The Gold Rush

The Gold Rush is a 1925 comedy film written, directed, and starring Charles Chaplin in his Little Tramp role. He goes to the Klondike in order to find gold, and falls in love. It also stars Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Henry Bergman, Malcolm Waite and Georgia Hale.

One famous scene shows the Little Tramp, starving, having to eat his boot; another famous scene shows a house sliding off a cliff in the snow, with Chaplin inside.

The movie was originally released before the invention of sound film. For the 1942 re-release Chaplin composed and recorded a musical score and narration and tightened the editing. One sequence is altered so that instead of the Tramp finding a note from Georgia Hale's character which he mistakenly believes is for him, he actually receives the note from her. Another major alteration is the ending, in which the now-wealthy Tramp originally gave Georgia a lingering kiss; the sound version ends before this scene.

Since the film was originally shot at 18 frames per second, the sound version, shown at 24 frames per second, is both shorter and faster than the original silent screenings. This has the side effect of making Chaplin's slapstick routines appear more frantic than before, a fact that had proably influenced Chaplin's decision to shoot Modern Times at silent speed.

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.