Silent Movie Night – FREE
First in a series of three, our Silent Movie Night series kicks off with two great films: The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Gold Rush (1925).
The Great Train Robbery is among the earliest existing films in American cinema – notably as an early film to present a narrative story to tell. It depicts a group of outlaws who hold up a train and rob the passengers, They are then pursued by a sheriff’s posse.
Edwin Porter made a ground-breaking film with The Great Train Robbery. Sure, the scenes were very simple and the film is so blurry that you can’t make out a single face (this is also a result of the total lack of close-up shots), but in 1903 people watched this film and were stunned. It was hugely successful because it was one of the first films in the world to be made that actually told a story. Previously, films were made mainly to show off the technology of the “moving picture,” and the public loved them because they had never seen such a thing before. But when Porter came along with The Great Train Robbery, the path of motion pictures changed dramatically because people began to realize that these films could tell stories just as well as they could show water lapping on the beach or factory workers getting off of work or people jumping into a lake. These were the type of films that were made in the 1890s and early 1900s. The Great Train Robbery is an extremely short film, but it is an interesting story that is made even more fascinating because of the fact that everything that happens on the screen happened nearly 100 years ago. It’s like looking at a piece of history.
The Gold Rush, starring icon Charlie Chaplin, tells the story of a lone prospector who ventures into Alaska (Klondike) during the 1890 gold rush looking for gold. He gets mixed up with some burly characters and falls in love with the beautiful Georgia. He tries to win her heart with his singular charm.
Charles Chaplin was and remains the most popular of all, an icon of history and a brand name recognized in every corner of the globe. Chaplin developed a personal cinematic technique to display his comedic and dramatic talents and to showcase his star personality. Keaton’s humor often required mechanical props like trick houses, trains and boats, but Chaplin’s genius was largely self-contained. No ballet dancer was as graceful, no clown as funny, no tragedian as heartbreaking. A complex man, Chaplin indulged appetites beyond today’s petty scandals. A penchant for under-aged women caused him his share of legal troubles, and was eventually used during the Cold War witch hunts to see him banished from America. Back in the 1920s and ’30s Chaplin’s popularity and talent made him too big to fail. Whereas Roscoe Arbuckle became a scapegoat for the perceived sins of the entire film community, Chaplin survived various scandals and retained his popularity.
Some of Chaplin’s greatest movies were produced while fighting off lawsuits and weathering smear campaigns designed to tarnish his image. His favorite and arguably most popular film is 1925’s The Gold Rush, an ambitious epic that finds laughs in the frozen North. Inspired by a few photos of the fanatic quest for riches in the harsh environment of the Yukon, Chaplin fashioned a comedy that mixed belly laughs and sentiment in equal parts.