Charlie Chaplin was born in London in 1889 (and he died in 1977). His mother was a performer in the London music hall and he became a child performer. His mother's mental illness and the absence of his father meant that his childhood included much tragedy, including dire poverty and time spent in the workhouse. Many of the experiences of his youth, such as hunger and social ostracism, appear in comic form in the iconic cinematic character he developed for early Hollywood silent films: The Tramp. In addition to The Gold Rush (1925), his films include The Tramp of 1915 (one of the earliest incarnations of The Tramp character onscreen), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940).
Charlie Chaplin on the origins of The Gold Rush:
"I was now free to make my first comedy for United Artists and anxious to top the success of The Kid. For weeks I strove, thought and brooded, trying to get an idea. I kept saying to myself, “This next film must be epic! The greatest!” But nothing would come. Then one Sunday morning, while spending the week-end at the Fairbankses, I sat with Douglas after breakfast, looking at stereoscopic views. Some were of Alaska and the Klondike; one a view of the Chilkoot Pass, with a long line of prospectors climbing up over its frozen mountain, with a caption printed on the back describing the trials and hardships endured in surmounting it. This was a wonderful theme, I thought, enough to stimulate my imagination. Immediately ideas and comedy business began to develop, and, although I had no story, the image of one began to grow.
In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose, is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature—or go insane. I read a book about the Donner party who, on the way to California, missed the route and were snowbound in the mountains of Sierra Nevada. Out of one hundred and sixty pioneers only eighteen survived, most of them dying of hunger and cold. Some resorted to cannibalism, others roasted their moccasins to relieve their hunger. Out of this harrowing tragedy I conceived one of our funniest scenes. In dire hunger I boil my shoe and eat it, picking the nails as though they were bones of a delicious capon, and eating the shoe-laces as though they were spaghetti. In this delirium of hunger, my partner is convinced I am a chicken and wants to eat me.”
…The Gold Rush opened at the Strand Theatre in New York and I attended its premiere. From the moment the film started, showing me blithely rounding a precipice unconscious of a bear following, the audience yelled and applauded. Throughout the laughter there was sporadic applause till the end of the picture. Hiram Abrams, the United Artists sales manager, later came up and embraced me. “Charlie, I guarantee that it will gross at least six million dollars”—and it did!" (299-300).
Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography. (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2003; originally published by The Bodley Head of London, 1964).
New Yorker film critic Richard Brody on Chaplin's Tramp character:
"The camera magnified Chaplin's exquisite grace into grandeur. As the Tramp, he embodied the natural nobility of the downtrodden and the despised, yet he was no innocent. He flaunted an anarchic insolence that mocked the arrogance of the rich, the moralism of the middle class, and the crude brutality of street bullies....He was more than a man of the people; he was the emblem of vulnerable yet combative humanity, and humanity loved him back. "
The New Yorker, January 6, 2014
"The camera magnified Chaplin's exquisite grace into grandeur. As the Tramp, he embodied the natural nobility of the downtrodden and the despised, yet he was no innocent. He flaunted an anarchic insolence that mocked the arrogance of the rich, the moralism of the middle class, and the crude brutality of street bullies....He was more than a man of the people; he was the emblem of vulnerable yet combative humanity, and humanity loved him back. "
The New Yorker, January 6, 2014