The Gold Rush was extremely well received upon release. Even Charlie Chaplin admitted that it was the film he hoped would be forever remembered for. As recently as 2007, the American Film Institute recognized its quality by placing it at number 58 on its revised list of the 100 best American films ever. The universality of critical adulation for Chaplin’s film seem almost complete. The key word here being “almost.” One early review of The Gold Rush stands out from the rest and seems to be a key figure in the playing out of Chaplin’s inability to speak to later generations with the same forcefulness and widespread acceptance with which he so easily enthralled his contemporary viewers.
The National Board of Review made the following observation upon the release of The Gold Rush: “there is a great difference between pathos rising legitimately out of a situation and pathos deliberately dragged in for its own sake.” The review also asserts that with Chaplin’s most ambitious effort to date “we have a very pretentious picture where the clown no longer clowns.”
The distance between critical reception and fan reception is often enormous, but perhaps the only gap wider that the one relating to Charlie Chaplin is the gap between critical and commercial appreciation of Citizen Kane. The simple fact of the matter is that one review that seems to have nailed the future trajectory that Chaplin’s career would take from the release of The Gold Rush forward was the one proposed by the writer of the National Board of Review. The issue of pathos swinging into the arena of bathos has been one that has plagued Chaplin since his retirement of his Little Tramp character. Revisionism has situated the beginnings of this concern that Chaplin is too eager to delve into the sentimentality in films prior to The Gold Rush. A cursory examination of reviews points to the National Board of Review suggestion that this is the film that tipped Chaplin into the realm of pretentiousness as the definitive moment that this criticism begin to overshadow the positive regard for such sentiment.
That appreciation for Chaplin would reach its lowest point in the current epoch where irony is at fever pitch only makes sense. No other filmmaker is so ill-suited to gain a foothold among an audience eager for irony in the theater than the filmmaker who deals most substantially in sentimental comedy. And, as the National Board of Review writer points out, no previous Chaplin film seeks so much to indulge in the particular style of sentiment known as pathos as The Gold Rush.
The challenge for anybody who wants to introduce Chaplin as a filmmaker of merit and quality to the uninitiated in the 21st century is, therefore, substantial. The challenge becomes the iconic issue of immoveable object (Chaplin’s sentimental comedy) with the seemingly unstoppable force of ever-increasingly reliance on irony to reach the modern comedy audience. The future for The Gold Rush does not look bright. In fact, despite the fact that this is the film that produced the images of Chaplin most likely to be recognized by modern audiences (eating the boot, the dancing rolls, etc), The Gold Rush may also be the film most likely to put a stopgap on any efforts to introduce young film fans to Charlie Chaplin. Now, that’s irony.
