Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman" at the Silent Movie Night at the Organ Pavilion August 28

Organist Clark Wilson Presents Eccentric Pre-Film Medley, but Supplies Able Accompaniment for the Film

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 28) my husband Charles and I went to the annual silent movie night at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. We left home at about 4:15 p.m. and got to the Pavilion at 5 – and were a bit surprised to find it almost empty. In previous years Charles had got there way early to stake us out a seat near enough to the screen where we could actually see the movie, but though the place was pretty packed this year it wasn’t anywhere nearly as crowded as it’s been in years past. (I think a lot of people have still not got back into the habit of going out after COVID-19.) The film was Harold Lloyd’s 1925 college comedy The Freshman, which we’ve seen before, and the live organist accompanying it was Clark Wilson, an Ohio-based musician and organ curator who, according to his official biography, learned the art of silent-film accompaniment from John Muri, who had been old enough to have practiced it “in the day.” Wilson’s bio makes me wish we could have seen and heard him accompany a serious silent drama instead of a comedy; for The Freshman he relied mostly on pop songs from the 1920’s, which was appropriate (one of his principles, as expressed in his bio, is that “the musical style of the time remains intact; no attempt is made to distract from the picture by using themes or styles that entered the musical scene years later,” a principle I wish had been followed by some of the composers who have concocted awfully anachronistic scores for silent films shown on Turner Classic Movies or released on DVD) but also made his score seemed just a bit shopworn. As usual, the live organist presented a concert recital of a few songs while waiting for the sky to get dark enough to allow the film to be shown – Wilson joked that he usually plays for silent films in old, restored movie palaces whose ceilings were painted to resemble sky, but in this case the sky was the real deal – but Wilson’s own pre-film concert was disappointing.

First of all, he began in medias res by playing a fanfare even before he was actually introduced, and the person who introduced him, Spreckels Organ Society president Randy Wood, announced that Wilson was going to open the concert with a “melody.” He meant “medley,” and Wilson did indeed do that. Unlike previous movie night organists, he did not announce his selections in advance, and both Charles and I were stumped by a lot of what he played. Wilson opened with Alfred Newman’s 20th Century-Fox fanfare and then played a mélange of pieces including “Believe It or Not,” the theme from the early-1980’s TV sitcom The Greatest American Hero, “We Are the World” (both Charles and I did double takes when this song emerged from some of Wilson’s noodling) and bits from John Williams’ film scores – including the Star Wars movies (though he blessedly avoided the over-familiar main title; I believe he used the Imperial March instead) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (though I don’t think I’d have recognized that if the U.S. Navy Band Southwest hadn’t played it at their final “Twilight in the Park” program last Thursday, August 24). Fortunately, for The Freshman Wilson knuckled down and played a score mostly drawn from actual pop songs of the mid-1920’s, many of them about college life as it was seen in the popular fiction of the time. The Freshman cast the 31-year-old Harold Lloyd as Harold Lamb, a would-be college student who’s raised the money to go to Tate College by selling vacuum cleaners (which suggests that Lloyd could have done a prequel that would have been at least as funny as this!). Harold’s vision of college life has been shaped by a movie he’s seen eight times called The College Hero, whose star does a weird little dance before he puts out his hand to shake someone he’s just met – a gesture Harold emulates. There’s a great scene early on in which Harold’s father, an amateur radio enthusiast, hears Harold making weird noises in his bedroom. Harold is just practicing college yells, but dad thinks it’s static from his radio, and when Harold’s practice cheers include a few phrases in pidgin-Chinese, dad rejoices and says, “I’ve got China!”

Later, on the train to Tate College, Harold meets Peggy (Jobyna Ralston, who took over as Lloyd’s leading lady on screen when Mildred Davis retired from acting to marry Lloyd for real; they stayed together until her death in 1969, two years before his, and of all the superstar male comedians of the silent era Lloyd was the only one who married just once). She’s solving a crossword puzzle – a national craze in the mid-1920’s – and he’s trying to come up with a word meaning romance. An elderly woman overhears them on the train and thinks they’re an actual couple, in a charming little aside that marks Harold Lloyd as one of the founding fathers of situation comedy even though he’s remembered today, if at all, only for his daredevil stunts. (Lloyd lived long enough to complain about that; he once said, “I made just six thrill pictures, and those are the only ones anybody wants to talk to me about!”) Once he gets to Tate, the other students gang up on him and successfully talk him into taking them to the local ice cream parlor, where all the ice cream is on him. This stunt makes a huge dent in Harold’s bankroll, so much that he has to abandon his original living arrangements and live in a cheap rooming house run by Peggy’s father. Harold soon realizes that his only shot at collegiate success is by becoming a football star, though his initial attempts are predictable wash-outs; he gets pressed into service as an animate tackling dummy and then is made the team’s water boy, though he’s led to believe that he’s actually made it onto the squad. Harold’s next chance at popularity is as host of the annual “Fall Frolic,” a dance which it seems is unilaterally hosted and paid for by one student. In 1924 it was Chet Trask (James H. Anderson), the real-life “college hero” Harold is trying to duplicate, and in 1925 it’s Harold – only his tailor (Joseph Harrington) is late making his suit, thanks to regular dizzy spells only brandy can ease.

