Next up on the AFI list is this Charlie Chaplin movie. So I’ve seen a couple of Chaplin films — City Lights and Modern Times, which are apparently generally considered his best — but this is at the very least right up there with them. It’s possible that it might even be my favorite, with arguably a more coherent storyline (though all these movies are extremely episodic, full of comedic setpieces), and a more specific setting in the Alaskan gold rush.

I don’t really have a lot to say about it — the plot isn’t so substantial that I think it’s worth recounting, and the comedic bits work better in context than in description — but two things were notable to me. The first is that everyone is wearing fur coats, which seemed weird except that like… I guess in Ye Olden Days, what was the alternative? They obviously didn’t have synthetics, and it turns out that the down jacket wasn’t invented until the 1930s, so I guess fur it is.

The second thing is more substantial, which is the history of the movie. As this disc loaded up, it provided a choice between the original 1925 version, and the 1942 Chaplin-directed reissue. We watched the OG version, which is considered the better one, but the 1942 one is kind of fascinating: Basically, nobody wanted to watch silent movies anymore by then, and the movie had basically disappeared from public exhibition, so Chaplin re-edited it into a talkie of sorts: Instead of intertitles, he narrates over it. This version also edits out a few bits and makes it a good 10-15 minutes shorter.

That’s such a fascinating thing to me, and it reminds me of the brief fad for colorizing old black and white movies, or the early HD era when SD shows would be squeezed into a 16:9 aspect ratio. I feel like there’s a time when technology has moved on, where the old thing is seen as just shitty and dated; but then ultimately it gets old enough that the only people who watch it are those who are interested in the oldness of it to some extent.

But the extra fun thing is, the 1925 film was basically lost, and so what’s here is recreated (in a restoration that went from 1992-2007) from some fragmentary copies, the 1942 film, and reconstructed intertitles. Some scenes are low quality (during one part there were even missing frames, which was weird as it kind of skipped around with seeming jump cuts), and I guess there’s still some missing footage, but like: That’s what we’ve got, for a movie that was a huge blockbuster popular smash in its day not that long ago.

Anyway, good movie, enjoyable watch, but I don’t know that the AFI list needs three Chaplin films on it; they’re doing similar-enough things that I think one would get the point across just fine, even if they are all perfectly pleasant.