The Gold Rush

All Ages Welcome! Complete 1925 version with orchestral score available for the first time!

NEW 35mm RESTORATION ► Chaplin called The Gold Rush “the picture I want to be remembered by.” It may be his most celebrated film, and is the masterpiece with more memorable Chaplin moments than any other. Most of us know it from Chaplin’s 1942 reissue, which added music and narration, but trimmed some 15 minutes from the 1925 original. Now, for the first time, Chaplin’s complete 1925 version is available on 35mm prints with a musical score. The Gold Rush has Chaplin’s beloved Tramp trekking to the Klondike of 1898 in search of fortune, only to wind up snowbound in a hilariously unbalanced cabin, fending off attacks by bears and ferocious fellow prospectors, and — in one of the cinema’s most famed sequences — staving off starvation by eating his own shoe. The film’s “dance of the dinner rolls” routine is nearly as famous. A 1952 survey of international experts selected The Gold Rush as the second greatest film of all time, after Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. “It manages to make high comedy out of hardship, starvation, and greed... In the subtlety of its characterization, the brilliance of its mime, and its blending of comic and tragic themes, The Gold Rush is Chaplin’s most characteristic work" (David Cook). “Anyone who saw Chaplin eating a boiled shoe like brook trout has seen perfection” (James Agee). B&W, 35mm, silent with musical score. 88 mins.

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A Note on the Restoration The complete, original 1925 version of The Gold Rush has never before been available with an attached musical soundtrack. Permission to screen the silent original was only given when it was to be presented with live orchestral accompaniment. Chaplin’s 1942 re-issue and re-edit of The Gold Rush is the version seen by most people. It added an orchestral score composed by Chaplin and some voice-over narration, but also cut several minutes from the original. This painstaking new restoration, undertaken by the Criterion Collection and Cineteca Bologna’s L'Immagine Ritrovata, used the latest digital advances to augment a 35mm restoration of the original silent version done in the 1990s by Kevin Brownlow and Dave Gill. Composer Timothy Brock arranged and conducted a brand-new orchestral recording of Chaplin’s 1942 score, and the Chaplin family gave special permission to marry that score to this new (and narration-less) restoration of the original, integral 1925 version.