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 convincingly and in detail: greed and poverty, guile and deception; but the goodness of the tramp rests upon charm and pathos much of the time, or, as in City Lights, is dramatized mawkishly.—Most of all, the vision shows the world as a series of traps and dangers: physical peril, hunger, trickery that will not always be reversed. It is a world, like those of all great artists, having the power to haunt us afterwards, physically: we see that world in our mind's eye, more real than the supposedly real world of most "realistic" films, with a timelessness that every "serious" film-maker, beset with problems of costume, slang, and manners, must sometimes wildly envy. The wonderful shabbiness of dress and settings in The Gold Rush seems beyond our art directors today. The grime and disrepair seen now in the beautiful soft grays of a good print have disappeared from the screens but not from our minds; and they still remind us of poverty, sadness, and the essential human condition—the last because, no matter how materially fat and sassy we become, we sense all too well on other levels that moths still corrupt and thieves break in and steal—and villains wield sticks and what is old must be made to serve. (p. 35)

It is because of the intensity of this vision, of course, that films like The Gold Rush will last and last, when today's bloated extravaganzas have crumbled to dust in the vaults. Even in the heartless and mechanical world of the cinema, art tells….

It is an art of charm or sympathy of character, ingenuity, timing, grace: an athletic and kinesthetic kind of beauty that can be very moving….

Chaplin has often been referred to as the greatest artist the screen has yet produced. Whether this is true I personally doubt: he never reached the tough unity and compression of Le Jour Se Lève, the finesse of Rashomon, the searing intensity of Los Olvidados, and in a sense one must judge every artist by the highest point he has reached. Nearer home, I would maintain that Keaton surpassed Chaplin with The Navigator and The General, both works of astonishing virtuosity and purity of aesthetic motive, and moreover of great technical brilliance.

But Chaplin's work as a whole clearly stands out far and above Keaton's as it stands out above everyone else's: he is the undeniable Hero of the cinema, who has shown beyond doubt what can be done with this new medium. (p. 36)

The question in reëvaluating Chaplin today centers around the problem of his sentimentality. This is in reality a complex social as well as artistic problem…. [The] object of much of film art is to produce an emotional involvement with events portrayed which will be strong enough to seem overwhelming and "real" but without asking ridiculously much, as does sentimental melodrama or overt political propaganda. In the long cultural run, evaluations of artistic success in this balancing act are bound to shift—sometimes drastically, so that Pope after a time seems chilly, and Shelley overblown, though their immense technical skill cannot be brought into doubt. It is from our own peculiar position on this sort of social sand, therefore, that we must judge any artist who, like Chaplin, is good enough to bother thinking of in terms longer than a decade or so.

Of The Gold Rush we may say, I think, that it is Chaplin near or at the peak of his powers. He had mastered feature-length construction; he had peeled away from the tramp almost all of the mere silliness inherited from the music halls…. The Gold Rush has the simple, lasting appeals of a well-defined constellation of characters, an overwhelmingly sympathetic hero, a satisfying pattern of frustrations followed by surprising and deserved success. It is a remarkable film, though it is not "life"…. (p. 37)