Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush

Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, filmed at Sugar Bowl and Truckee, was written, produced, directed, and starred in by Chaplin, and it became one of his most famous movies and the film for which he most wanted to be remembered. The 1925 silent was the highest grossing silent comedy. Inspired by accounts of the Donner Party and Klondike gold prospectors, Chaplin combined hardship and the search for gold in a story in which Charlie, the Little Tramp, heads for Alaska, shares a cabin with a criminal named Big Jim, faces such hunger that they eat one of Charlie’s boots, survives a cabin teetering on a cliff edge, falls in love with a dance hall girl, performs the dance of the dinner rolls, and later becomes a multi-millionaire and meets the girl again. During winter filming many cast members caught colds and Chaplin caught the flu. The movie was finished on Hollywood sound stages, and much of the Sierra footage was cut. For the Klondike scene over the Chilcoot Pass, the Truckee Ski Club cleared a snowy path up the mountain at what would become Sugar Bowl, and six hundred extras were brought by train from Sacramento to appear as miners going up the pass. The boot Chaplin ate was made of licorice, and after so many retakes requiring so much licorice eating, he became sick and had to have his stomach pumped.

California · United States