Russ Peck Accompanies Three Silent Laurel and Hardy Shorts at Organ Pavilion's "Not -So-Silent Movie Night" August 25

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 25) my husband Charles and I went with several friends to the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” as part of the annual Monday nights’ summer organ festival at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. We got there early enough to hear the organist, Russ Peck, rehearse his program of short selections before the movies (there were three, more on that later). I was amused that the first thing he played, both in rehearsal and in the actual concert (the normal routine is the organist plays a short pre-film recital of theatre-organ pieces, including arrangements of pop songs, while waiting for the sky to get dark enough to render the movie visible), was “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” The irony was that it was this song, probably more than any other, that killed the silent movie as an art form. In the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson sang the song “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” (one of his many bathos-filled ballads honoring motherhood) and then went into “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” The original plan had been that Jolson would only sing in the otherwise silent film, but he started barking out instructions to the on-screen conductor, Louis Silvers, on how he wanted to be accompanied. When the film and its accompanying record (this was the Vitaphone process in which the sound was on a separate disc and a motor with an elaborate set of synchronizing gears ran the projector and the turntable simultaneously) were processed, the “suits” at Warner Bros. were so impressed at how well Jolson’s speaking voice matched his image that they wrote another talking scene into the film, the one between Jolson and his mother (Eugenie Besserer) – thus sounding the death knell for the silent film.

Since the program included three Laurel and Hardy silent shorts, Putting Pants on Philip (released in 1927, though actually shot a year earlier); Two Tars (1928); and Liberty (1929), Peck’s musical program drew on songs composed in each of those years. This was a bit of a mistake, because Putting Pants on Philip – not the first Laurel and Hardy film, but the first in which they were co-starred and got above-the-title billing – was actually shot in 1926, but not released until a year later. For 1927 Peck played a medley of “Me and My Shadow,” “Diane,” and “Thou Swell.” For 1928 he only played one song, the novelty hit “Nagasaki” – though his arrangement included a snatch of “The Sailor’s Hornpipe” because one of the two things the real Japanese city of Nagasaki is famous for is as the setting for Puccini’s naval opera, Madama Butterfly. (The other thing Nagasaki is famous for is as the site of the second U.S. atomic bomb attack on Japan on August 9, 1945.) For 1929 he went back to the medley format and did “Sunny Side Up” (ironically the title song from a Fox talking musical that was one of the biggest film hits of the year), “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” “Green Eyes,” and Thomas “Fats” Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” To Peck’s credit, he not only mentioned that Waller made records on pipe organ (his label, RCA Victor, had bought an abandoned church in Camden, New Jersey, and the purchase included the organ), he played “Ain’t Misbehavin’” with a relatively light touch that reflected Waller’s organ records rather than the thick, heavy theatre-organ voicings most organists who play Waller give his songs. (I’ve heard more than one theatre organist play Waller and make me want to scream because he or she has obviously not heard any of Waller’s own organ recordings, which showed perfectly how he wanted his music to sound on the instrument.)

The first film on the program, Putting Pants on Philip, reflected the rather unusual way Laurel and Hardy became a team. Facing the loss of his biggest comedy star, Harold Lloyd, in 1924 (the parting was amicable but Lloyd had outgrown the independents and formed his own company, releasing through major studios), producer Hal Roach gathered together what he called the “Comedy All-Stars.” They were a group of comic actors who could collectively draw audiences to their films even though no single individual among them had the power to make a movie a hit. Gradually Roach realized that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had more audience appeal than the others, though it was director Leo McCarey who had the idea of co-starring them and building them into a comedy team. He also conceived the idea for Putting Pants on Philip, in which Hardy plays influential social leader J. Piedmont Mumblethunder. He receives word that his nephew Philip (Stan Laurel) is arriving by ship from Scotland, and goes to the dock to meet him. The letter alerting Mumblethunder about Philip’s arrival warns him that he has one weakness: women. Every time he sees a pretty girl on the street, he’ll kick up his leg and run after her in a move far more like Harpo Marx (at a time when the Marx Brothers hadn’t yet made a released film, though Harpo had had a brief comic-relief role in a 1925 Paramount rom-com called Too Many Kisses) than the Laurel we know from their later films.

