Stan Laurel was a well-known silent film actor before he teamed up with Oliver Hardy. I’ve uploaded his 1925 film, Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde, to YouTube with my accompaniment. The two-reel comedy plays off two earlier Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde films, both released in 1920. In this version, Laurel’s character turns into a prankster rather than a real menace. He escapes from the angry crowd by returning to Jekyll’s lab and drinking the reversing potion, but his supply is limited.
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My latest silent film upload with my accompaniment is the 1920 The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks. It’s one of the most libertarian films of the silent era, presenting a masked hero who fights against oppressive rulers in Spanish California. He wears a mask, appears when he is most needed, and has a secret identity as a rich but timid caballero. It’s obvious that he was part of the inspiration for Batman. The film was Fairbanks’ first role starring as an action hero.

As usual, the accompaniment is my improvised music, played on a Roland EX-50. For this movie, I wanted to sound a bit Mexican, so I did some research. It led to a wonderful discovery: the Spanish scale, which oddly enough is also the Jewish scale. The common source is the Sephardi Jews of the Middle Ages. I started noodling in that scale and, olé! It’s a tricky scale to use when creating harmonies; there’s no proper dominant chord. With some practice, I was able to weave between major, minor, and Spanish modes. Also, I tried to sound like a guitar in some scenes, as if I were a storyteller accompanying myself.
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Let’s start 2025 with one more silent movie accompanied by me: The 1925 The Lost World. This film, presenting a plateau populated by dinosaurs, uses stop-motion effects created by Willis O’Brien, who did the effects for King Kong a few years later. It still looks pretty good. It’s vastly better than the 1960 version directed by Irwin Allen. I saw that one as a kid and immediately recognized that it was using poorly disguised lizards as dinosaurs.

The movie is based on a novel of the same title by Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s one of three novels that featured Professor Challenger, a man with a brilliant mind, a large body, and a terrible temper. The other two have fallen into obscurity. He has received the diary of an explorer, Maple White, containing sketches of dinosaurs and pterosaurs supposedly living on a South American plateau. He is ridiculed for claiming these creatures are alive in his time, and he responds by organizing an expedition to find the plateau and its inhabitants. He finds plenty of them, brought to the screen with stop motion. After his party struggles to survive and escape, he brings a brontosaurus back to London, where it gets loose to cause panic and wreckage.
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September 29 is Silent Movie Day, and I’m participating with a short Méliès movie, The Haunted Castle or Le Manoir du Diable, for which I’ve provided improvised accompaniment.

And don’t forget my livestreaming of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on October 9 at 8 PM. I’ll also accompany it for a live audience at the Plaistow Library on October 11. Hopefully many of you will be able to make it for one or the other.