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Aguirre: The Wrath of God is instantly recognizable, and, later, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. A waddling speck on the frozen landscape, Charles Chaplin's Lone Prospector in the Yukon tundra. The cabin lashed by a blizzard slants this way and that, an arena for burly men, Big Jim (Mack Swain) and Black Larson (Tom Murray) vie for a shotgun that's inevitably aimed at the little fellow. Aesthetics of hunger—the boiled boot is a Thanksgiving feast in the right state of mind, shoelaces become spaghetti and a bent nail a wishbone. "Man proposes, but a storm disposes." The chicken hallucination is answered by a real grizzly, enough to stave off a little cannibalism between friends. At the entrance of the boom-town saloon, one of Chaplin's greatest images: The outsider with his back to the camera contemplating the dancing couples, about to meet the "spitfire" (Georgia Hale). (A dancer's life bores her, she pines for somebody worthwhile, the tramp's adoration is indulged as a caprice.) Cold and warmth, famine and food, despair and hope, no other film so purely and directly communicates how elemental horrors can turn into tactile beauties. "The North. A law unto itself," Flaherty's Nanook might be a kinsman. Dance of the bread rows, an enchantment that dissolves to an empty table, a brutal cut separates revelers singing "Auld Lang Syne" and the protagonist in jilted profile. "I, and the abyss," says Emerson, the sublimest gag finds the cabin on the edge of the precipice, the screen's wobbliness not quite a hangover's symptom. Changes of fortune, incomplete without one's beloved, a tumble from deck into steerage fixes that. The beautiful coda has a reflexive side, the rigid poses of a photograph yield to a documentary of the cinéaste's kiss with his leading lady. "Oh! You've spoilt the picture." (The narration in the abbreviated 1942 re-release is redeemed by the Proustian longing in Chaplin's voice as he sighs "Georgia.") With Malcolm Waite, Henry Bergman, and Betty Morrissey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |