Repost: The Gold Rush (August 10th at the Cleveland Museum of Art)

[THE GOLD RUSH screens Friday August 10th at 7:00 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

What's there left to say about Charlie Chaplin's 1925 GOLD RUSH that hasn't been said? I a bit of digging and learned that Chaplin's direct inspiration for this comedy of hardship was reading about the horrific true-life Donner Party incident - a group of California-bound western settlers, snowed in for the winter of 1846, reduced to cannibalism to survive. You know what that means, right? Someday some film-school brat with a dorm shrine to George Romero and Herschell Gordon Lewis and the like will earn his ticket to Hollywood big leagues with a digital-era remake "Gold Rush - The Way Chaplin Intended," with full dismemberment, decapitations, eviscerations, nudity, anthrophagy etc. And the swooning Sundance jury (or San Diego Comic-Con, same thing) nerds who hand the splatter comedy their coveted midnite-screening slot won't even be savvy enough with film history to know the decent 1998 frontier horror flick RAVENOUS, with Guy Pearce, also drew from the Donner tragedy. Making it and THE GOLD RUSH kind of cousins, which is a weird thought.

The Gold Rush (February 25 at 5:15 p.m. and February 26 at 2:50 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE GOLD RUSH screens Friday February 25th at 5:15 pm and February 26th at 2:50 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

What's there left to say about Charlie Chaplin's 1925 GOLD RUSH that hasn't been said? I a bit of digging and learned that Chaplin's direct inspiration for this comedy of hardship was reading about the horrific true-life Donner Party incident - a group of California-bound western settlers, snowed in for the winter of 1846, reduced to cannibalism to survive. You know what that means, right? Someday some film-school brat with a dorm shrine to George Romero and Herschell Gordon Lewis and the like will earn his ticket to Hollywood big leagues with a digital-era remake "Gold Rush - The Way Chaplin Intended," with full dismemberment, decapitations, eviscerations, nudity, anthrophagy etc. And the swooning Sundance jury (or San Diego Comic-Con, same thing) nerds who hand the splatter comedy their coveted midnite-screening slot won't even be savvy enough with film history to know the decent 1998 frontier horror flick RAVENOUS, with Guy Pearce, also drew from the Donner tragedy. Making it and THE GOLD RUSH kind of cousins, which is a weird thought.