Chaplin, (Sir) Charles (Spencer) - Ernest Callenbach
ERNEST CALLENBACH
The Gold Rush, certainly, is one of Chaplin's achieved masterpieces of silent comedy, the work of a great artist of sentiment and pathos. (pp. 31-2)
The story-line (The Gold Rush was made after A Woman of Paris) has become firm and rich. And if the film has none of the flabbergasting imagination of a Keaton … it nonetheless creates a comic world as viable as any, and with a great deal of genuine poetry to it. (p. 32)
The key elements in the vision?—The search for love, above all; this time found in the person of a girl harder and less "good" than the usual Chaplin heroine…. The existence of good and evil, too; the Big Jims and Black Larsens of the world exterior to the tramp's person, who struggle violently, often for objectives the tramp has no hope of reaching through struggle, and can only attain through luck or guile…. It is worth noting that in Chaplin films as a whole evil is portrayed rather...
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