The tailor warns Harold that he’s only basted the suit – holding it together with weak, easily torn stitches because he hasn’t had time to do the final assembly yet – and he should be careful moving around in it. Well, the moment the writers (Sam Taylor, Ted Wilde, John Grey, Tim Whelan and an uncredited Lloyd himself; Taylor and Fred Newmeyer also directed the film, though Lloyd was the real auteur) drop that hint, we know what’s going to happen. Harold’s suit is going to unravel spectacularly in mid-dance, and even the attempts of the tailor to mend it while Harold is partying fail spectacularly. In James Agee’s famous article on silent comedy, he claimed that in the original version of the scene Lloyd refused to allow his pants to drop, thinking that dropping his pants was too low-comedy and he would lose only the jacket. After a disappointing preview, Lloyd called back the entire cast – including all the extras – for a costly reshoot in which he did indeed drop his pants at the end, to hilarious effect. At the party the College Cad (Brooks Benedict) tries to rape Peggy, who’s working the dance as a hat-check girl, and when Harold breaks it up and preserves Peggy’s virtue, the Cad announces that he’s going to get his revenge by telling Harold that he’s been the butt of jokes all year, and he’s only the water boy on the football team, not an actual member. After that comes the big annual football game between Tate and Union State, who jumps out to an early 3-0 lead on a field goal (which we don’t see, though Lloyd sent out a second unit to the 1924 East-West Game for stock footage of actual football played to a packed stadium). Union State’s players are so rough the Tate squad literally runs out of players, and the Tate coach (Pat Harmon) is forced to put Harold into the game. Harold does surprisingly well – not really, given that he is the film’s star (and producer) and he’s obviously going to stack the deck for himself – though he blows his big chance when, previously told by a referee that he’s supposed to drop the football whenever he hears the referee’s whistle, hears a nearby factory whistle blow just as he’s at the one-yard line about to score the game-winning touchdown for Tate. The other team scoops up the ball, but Harold is able to wrest it away from them and win the game for Tate in a broken-field run down the full length of the field, which makes him an instant hero and wins him the love of Peggy.

In 1947 Preston Sturges cast Lloyd in his last film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, and got Lloyd’s permission to use the last reel of The Freshman to begin his movie, which cast Lloyd, 25 years after his transitory college triumph, stuck in a dead-end accounting job until he rebels. The film was produced by Howard Hughes, who three years later cut about 15 minutes of it and re-released it through RKO, which he then owned, as Mad Wednesday. The Freshman is a fine, funny film, and yet it’s far from Lloyd’s best even though it was a huge hit on its initial release. It made more money than any of Lloyd’s other films, and it started a cycle of college movies that focused almost exclusively on athletics and social life. Unusually for a film supposedly set at a college, there’s absolutely no education depicted in this spoof of “higher education.” The football field and the dance hall are the abodes of this movie; never do we see an actual classroom and the only faculty member in the dramatis personae is the college dean, who one of Thomas J. Grey’s best intertitles describes as never having married because if he had, his wife would expect to call him by his first name. The Freshman inspired a lot of college comedies, including College (1927), which Buster Keaton was forced to make by his producer, Joseph Schenck, after the financial failure of his masterpiece, The General (1926); and probably the greatest of them, the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932), which not only had scenes in classrooms lampooning college curricula but spoofed the then-current practice of colleges hiring professional “ringers” to play on supposedly “amateur” student teams. I remember being startled by seeing “serious” films of the early 1930’s, including The Sport Parade (RKO, 1932) and College Coach (Warner Bros., 1933), which depicted dramatically the same scandals the Marx Brothers were ridiculing. But among Lloyd’s better silents were the iconic Safety Last! (1923) – the famous one in which he climbs a skyscraper to win a bet and gets tangled up in a clock – For Heaven’s Sake (1924) and the awesomely dark The Devil’s Brother (1927), which seemed to me a deliberate parody of F. W. Murnau’s unauthorized Dracula knock-off Nosferatu (1922).