Long-lost Charlie Chaplin film meticulously restored after 100 years

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When classic films undergo 4K restorations, the results can divide fans. Look around Hollywood and you’ll find numerous examples of movie rereleases featuring controversial uses of digital noise reduction, motion smoothing, and other post-production tools. Meanwhile, the proliferation of AI- and machine learning-based upscaling programs has only complicated the debate.

When approached properly, though, the technique has helped revive some of Hollywood’s oldest—and for a long time, inaccessible—movies. A recent example is the official 4K restoration of one of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous and beloved titles, The Gold Rush. The laborious endeavor celebrating the movie’s centennial anniversary premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 13, followed by screenings at 250 theaters in 70 countries on June 26.

The story of how and why The Gold Rush received its 4K restoration shows that tinkering with movies isn’t always a bad thing. It also isn’t anything new—in some cases, the movie’s own creator does the original tinkering.

‘He transformed it’

Almost 100 years ago, Charlie Chaplin released one of his most iconic works, The Gold Rush. But unless you saw the movie during its original theatrical run, it would take decades for most audiences to see that version again. That’s because for years, The Gold Rush that Chaplin fans knew wasn’t the silent movie from 1925—it was a “talkie.”

“He transformed it into a sound film,” Arnold Lozano tells Popular Science. “It’s his own voice commenting throughout the film.”

Lozano is the managing director of the Chaplin Office, which oversees the rights to the legendary movie star’s films such as The Kid (1921), The Circus (1928), and City Lights (1931). He explains that while Chaplin left the majority of his other movies untouched after their debuts, The Gold Rush never sat right with him. So 17 years after its premiere, Chaplin decided to do something about it.

A nation on the brink of the Great Depression enjoyed 1925’s The Gold Rush in part because it punctuated its situational comedy and slapstick with melancholic reflections on endurance, hunger, and loneliness. Although 1942 marked the beginning of a politically charged era for Chaplin—he released The Great Dictator only a few months earlier—he believed The Gold Rush required a more updated (and more upbeat) overhaul. 

“It became quite a different film… it was wartime. Tires were being rationed in Los Angeles, so that’s the world that The Gold Rush was reintroduced to,” says Lozano.

Chaplin cut roughly 16 minutes from the original Gold Rush to a tight 72-minute runtime. He removed entire sequences and rearranged others. Chaplin’s voiceovers added more levity, along with a new musical score to match. When he finalized the re-edit, an advertising tagline from the film promised theatergoers that the transformed Gold Rush would be their “Laughter Cue for ‘42!”

“Chaplin himself believed it was an improvement,” says Lozano. “There’s a legal document from the 1960s where he says, ‘I improved it.’” 

Many audiences and critics agreed with him at the time, but dissenting opinions have circulated over the ensuing years.

“Many fans and cinephiles have said, ‘What did he do to the film?’ They,” Lozano pauses, “respectfully disagree that it was an improvement. But Chaplin was the artist, and who are we to say otherwise?”

Gone for 50 years

After the re-edit, the 1925 version seemingly disappeared, but not because audiences preferred the 1942 edition—Chaplin ordered the destruction of all available prints of the first Gold Rush. 

“Whenever he’d hear of them, he had quite powerful lawyers and he did what he could to get rid of it all,” says Lozano.

That seemed like the end of the story for The Gold Rush. But beginning in the 1980s, film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill started searching for any surviving reels from the original version. They eventually amassed enough material, and in 1993, began combining the salvaged reels with a copy of the 1942 Gold Rush print.

Much of their project relied on a Japanese full aperture print housed in the Chaplin archives. Full aperture only applies to film that includes the entire original frame. When movies first integrated sound, designers needed to trim a section off the left side of the film to make room for the soundtrack reel. Although the Japanese copy contained the 1942 version, the full aperture allowed Brownlow and Gill to use it as a base to build around.

Lozano looks back at the 1993 edition as a “work in process”—imperfect, but an essential step towards recovering the original film. Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of digital communications streamlined the ability for archivists to continue their Gold Rush prospecting.

“Now it’s some 30 years later and… the world has changed,” he says. “It’s much easier to contact people now instead of writing letters and faxes and everything.”

What used to take weeks of back-and-forth communication can now happen in a matter of days or hours. Knowing this, Lozano and the Chaplin Office decided to pursue one final Gold Rush prospecting project.

A few years ago, the Chaplin Office put out a call to locate any remaining copies of the 1925 Gold Rush. Six archives replied with what they had, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. The expanded resources allowed experts at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, Italy, to begin work on a true 4K restoration of Chaplin’s first version of The Gold Rush.

Praise for the ‘pirates’

“The duplicate negative that Brownlow [and Gill] produced in ‘93 for the previous restoration was our starting point for two reasons,” L’Immagine Ritrovata preservationist and project manager Elena Tammaccaro tells Popular Science. “Seventy percent of that duplicate negative was the best we had in terms of image quality and full frame.”

That still meant around 30 percent of the original film remained missing. According to Tammaccaro, much of the project’s completion is owed to decades of outright disobedience from people in the movie industry.

“People worked like pirates… making copies they were supposed to eliminate,” she says. 

In addition to the duplicates, the team also tracked down an original nitrate reel in 4:3 ratio, the standard for Hollywood’s Silent Era.

After conducting a frame-by-frame review of all of their available reels, Tammaccaro and colleagues settled on the best combination of material to reconstruct Chaplin’s original 1925 version of The Gold Rush. Factors they considered included the levels of film grain, overall image degradation, and coloration. Tammaccaro says their restoration approach was “not aggressive” compared to many other laboratories, but it did occasionally require the use of digital tools to sharpen particularly blurry frames.

From there, the team scanned and digitized their final cut. Tammaccaro estimates it took her team 10 months to restore the 88-minute movie as well as create a wholly new 35mm print. However, that one won’t ever be shown—instead, it’s purely intended for preservation purposes in the Chaplin Office archives.

“It’s good to have an actual print made of this restoration and, if need be, can be rescanned by robots or whatever in the future,” Lozano says with a smile.

For the first time in decades, both new and longtime fans can now watch what is unequivocally the best preserved and most accurate reassembly of The Gold Rush. It may not have been its creator’s favorite cut, but its return marks a major moment for both film history and preservation. 

“We don’t think that they’re in competition with each other,” Lozano says of the two versions. “They’re both reflections of their times.”

 

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