The dish, if it could even be called that, was the colour of tar. It slumped on the white plate, soft and steaming, giving off a pungent smell: burnt, with traces of sweet. A dead rat would have been more appetising. The two men hesitated for a moment before digging in. But they hadn’t eaten in days. Their cheeks were hollow, their eyes full of desperation. They had no choice: they were going to eat a leather shoe.
This is one of the most memorable scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, a rollicking action comedy which premiered 100 years ago this week. To mark the occasion, the silent film is returning to cinemas worldwide in a 4K restoration. And it hasn’t aged a day.
The Gold Rush is set in the 1890s, when chancers flocked to the Klondike region of Canada, near Alaska. Rumour had it that the world’s largest gold reserves were buried there. Most returned home empty-handed; an unlucky few never came back at all. Causes of death included avalanches, typhoid fever, alcoholism, murder and starvation.
Into this perilous world Chaplin drops his most famous character: the Tramp, played by Chaplin himself, in his trademark bowler hat, cane and ragged suit. The Tramp, ever the optimist, fancies his chances of hitting it big.
A century on, The Gold Rush still packs a wallop. Chaplin — who not only starred in the film, but also wrote, directed, produced and edited it — has lost none of his genius. If anything, the film’s snappy gags and raffish sense of play makes it well suited to our TikTok age. In today’s world, the moment Chaplin picks up two loaves of bread, sticks forks into them and makes them dance like little feet would almost certainly go viral.
But The Gold Rush is far more than just good entertainment. It always is with Chaplin. The film is a biting critique of free-market capitalism. It lampoons an ideology — influential in the Twenties — in which everyone was expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Chaplin shows what happens when that doesn’t work: you end up eating your own boots.
The film’s political commentary rings as true today as it did in 1925. Faith in unfettered markets lives on. Since the neoliberal reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, governments have preached individual responsibility while dismantling the welfare state and removing checks on corporate power.
The results are plain to see: Western societies are marked by wealth disparity and precarity. Take the United States, where Chaplin spent most of his career. The richest are getting richer at record speed. Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans have less than $500 in savings. And only one in five has more than $5,000. Any emergency could put them on the streets. “I don’t want the old rugged individualism,” Chaplin once said. “Rugged for a few, ragged for many.”
“The film lampoons an ideology in which everyone was expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
Work hard, we’re told these days, and you’ll succeed. But in The Gold Rush, Chaplin tells us the opposite: fortune doesn’t favour the industrious, it favours the lucky. At the end of the film, the Tramp becomes a millionaire. But his success has nothing to do with merit. One night, his cabin is caught up in a snowstorm and carried right next to a gold deposit. The Tramp literally struck gold in his sleep. It’s the ultimate send-up of the American Dream. As George Carlin, another comedian, quipped decades later: “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
Ultimately, The Gold Rush argues that the rich and powerful aren’t all that special. They owe their status more to quirks of fate — or accidents of birth — than to any intrinsic worth. It’s no wonder, then, that it was Chaplin who told this story. He always identified with outcasts — a habit which stemmed from his Dickensian childhood in London at the tail end of the 19th century. His father was out of the picture. His mother suffered from severe mental health issues, and was in and out of asylums. When she was institutionalised, a young Chaplin was sent to the workhouse. There, like Oliver Twist, he was berated for his plight. “To me it was a prison and a house of shame,” he said later. “We had gone through extreme poverty, and poverty was a crime. Even at the early age of seven I realised this.”
No matter how rich he became, Chaplin never forgot what it was like to be down and out. “My memory is so clear of the days when meat once a week was a luxury,” he told a colleague. Chaplin was certain that if only a few things had turned out differently, he’d have spent his life as a member of the underclass. “I might have become a thief in the London streets. I might have been buried in a pauper’s grave,” he said.
Instead, Chaplin became one of the most illustrious men of the 20th century. He got his start in vaudeville in the West End of London. By 24, he was in Los Angeles starring in a new art form called moving pictures. By 28, he was a global star making more money than almost anyone else on earth.
Chaplin’s extraordinary rise personified the American Dream: the penniless immigrant who became a legend in sun-drenched California. He was supremely talented — as inventive in front of the camera as behind it — but he worked damn hard too. The irony is that he did pull himself up by his own bootstraps. His creative process was simple: “sheer perseverance to the point of madness.”
It would have been easy for Chaplin to portray himself as a self-made man. That he chose instead to make the Tramp his on-screen double is a testament to his powers of empathy. No matter what, he was always Charlie from the workhouse. A shrink at the time looked into his case. “He always plays only himself as he was in his dismal youth,” wrote Dr Sigmund Freud. “He cannot get away from those impressions and humiliations of that past period of his life.”
With the Tramp, Chaplin set out to lessen those humiliations not just for himself, but also for the huddled masses. His goal was to give the poor and downtrodden their dignity back. Humour was his weapon: “We must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature — or go insane,” he said.
