Clara Gerdes Leads Silent Movie Night at Organ Pavilion August 29 – But Her Concert Set Was Better Than the Movie Accompaniments

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

August 29 was the “Silent Movie Night” at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, and my husband Charles and I made it a point of getting there early so we could stake out good seats and be able to see the films effectively without too many people in our way. We were also worried that the Spreckels Organ Society had announced that they were blocking off the primo seats for people attending the beer and wine tasting event at 5:30 p.m. (Charles said that if I were interested in beer or wine he might have wanted us to go, even at a cost of $60 per person – at least it’s a benefit for the Spreckels Organ Society, a cause we support – but since I don’t drink alcohol and they weren’t serving a full meal, just hors d’oeuvre, there wasn’t much point in me going.) Charles wanted to block off some seats for friends of ours, and though I was a bit anxious about that, the people he had invited all showed up. Like all the other concerts this year, attendance was well below pre-pandemic levels – apparently a lot of people are still too intimidated by COVID-19 to start going out again – there were plenty of empty seats and none of the throngs we’ve seen lining the Organ Pavilion and setting up deck chairs on the patio as we’ve seen in previous years. The organist turned out to be a phenomenal player, Clara Gerdes – her last name is not pronounced either “Girds” or “Gir-DESS,” as I would have assumed, but “Gir-DEES” – who was an odd choice for the movie night because she’s much more a classical organist than a theatre organist. She’s dark-haired, slender, quite short and very young – she just graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

She’s also a damned good player and I hope that the Spreckels Organ Society will bring her back some day for a full-fledged classical concert. Instead of doing a short set of pop songs from the silent-movie era (basically the 1910’s and 1920’s) or just afterwards, Gerdes opened her program with three hard-core classical selections, Dvorák’s Carnival Overture (in a transcription by Edwin H. Lemare), Maurice Duruflé’s Scherzo, and Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1. The last was particularly nervy because the piece is one of San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez’s specialties – he had programmed it for his opening-night concert but had taken it off the program because Gerdes wanted to play it later in the year. Judging from her performance (of a different, and uncredited, transcription from the one Raúl uses, which is his own), I can see why Raúl wanted to duck the piece. She just totally outplayed him on it, bringing the sheer fire and verve Liszt intended the piece to have and communicating the darn, morbid mood Liszt wanted far better than the man I contemptuously call “the Spanish clown.” (I’ve not exactly made it a secret just how much I detest Raúl Prieto Ramírez – there’s nothing wrong with his musicianship but his stage presence is utterly revolting – and how I groaned when he got the job as civic organist – and groaned even more when his contract was recently extended for 10 years, which means we’ll have to put up with his horribly sexist, insulting comments for at least another decade.) The organ did sound a bit muffled on the opening of the Dvorák, which I attributed to the huge inflatable screen that was put up to show the movies – Charles joked that lt looked like one of those bouncy kids’ houses people rent and put up in their front yards for their children’s birthday parties – though Gerdes seemed to realize it and for the rest of her concert she kept the “swell” shutters wide open and went for maximum volume and power.

Last night’s Balboa Park organ concert, the annual showing of one or more silent films with live organ accompaniment, underwent a sudden last-minute change which apparently was organist Clara Gerdes’ idea. The scheduled films were Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 short A Night in the Show, Buster Keaton’s 1920 short Neighbors, and two experimental films by French director Segundo de Chomón, Avant la Musique (translated by imdb.com as “Music, Forward!”) (1907) and La Leçon de Musique (*The Music Lesson”) (1909). Instead Gerdes apparently asked to perform the Chaplin short and a full-length Keaton feature, Seven Chances (1925). I was particularly anxious to see the Chaplin short – one from his year at the Essanay studio (which made mostly Westerns, as evinced by the silhouette of an Indian head that was the company’s logo) – because it was based on the famous sketch, called Mumming Birds in Britain and A Night in an English Music Hall in the U.S., that Chaplin performed in his apprenticeship with Fred Karno’s comedy troupe on stage well before he first set foot in front of a movie camera. Chaplin made his American stage debut with the Karno company in a different sketch, “The Wow-Woes,” which parodied the popular British summer camp resorts, on October 3, 1910 at the Colonial Theatre in New York, and Variety gave him this review which indicates he already was a major star on both sides of “The Pond” before he started making movies: “Chaplin is typically English, the sort of comedian that American audiences seem to like, although unaccustomed to. His manner is quiet and easy, and he goes about his work with a devil-may-care manner. … Chaplin will do all right for America.”