Philip arrives in a kilt and sporran, and when Mumblethunder insists that this is America and he must wear a pair of pants, Philip says he’s never worn pants in his life and doesn’t intend to start now. The issue gets forced when Philip and Mumblethunder walk down the street together, and several times Philip steps over air vents that blow his kilt above his waist – an interesting precursor of the famous gag Marilyn Monroe did in The Seven-Year Itch almost 30 years later. On the last blow-down Philip’s underpants fall down and he’s literally naked under the kilt. When they go to a tailor (Harvey Clark) Philip is too ticklish to have his inseam measured, and the three end up in a free-for-all on the tailor shop’s floor. Ultimately the film ends with the scene everyone who’s seen it (and a lot of people who haven’t but have seen the clip in various comedy compilations) remembers. Philip seeks to help a young woman cross a muddy street by laying down his jacket like Sir William Raleigh supposedly did for Queen Elizabeth, but she ignores the gesture and steps over the jacket. Philip walks across the mud unscathed, but when Mumblethunder tries it the ground gives way and it turns out the jacket was covering a large hole in the sidewalk, through which Mumblethunder falls and, when he pulls his head out of the murk, he registers the famous exasperated gesture and expression that would become a Hardy trademark for the next two decades. Putting Pants on Philip is the first appearance of a trope Laurel and Hardy often used: Hardy has achieved an at least semi-respectable position in society until Laurel comes in, all anarchic energy and drives, and releases him from it.

Two Tars (1928) was the movie Russ Peck said introduced him to Laurel and Hardy. It happened in 1965, when a teacher who owned a 16 mm projector and a few copies of silent films brought it into school and played it for a student audience – who found it hilarious. It’s a fascinating movie in which Laurel and Hardy (once again calling themselves “Stan” and “Ollie” as their character names as well; in late-in-life interviews Laurel explained that was because if they’d played characters, the studio they were working for could have claimed ownership of the character, forbidden them from playing it anywhere else, and recast the series with other actors; Laurel reasoned that if he and Hardy played characters with their own names, they could use those characters wherever they worked) play two sailors on leave in the U.S. after having been on an extensive cruise. They pick up two women (Thelma Hill and Ruby Blaine) in a rented Ford Model “T” after rescuing them from a recalcitrant gum machine that literally grabbed their fingers (Hardy’s attempt to shake it loose results in all the gumballs spilling out over the sidewalk, much to the store owner’s exasperation), and drive them around Los Angeles. (Even though this movie was made in 1928, its locale – where Hal Roach’s camera crews could get to quickly and with little fuss – is obvious.) Ultimately the boys get into a traffic jam that turns into a major altercation, with “supervising director” Leo McCarey staging one of the famous “tit-for-tat” gag sequences he loved so much. Instead of going at each other all at once, the participants in these sequences will release some visible sort of mayhem against each other’s person, car, or other belongings, and the victim will patiently wait their turn before retaliating.

At least one of those gags didn’t work for me: a driver comes through with all his belongings tied with ropes to the top of his car, only the belongings get loosened from their bonds and knocked to the ground. This hadn’t happened in 1928, so I can find this gag at least partially forgivable, but I’ve seen too many films, both documentaries and dramatizations, of people fleeing the Midwestern Dust Bowl in the 1930’s with their cars similarly accoutered with all the belongings they had in the world to find a scene like that funny. Aside from that one lapse, Two Tars is a quite amusing film (though other Laurel and Hardy vehicles, including their joint masterpiece, Sons of the Desert, were better), and car customizer Dale Schrum got a credit for creating the bizarre-looking wrecked cars (one of which has to be driven by its owner’s feet à la the Flintmobile in the 1960’s Flintstones cartoon TV series) that all drive off into the distance at the end, as a train coming in the opposite direction from the cars smashes them all into smithereens – except Laurel’s and Hardy’s, which just gets narrowed but still runs. One nice touch in this movie is that the two women Laurel and Hardy picked up watch the action unfold with barely controlled glee at all the mayhem – until a police officer shows up on a motorcycle eager to arrest somebody for starting the melée, until a steamroller drives by and flattens the motorcycle into a pancake shape. The girls flee rather than waiting around to be arrested. Charles and I had seen Two Tars before in a live program on the waterfront with members of the San Diego Symphony providing live accompaniment and Stan Laurel’s daughter and Buster Keaton’s widow as featured guests. It was a great occasion, but even though they tried to wait until late in the evening to show the films it was still too bright for Two Tars to make the effect it deserved.

