The Gold Rush

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp heads to the Klondike during the gold rush and finds himself stranded in a remote cabin through a blizzard, starving alongside a towering prospector named Big Jim McKay. The famous sequence of Chaplin boiling and eating his boot, twirling the laces like spaghetti, began here. The film follows the prospector into a frontier town, where he falls for a dance-hall girl named Georgia and tries, mostly badly, to win her regard. Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, scored, and starred, and the production was enormous: a full Alaskan town built on a Hollywood backlot, real location work in the Sierra Nevada, and a shoot that ran more than a year. The result is the film Chaplin said he most wanted to be remembered by. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.