The New Pictures

The Gold Rush (Chaplin; United Artists) is a revival of Charlie Chaplin's most successful comedy (gross: $7,112,000). Printed from the original 1925 negative, it has been modernized by its producer-director-author-star only to the extent of substituting his own narration for the old subtitles, editing out 1,000 feet of film and adding a musical background score. The result is a sight for sore eyes, for old-style Chaplin fans and novitiates alike.

Although it was another generation's children who promised to be good all week if they could see a Chaplin comedy, the bantam tramp with his flapping shoes, battered derby hat, jaunty bamboo cane, absurd black mustache, shabby, defiant clothes, is not dated. The craftsmanship of his effortless performance--the innocent waddle, the peculiar childlike kick, the desperate elegance, the poignant gallantry--is still high comedy.

The hero of The Gold Rush is billed as The Lone Prospector, a tenderfoot out for Alaskan gold. In his running narrative, Chaplin calls him "the Little Fellow." With eloquent timing he jaunts along the rim of a ledge high in Chilkoot Pass, unknowingly trailed by a big black bear, and the picture is away.

That the Little Fellow eventually becomes a multimillionaire wearing two fur coats, one over the other, is unimportant. What matters are the delicious beads of humor strung on the thread of his unique personality. Chaplin cinemaddicts will recognize with tears of joy two famed scenes: trapped by a blizzard in a lonely mountain cabin with a friendly prospector named Big Jim (Mack Swain), Charlie hopefully removes a shoe and places it in the stewpot. Tenderly basting the foul boot with its own juices, he nurses it along to Big Jim's bursting point. "Not quite done yet," soothes the Little Fellow. "Give it two more minutes." He serves it up with a shoestring for potatoes, munches it contentedly.

Other great scene: the dance of the rolls. Unable to speak his happiness at having Georgia (Georgia Hale), the dance-hall girl he hopelessly adores, take dinner with him, the Little Fellow impales two rolls on forks and transforms them into the lyric legs of a ballet dancer, footing it with furious featness.

The dubbed-in narrative is as simple as its author's pantomime (e.g., "With cheerful optimism our little Columbus descended into the vast uncharted waste--then stopped, stepped, slipped and slid"). It kids the stylized exaggerations of Big Jim, a notable heavy, by referring to him as "the noble type. . . . Oh, how he loved to suffer"; it anticipates Georgia's atrocious, kittenish, dated antics by introducing her to the audience with the single expletive: "Georgia!"

Chaplin spent $125,000 refurbishing The Gold Rush, which had cost $2,000,000 to make. While editing out whole sequences and shortening others, he added film which had been cut from the original version, lengthening, in particular, the shoe-stewing sequence and another in which Big Jim, dizzy with hunger, sees the Little Fellow as an enormous chicken.

Despite the fact that silent films of The Gold Rush era were photographed for projection at 60 feet a minute, the picture unrolls with hardly a jerk at today's 90-feet-a-minute speed. The photography is remarkably good for its age, and the stronger light of modern projection machines considerably improves it.

For the last ten years movie distributors have begged Chaplin to reissue some of his great comedies. Chaplin, now 52, and as fiscally astute as ever, is ready to pretty-up The Circus for reissue if The Gold Rush box office warrants it.

To The Shores of Tripoli (20th Century-Fox) is Hollywood's first long look at the real pros of the U.S. armed forces: the Marines. So long as it keeps a Technicolored eye on their activities at the San Diego Marine Corps Base, it is a rousing picture.

Tripoli's story is the old one about the ex-Marine (Minor Watson) who dumps his playboy son (John Payne) on his old sergeant pal (Randolph Scott) to be made a man of. It ambles through a romance with an almost unbearably beautiful nurse (Maureen O'Hara), a fight, a near court-martial, a rescue at sea. They make a Marine out of the young scamp, all right, but it hardly seems worthwhile, cinematically.

Very much worthwhile, however, are the views of Leathernecks in training. The Marines have class, and it shows at every click of the camera shutter--in the way they handle their grunting green tanks, the symphonic grace of their close-order drill, the impressive torso power of their mass setting-up exercises. But it shows best in one chance shot of a nameless Marine, at liberty, decked out in blue & scarlet, sauntering along with the easy, uncoiled assurance of a fighting man who knows no one can lick him.

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