Sounds of Silents for MSUM Summer Cinema

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Movies Editor

MSUM’s annual Summer Cinema film series begins next week, this time with four bi-weekly screenings of classic movies, all from the height of Hollywood’s silent era during the 1920s. Each will be shown from 16mm film prints with live musical accompaniment performed on the “Mighty Wurlitzer” theatre pipe organ in Weld Hall’s Glasrud Auditorium. All shows start at 7:30 pm, with a pre-show organ concert at 7:15 pm. Admission is $4 per program.

International film legend Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length film, “The Kid” (1921), is first in this summer’s lineup, showing Monday, June 13th. Chaplin delighted audiences around the world with his affecting blend of slapstick, sentiment, and social commentary. Beginning in the British music hall, he started making short film comedies for Mack Sennett in 1914, shot to stardom almost immediately, formed his own studio within a few years, and continued his filmmaking career for over a half-century.

The dozens of short comedies he made before “The Kid” usually pitted a free-spirited little tramp character against authorities and/or “respectable” society. He continues that approach in his first feature but has a far more developed dramatic backdrop for his humor. The main action follows an unemployed social misfit who reluctantly decides to take care of an abandoned young boy and grows to love him, but then must deal with the social workers who want to seize the child. Sound familiar? Chaplin’s basic plot was copied closely by Adam Sandler for “Big Daddy.”

“The Kid” established Chaplin’s career in full-length features and made a superstar of five-year-old Jackie Coogan, who played the title role and a number of very similar roles over the next few years. A much-older Coogan was known to later generations as Uncle Fester in the 1960s TV series “The Addams Family.”

Chaplin pioneered a type of film comedy that ventured beyond simple slapstick or situational humor to place its gags into a context that could incorporate social criticism (most often dealing with poverty similar to that he had grown up with). His “Little Tramp” was an outcast character searching for love and acceptance as well as a universal symbol of human persistence against all odds. “The Kid” is full of amusing and clever scenes, especially showing the characters’ haphazard domestic life, yet Chaplin develops a vividly believable relationship with Coogan’s precocious little boy.

The genuine sentiment that builds between them on screen leads to some heart-rending moments. However, scenes such as the child welfare society taking the boy against his will from the only father he has ever known go beyond mere audience manipulation. They strike a much deeper chord that makes the viewer care what will happen to the characters next — an attribute often missing from today’s comic films.

Chaplin would go on to make such acclaimed masterpieces as “The Gold Rush” (1925) and “City Lights (1931), each with increasing subtleties and sophistication, but “The Kid” easily ranks among his best works. Despite being his first feature, it shows his fully-developed sense of how to make an effective character-driven story that works in carefully designed sight gags as part of the plot rather than simply for their own sake. Dave Knudtson will compose and perform the music for “The Kid.”

The second Summer Cinema program will be Monday, June 27, but instead of a feature-length work it will be a collection of short comedies by the popular team of Laurel and Hardy. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy each had modest film careers from the late 1910s through the 1920s but as soon as they were teamed together at the Hal Roach Studio in 1927, their on-screen rapport and comic inventiveness soon established them as distinctive personalities. Like Chaplin, they quickly became beloved world-wide. Although they easily made the transition to talking pictures in 1929, their carefully constructed physical humor was ideal in the silent era and most of their best films are from the silent period. Dave Knudtson and Lance Johnson will play scores for the films.

On Monday, July 11th, the genre shifts to exotic adventure fantasy, with the light-hearted touch of athletic movie hero Douglas Fairbanks in his spectacular 1924 epic, “The Thief of Bagdad.” Veteran action director Raoul Walsh guided Doug through this stylized Arabian Nights tale of a common thief who falls for a princess and sets out on a magical quest to win her hand. Lance Johnson will accompany “The Thief of Bagdad” on the organ.

This summer’s series concludes with another silent comic icon, Buster Keaton, perhaps Chaplin’s greatest rival among both audiences and critics. On Monday, July 25th, is one of Keaton’s all-time best features, his 1928 comedy “The Cameraman.” He plays a barely competent tintype portrait photographer who decides to become a movie newsreel cameraman to impress the office secretary, and naturally soon finds himself in all sorts of difficult situations.

Hugely successful with audiences, “The Cameraman” was Keaton’s first film for MGM after working on his own the previous eight years. Along with his final silent feature, “Spite Marriage” (1929), it was one of the last times he still had a large amount of creative control over his work. Dave Knudtson will do the score for “The Cameraman.”

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