A Night in the Show is a thinly veiled reworking of A Night in an English Music Hall, in which Chaplin played “The Drunk,” who stumbled into the theatre and disrupted the show. (HIs understudy in the role was another British comedian who became a screen legend, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, later Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy.) For A Night in the Show Chaplin played a dual role, “Mr. Pest” and “Mr. Rowdy.” As “Mr. Pest” hw wore the familiar Chaplin makeup of tousled hair and toothbrush moustache; as “Mr. Rowdy” he wore the older makeup he had worn with the Karno troupe, with a pointed cap and a walrus moustache. (This is the get-up Chaplin wore in his first film, Making a Living, made at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio in 1914, before he hit on the “Tramp” makeup and costume in his second film, Kid Audy Races at Venice.) “Mr. Pest” first attracts the ire of the other patrons when he cuts in front of them in the line to buy tickets. When he finally gets in, he sits in an orchestra seat quite near the stage, gets moved around a lot by the ushers, picks a fight with several musicians in the pit (including the conductor, who accidentally strikes him while moving his arms to lead the band) and ends up on stage, where his antics convulse the audience. It’s a situation Chaplin would later use in what’s probably his most underrated feature, The Circus (1928), in which he plays a young man desperate to break into the circus and get a job as a clown, but who can make people laugh only when he’s not deliberately trying to.

“Mr. Rowdy” arrives drunk, takes several near-close calls during which he almost falls off the balcony where his seat is, and at the film’s climax he grabs a fire hose and tries to put out the fires set on stage by the fire-eater, whose antics seem to have been copied from the famous “trick films” of Georges Méliès. Ultimately he drenches the entire audience with the outflow from his hose. A Night in the Show is not major Chaplin (as some of his Essanay films, notably The Tramp and Police, are), but it’s a fascinating curio and a fortunate insight into Chaplin’s beginnings as a performer. My husband Charles noticed a Black man in the balcony audience, and though it was actually a white actor, frequent Chaplin foil Leo White, in blackface, it was still a surprising sight. There are also a lot of gender-bending scenes; at least one of the heavy-set “women” performers in the show-within-the-show is played by a man in drag, and in one scene that seems audacious even today “The Pest” sits next to a heavy-set straight couple, reaches for the woman’s hand and grabs the man’s hand by mistake.

When the projectionist cued up the opening of Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925), a lot of people in the audience were surprised to see that the main credits were in color. Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who has the annoying habit of thinking he knows more about absolutely everything than anyone else, immediately decided that the film must have been colorized and made a bad joke about it. In fact the opening sequence was actually shot in two-strip Technicolor (to my knowledge Keaton is the only one of the great silent comedians to use two-strip Technicolor), and though the sequence is badly faded (and no one involved ih Keaton’s cinematic legacy has tried to restore it), it’s still a charming prologue in which Jimmie Shannon (Buster Keaton) keeps showing up at the flower-strewn cottage where his wanna-be girlfriend Mary (Ruth Dwyer) lives but is too shy to tell her he loves her. He brings along a dog, and as the year progresses the dog gets noticeably larger in each scene. Seven Chances is not a Buster Keaton original; it was originally a Broadway play by David Belasco (who’s probably most famous today for the two plays, Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West, which were turned into operas by Puccini) and a writer named Roi Cooper Negrue gets credit for adapting it for the screen. (Negrue died in 1927 at age 44, though seven of his 12 credits on imdb.com are for films made later than that, including The Bachelor, a 1999 remake of Seven Chances with Chris O’Donnell in the Keaton role.) Regular Keaton collaborators Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell get credit for the actual screenplay, though given the way comedy movies were usually written in the silent days they were most likely part of a writers’ room (originally invented by Mack Sennett, by the way) with Keaton himself in overall charge.