Chaplin was a rare kind of artist: a megastar who was also genuinely subversive. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. You know subversion is dead when Barbie is called subversive, or when Kneecap, a band that projects “fuck Israel” at gigs and chants “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”, is treated as brave.
But Chaplin never missed his target. In Modern Times (1936), he went after industry. In The Great Dictator (1940), he went after Adolf Hitler. Next, at the dawn of the Cold War, Chaplin came out with Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a dark comedy that condemned the capitalist system. It was also his first film without the Tramp. Chaplin plays Henri Verdoux, a man who loses his job of 30 years during the Great Depression. To support his disabled wife and son, Verdoux turns to crime. He uses his considerable charm to marry wealthy women, then murders them to get their money. Verdoux is the mirror image of the Tramp. Where the latter takes misfortune on the chin, the former goes for the jugular. As Verdoux himself puts it: “This is a ruthless world, and one must be ruthless to cope with it.”
Monsieur Verdoux was satire, but it revealed the ugly toll that exclusion takes on people. “One thing I know is that poverty taught me nothing,” Chaplin said, “but on the contrary distorted and twisted my sense of values, gave me a wrong concept of life.”
Chaplin paid a high price for his subversion, as the historian Scott Eyman recounts in Charlie Chaplin vs. America. In 1922, the FBI had opened a file on him on account of possible “socialist beliefs”. Over the next 30 years, the Bureau accumulated nearly 2,000 documents on the filmmaker. By the early Fifties, Chaplin had become public enemy number one. The Cold War was in full swing, and the red threat was everywhere. Criticising capitalism was now anti-American. The FBI, never one for nuance, denounced Monsieur Verdoux as “anti-capitalist propaganda”. The House Un-American Activities Committee, the Congressional body that investigated Soviet influence in Hollywood, suspected Chaplin of being a communist.
To make matters worse, Chaplin’s private life also shocked Puritan America. He’d been married four times and had a penchant for younger women. His fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, who would remain with him until his death, was 18 when they tied the knot. Chaplin was 54.
Before he met O’Neill, Chaplin had been romantically involved with a 21-year-old named Joan Barry. After they broke up, she became pregnant and claimed Chaplin was the father. He denied it, and Barry took him to court.
The US Department of Justice seized the opportunity to smear Chaplin, prosecuting him for transporting Barry across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”. He faced 23 years behind bars. But the case was flimsy — all Chaplin had done was take Barry on a trip to New York. In the end, he was acquitted.
Nor was Chaplin the father of Barry’s child. A blood test made that indisputable. However, back then, blood tests weren’t admitted in Californian courts. Chaplin was therefore ordered to pay alimony for a child that wasn’t his.
Although Chaplin was ultimately vindicated, the trials bruised his public image. In the court of public opinion, he was not only a communist but also a pervert. For many, the two went hand in hand anyway.
And so in 1952, when Chaplin travelled abroad, the Department of Justice barred him from re-entering America, revoking his visa, even though Chaplin had lived in the country for 40 years. The Attorney General called him “a menace to womanhood”; Congress blasted him as “left-wing and radical”. Chaplin didn’t try to go back. “Whether I re-entered that unhappy country was of little consequence to me,” he said later. “I was fed up with America’s insults and moral pomposity.”
Chaplin settled in Switzerland with O’Neill and their children. He made two more films — neither one good — and only returned to the US in 1972 to pick up an honorary Oscar. He died five years later at 88.
One question remains: was there ever any truth to the charge that Chaplin was a communist? The answer is a resounding no. How could anyone believe that the maker of The Great Dictator could support any totalitarian system?
Clearly, Chaplin was a critic of capitalism. But that didn’t make him a communist. Rather, the filmmaker believed that the market should be subservient to a democratically elected government. Power should lie with the people. And a government of the people, by the people, for the people should look out for the common welfare. The reason: there can never be true freedom while some struggle to get by.
Chaplin’s politics were in the vein of the economist John Maynard Keynes and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal of the Thirties, which was based on Keynesian principles and carried out by FDR, was perhaps the most successful experiment in reclaiming power from the market. It delivered prosperity and social justice. FDR dedicated it to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”, or, if you will, to the Tramp.
Throughout his life, Chaplin never wavered in his commitment to the Tramp and his ilk. He supported shorter hours for the working man, and a generous minimum wage for both skilled and unskilled labour. He also supported a “national dividend”, or what we would call today universal basic income.
Chaplin’s vision has lost none of its relevance. Precarity is on the rise. Governments look more impotent than ever. And AI threatens to kick millions out of the job market. In this context, we would do well to remember what Chaplin stood for. “Naturally, I am progressive,” he said. “I just want to see everybody pretty well happy, and satisfied.” In his view, no one should ever be so hungry they have to eat their shoe.
