The film also stars Chaplin in his Little Tramp persona, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Henry Bergman and Malcolm Waite.

Chaplin drew inspiration from photographs of the Klondike Gold Rush as well as from the story of the Donner Party who, when snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, were driven to cannibalism or eating leather from their shoes.

He decided that his famous rogue figure should become a gold-digger who joins a brave optimist determined to face all the pitfalls associated with the search for gold, such as sickness, hunger, cold, loneliness or the possibility that he may at any time be attacked by a grizzly.

In the film, scenes like Chaplin cooking and dreaming of his shoe, or how his starving friend Big Jim sees him as a chicken could be seen.

When he returns to the town, his memory has been partly restored and he remembers that he found a large gold deposit, that it was close to a cabin, and that he stayed there with the Prospector.

On New Year's Eve, while waiting for her to arrive to the dinner, the Prospector imagines entertaining her with a dance of bread rolls on forks.

[3] The rest of the film was shot on the back lot and stages at Chaplin's Hollywood studio, where elaborate Klondike sets were constructed.

[3] Lita Grey, whom Chaplin married in November 1924, was originally cast as the leading lady but due to her pregnancy was replaced by Georgia Hale.

Mordaunt Hall wrote in The New York Times: Here is a comedy with streaks of poetry, pathos, tenderness, linked with brusqueness and boisterousness.

[6]Variety also published a rave review, saying that it was "the greatest and most elaborate comedy ever filmed, and will stand for years as the biggest hit in its field, just as The Birth of a Nation still withstands the many competitors in the dramatic class.

[9] At the 1958 Brussels World Fair, critics rated it the second greatest film in history, behind only Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

In 1992, The Gold Rush was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

He writes: "The Gold Rush is arguably his greatest and most ambitious silent film; it was the longest and most expensive comedy produced up to that time.

The film contains many of Chaplin's most celebrated comedy sequences, including the boiling and eating of his shoe, the dance of the rolls, and the teetering cabin.

However, the greatness of The Gold Rush does not rest solely on its comedy sequences but on the fact that they are integrated so fully into a character-driven narrative.

Literary critic Manny Farber, writing in The New Republic, on the 1942 re-release of The Gold Rush: You see things that are so peculiarly a result of Chaplin's genius you can't explain them…These situations begin with something absurd: a dancer's feet represented by two bread rolls, a house half on, half off a cliff, a meal made of a shoe.

But Chaplin's pantomime changes the absurdity into something significant with human feeling—the rolls come alive with the personality of a dancer, the house, for all its triteness, becomes a stirring reality, and what happens to the shoes is unbelievable.

An absurdity has been made real and enormously significant, and this is where you feel whatever emotion was intended by Chaplin…[25]The new music score by Max Terr and the sound recording by James L. Fields were nominated for Academy Awards in 1943.

After 1995, Chaplin's estate blocked unauthorized releases of The Gold Rush in the United States by arguing that the film's U.S. copyright had been restored by the Uruguay Round Agreements Act.

In more recent times, it was replicated by Robert Downey Jr. in his lead role as Charles Chaplin in the 1992 Chaplin, which briefly depicts the production of the film; Johnny Depp's character in the 1993 film Benny and Joon; Grampa Simpson in the 1994 The Simpsons episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover"; and Amy Adams's character in The Muppets.

The "hanging cabin on the edge of the cliff" sequence (starting at 1:19 in video inserted above) has been used in two Indian movies: Michael Madana Kama Rajan and Welcome.