The plot kicks off when an attorney shows up at the offices of Meekin (T. Roy Barnes) and Shannon. A title explains that the firm “had been tricked into a financial deal that meant disgrace – and possibly prison – unless they raised money quickly.” Needless to say, both Shannon and Meekin run away from the lawyer, thinking he must be a process server connected with the deal that threatens them with disgrace and possibly prison. The attorney finally shows up and tells Jimmie that he’s in line for a $7 million inheritance, but only if he’s married by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday. “Whern is your 27th birthday?” Meekin asks Shannon. “Today,” Jimmie shame-facedly tells his partner. He first runs over to Mary, the woman he actually loves, but she’s predictably upset when he tells her about the inheritance and she assumes he just wants to marry her for the money. Meekin offers Jimmie the titular “seven chances” – single women from his little black book – but he strikes out with all of them, including one who tears up the “Will you marry me?” note he wrote her and drops the teared pieces over him, where they fall in a slow-motion pattern two years before Josef von Sternberg did a similar effect with the feathers in Evelyn Brent’s boa in the film Underworld. There’s a famous scene in which Jimmie approaches a theatre stage door with a portrait of an attractive woman on the bill – only it turns out to be Julian Eltinge, a famous female impersonator of the time, and Jimmie leaves after clearly having been beaten up by Eltinge. (One wonders who the writers of The Bachelor used for this gag – assuming they kept it in. Maybe RuPaul.)

Meekin goes to the offices of the local evening paper and gets them to print a story about Jimmie’s predicament – and literally hundreds of women in bridal gowns and veils show up at the Broad Street Church to see if they can grab him and a share of his millions. (Before that we’ve seen Jimmie finger two train tickets: “Niagara Falls,” the famous honeymoon destination, and “Reno,” the equally famous locale for divorces.) When Jimmie arrives at the church he sits alone in one of the pews and falls asleep; when he wakes up the church is full of would-be brides and the minister tells them they’ve been the victims of a practical joke. The brides-to-be chase Jimmie through the streets and are angry enough to tear him limb from limb. Jimmie flees them, in that remarkable way Buster Keaton had of running – with his legs moving with the regularity of pistons – and he stumbles into a construction site and is literally lifted off by a crane and swung overhead in mid-air by one of the women who has taken it over. (As usual, Keaton did this stunt himself and it was every bit as dangerous as it looks on screen.) Amazingly, when Keaton previewed the film, the chase scene, with the women showing the same grim determination to get him the police showed in his marvelous 1922 short Cops (a wickedly funny parody of the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886 – the radical politics in Keaton’s films may not have been as obvious as they were in Chaplin’s, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there!), almost nobody in the audience laughed. The only laugh Keaton’s antics got was when he tripped over three rocks on screen, and the rocks rolled towards him.

Realizing that he had to take desperate measures to save the film, Keaton decided to build a whole series of papier-maché rocks and have them chase him as well, producing one of the most audacious comedy scenes in film history. Meanwhile, Jimmie’s girlfriend Mary has thought the better of her rejection and sends a Black servant on horseback to “ride like the wind” to catch Jimmie and give him a note that she’ll marry him after all, only he takes the slowest horse in creation and at one point he misses Jimmie’s car as it zips by. Meekin gathers up the minister from the church and tells Jimmie he’ll have the officiant at Mary’s house if he can make it by 7 – only he just misses the deadline and he thinks he’s sunk. Mary offers to marry him even if he ends up penniless, disgraced and possibly imprisoned, but at the last minute Jimmie looks at a public clock in the town square and it says it’s still a couple of minutes before 7. The two finally get married, and the dog from the prologue shows up and is now enormous. I have no idea how close Seven Chances is to the Belasco play on it was nominally based, but I suspect Keaton and his crew radically reshaped it to turn it into a Keaton vehicle – and as such it’s a masterpiece, a brilliantly funny film that’s remarkable for the sheer audacity of the gags and the marvelous way they’re staged so they build on each other – a seemingly lost art of comedy construction, though I remember Charles and I going to the old library and seeing Scott Prendergast’s great 2007 comedy Kabluey, a brilliant satire of the dot-com boom and bust, and the number of ruined lives it left in its wake. Like Chaplin and Keaton, Prendergast directed his film as well as starring in it, and he created an old-style comedy even though the content was up-to-date.