I failed terribly last night when showing The General. I don’t know what I did wrong.

As I’ve said before and told the audience before the showing, The General is a complex movie. It’s a comedy, but it’s also a war movie. A train collapses into a gorge. Soldiers die on screen. I expect people to laugh at the funny parts. I don’t expect them to laugh at the deaths. I tried to underscore the mood of each scene, as I always do. It didn’t work.

In a silent movie, the accompanist has the responsibility of underscoring the emotional tone of each scene. It has to be done at the right level. Do it insincerely, and it won’t work. It will seem like mockery. Is that what I did?

I noticed what was happening during the movie. It threw my playing off a bit, though I kept going as I always have to. At first I thought that the laughter was directed at the Confederates, who were the “good guys” in the movie but aren’t in our perspective today. But there’s one scene was is especially jarring and showed it wasn’t that. Keaton’s Johnny Gray walks into a group of Confederate artillery men. A Union sniper is lying on the ground, taking aim at them. Three of them fall over and die, leaving Keaton alone with the gun. Their deaths drew gales of laughter. OK, maybe it’s because they were fighting on the side of slavery. But then Keaton accidentally makes a gun go off in the direction of the sniper, and we see him lying dead. They laughed just as hard at that. There was also laughter at the dismay of the Union soldiers when the bridge collapsed with a train on it.

I was told it was because their deaths weren’t “real.” Of course they weren’t. Darth Vader didn’t actually kill Alec Guinness. Ali McGraw didn’t die while making Love Story.

Was it the lack of blood? The actors just fell over without any sign of a wound. Are audiences so used to gory movies that they can’t consider movie deaths “real” unless they see flesh and bones flying? But in the stage musical Les Miserables, characters died in battle without graphic representation of their injuries. Javert jumped into an imaginary lake with no water and drowned; the audience didn’t laugh at that.

Did my playing make it all seem ridiculous? I don’t know. I’d planned to put the audio up on YouTube, but it would clearly include all that laughter. I just know it all went wrong.

Update, July 24: I’ve looked for articles on silent film accompaniment, and I’m starting to think I need to cut back on what’s called “Mickey Mousing” in the trade, having musical effects concretely reflect what’s happening in the film. For instance, having a surprise chord just as Buster takes a surprising fall. I got compliments on my timing on these, but done too much, they pull the audience’s focus into the gags, when there’s a lot more in the movie. The other approach, and probably a better one, is to let the music reflect the overall tone of the scene, including feelings and foreshadowings which aren’t explicitly in the scene. For example, Buster rushes off to enlist, and he’s so nervous he falls over. I used an accented chord for his fall. Another approach would have been to use music that emphasized his eagerness and nervousness but didn’t follow his actions moment for moment. It’s something I’ll keep in mind in my future efforts. In a heavily slapstick movie, like One Week a certain amount of Mickey Mousing works, but for a more complex film like The General, it can and possibly did throw the audience off.