Gold Rush Charlie Chaplin Views

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Carl Davis has made a name for himself reconstructing and conducting scores to classic silent films. On January 3 2011, Carl will conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra live along to Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. We caught up with Carl and asked him about his fascination with the world ’s best-loved comic actor.

Why did you choose to reconstruct the score to The Gold Rush in particular? It was a simple reason really. I wanted to do a concert around the New Year and The Gold Rush has a fantastic New Year’s Eve sequence (pictured here) where Chaplin thinks he’s going to spend New Year’s Eve with some glamorous girls and he ends up on his own.

Tell us about reconstructing the score of The Gold Rush. Chaplin saved everything including music and all of his letters in a vault under the Alps in Geneva. I was allowed to go down and look through all of this and pieced everything together. Once I had all of the materials the whole process took about three months from start until the first performance.

The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) travels to the Yukon to take part in the Klondike Gold Rush. Bad weather strands him in a remote cabin with a prospector who has found a large gold deposit (Mack Swain) and an escaped fugitive (Tom Murray), after which they part ways, with the prospector and the fugitive fighting over the prospector's claim, ending with the prospector receiving a blow to the head and the fugitive falling off a cliff to his death. The Tramp he was with eventually finds himself in a gold rush town where he ultimately decides to give up prospecting. After taking a job looking after another prospector's cabin, he falls in love with a lonely saloon girl (Georgia Hale) whom he mistakenly thinks has fallen in love with him. He soon finds himself waylaid by the prospector he met earlier, who has developed amnesia and needs the Tramp to help him find his claim by leading him to the cabin.