THE GOLD RUSH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 188, 29 January 1943, Page 17

THE GOLD RUSH

(United Artists)

T would be easy to become dreamily sentimental about The Gold Rush. Ah, me, those were the days! They don’t make pictures like that nowa-

days, do they? No, they don’t and more’s the pity perhaps, yet the plain fact is that we wouldn’t really be satisfied if they did. We’d miss the bustle and the slickness and the noise and all the technical achievements that we've grown accustomed to in the past 17 years or so. But now and again it’s a delight to look back, and this revival of Chaplin’s film of 1925, with music and commentary added by the comedian himself, provides an ideal medium. Actually, the film has stood the test of time remarkably well-far better, I should imagine, than its average contemporary. Perhaps this is the very proof of its immortality: that we begin to laugh the moment Chaplin comes on the screen, that we immediately recognise again the genius in the Dance of the Bread-Rolls or in that sequence where the cabin. balances on the edge of the precipice, and that indeed it all comes back to us so clearly from across the years. Curiously enough, the film is not so much an occasion now for roars of laughter as for smiles and chuckles, and the "little fellow" bedevilled by fate has never seemed more pathetic, perhaps because life (and the cinema itself), has become rowdier since 1925, and because we have a closer fellow feeling for thé little chap shut up in the cabin and trying to get out of the way of the gun. At any rate, when we now describe The Gold Rush as a classic of the screen, we may do so’ with some authority, and when we talk about Chaplin’s undying and universal appeal, we may begin to know what we are talking about.