Film Festival 09 - The Gold Rush
The Gold Rush
USA 1925, 82m
Director: Charles Chaplin
A highlight of any movie-going year, this year's Live Cinema
collaboration between the Festival and the Auckland Philharmonia
Orchestra offers laughter and spectacle. Charlie Chaplin's The Gold
Rush is one of the great, endlessly rewatchable cinema comedies -
and its presentation with live music is exactly the kind of
experience that The Civic was originally designed to deliver so
grandly. Conductor/composer Timothy Brock has worked with the
Chaplin Estate since 1999 to reconstruct Chaplin's own superb film
scores. He completes that project with his work on The Gold Rush.
He returns to the Festival to conduct the Auckland Philharmonia in
this single New Zealand performance, and to prove one more time how
gloriously far from silent was the cinema we mistakenly call by
that name.
Like Keaton's immortal The General, the 1925 The Gold Rush places
its comic anti-hero at the centre of a historical epic. He is The
Lone Prospector, a gentle soul among the throngs who've headed to
Alaska hungry for gold. We see him first traipsing nimbly along the
rim of a ridge high on a mountain pass, blithely unaware that he's
being followed by a large black bear&
The Gold Rush was the last movie Chaplin made before the specter of
technological change - the 'talkies' - began to haunt him. Its
brilliant set-pieces - the Little Tramp making dinner rolls dance,
ravenous Mack Swain mistaking the Tramp for a large chicken, Swain
and the Tramp feasting upon the latter's shoe, and the cabin
teetering on the edge of the abyss - are classic moments of
silent-film comedy. Though it is probably Chaplin's most famous
film, The Gold Rush is atypical in several ways. Its snowy wastes
are far removed from his usual urban and rural settings - and the
film has a happy ending with the Tramp becoming a millionaire. The
Museum of Modern Art's notes suggest that The Gold Rush "captured
Chaplin in a time of relative contentment - one of the medium's
great geniuses at a moment of confidence in his ability to control
his destiny and his art." - BG