The third film on the program was Liberty (1929), which begins with an odd sequence detailing the various struggles in American history for liberty, including George Washington at Valley Forge, Abe Lincoln during the Civil war – and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in striped prison jumpsuits. They had help making their break from two former confederates who bring them normal street clothes – only, when they try to change inside the car, Laurel gets Hardy’s pants and Hardy gets Laurel’s. The first half of the film details their increasingly panic-stricken attempts to get enough privacy long enough to switch pants – including one stop by a truck dispensing seafood, from which a live lobster emerges and leaps into the big pair of pants. (One French critic whose name escapes me at the moment said that the frequent shots of Laurel and Hardy in their underwear in this film proved that they were playing a Gay couple. Actually, as I’ve previously written about Laurel and Hardy, one of the joys of their films is how they blended pre-sexual, homosexual, and heterosexual tropes in their relationships to each other and the world around them. They did that with enough subtlety that they were able to pull some quite audacious gags – including the 1932 film Their First Mistake, in which Hardy’s wife sues him for divorce and names Laurel as the co-respondent – while maintaining their image as “clean” comedians.) The first half of Liberty – in which the only awareness we’re given that these guys are escaped convicts is a police officer (Jack Hill) is chasing them – is mostly a situation comedy with a great slapstick scene. A music-store owner (James Finlayson, a frequent supporting player in Laurel and Hardy films) puts out a large standing record player, puts a six-inch stack of records on it, and tops it with a sign that anyone who buys the player gets the records free. Well, with a setup like that you know what’s going to happen: the boys are going to knock over the player and break some of the records, then ineptly try to pick the rest up and only succeed in breaking them all, to Finlayson’s predictable comic rage.

Then the boys end up in the skeleton of a skyscraper under construction. They take a construction elevator and end up stranded on a high floor when the elevator is summoned back down – and at that point Liberty turns into a Harold Lloyd knock-off as the boys try their best to get back down. There’s a ladder on the side of the building but it only goes down another floor or two, and when Laurel gets on it, it works itself loose from the side of the building and leaves Laurel perilously dangling from the end. It’s not clear just how much danger Laurel and Hardy were actually in filming the scene; they were not as insanely dedicated to thrill comedy as Lloyd was. Though we get a few vertiginous shots looking down at the ground below and making us all too aware of the fate awaiting Our Heroes if they fall, for the most part the backgrounds are process screens, and not too convincing process screens at that. (Hal Roach’s studio wasn’t known for the quality of its process work; the chase scene that ends 1932’s County Hospital is nowhere nearly as thrilling – or as funny – as it could have been with better process effects.) I suspect the boys were really shambling around on those girders, but they were more or less safely inside a soundstage and if they’d fallen, they’d only have had about 12 feet to fall instead of hundreds, which would have been fatal. Liberty has a great if a bit tasteless ending sequence: the boys finally get the elevator back to their level and use it to descend off the building, only as it lands it squishes the cop who’d been chasing them all movie and he emerges in little-person size. Russ Peck boasted before the showing that he was going to use the authentic 1920’s song “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” to accompany this sequence, and it worked marvelously. After we got home Charles had an interesting comment on the bill: he said that each of the three movies were more plotless than its predecessor. Putting Pants on Philip had an interesting and well-developed through line; Two Tars also had a through line, though not as strong a one; and Liberty was just a series of disconnected incidents with little to hold them together.