, at a final cost of around $900,000, which was an enormous sum for a comedy at the time. Chaplin financed it himself through United Artists. It was the film he would later say he most wanted to be remembered for.

The scene everyone remembers is the one where the Tramp, starving in his Alaskan cabin with his partner Big Jim (Mack Swain), boils and eats one of his leather boots. The boot had been made of licorice for the shooting. The scene took sixty-three takes over three days. Chaplin and Swain, both convinced the scene had to work to the frame, ate so much licorice that Swain had to go to hospital.

What is less discussed is the scene's cinematography. Chaplin's regular cinematographer Rollie Totheroh (1890-1970) photographs the cabin as a tight interior with the light coming from a single window on the far side. The window is in frame throughout. The contrast between the bright snow outside (which Totheroh photographed with the aperture stopped down so that the snow does not blow out) and the interior in firelight is the entire visual argument of the scene: the Tramp is in a warm small space, the world outside is white death, he is eating his boot because the alternative is starvation in the cold. The gag is funny. The setup for the gag is photographed with precise discipline.

Chaplin's method was to compose each shot personally and to operate to a level of detail that was maddening to his crews. Totheroh's job was to execute what Chaplin wanted, which Totheroh did for thirty-five years. The Chaplin method produced The Gold Rush in fifteen months. It also produced City Lights (1931) in three years and Modern Times (1936) in two. Nobody else in Hollywood worked this way.

The second famous sequence, the dinner rolls dance, takes place at the cabin when the Tramp dreams of entertaining the dance-hall girl Georgia (Georgia Hale). The Tramp sticks two forks into two dinner rolls and dances them across the table in a parody of a music-hall routine. The sequence lasts about thirty seconds. It was improvised in an afternoon. It is the single most copied shot in silent comedy.

Chaplin re-released the film in 1942 with his own narration replacing the intertitles and a score he had composed himself. The 1942 version is the one that played in most theatres for the next forty years. The 1925 silent original was difficult to see until the 1980s. Both versions are worth your time. I prefer the silent one.

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sources
[1] Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. Simon & Schuster, 1964.
[2] Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. McGraw-Hill, 1985.
[3] Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture. Princeton UP, 1989.
[4] Vance, Jeffrey. Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema. Abrams, 2003.