Last night’s Silent Movie Night at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park featured Steven Ball, who both in his Sunday appearance the day before at the usual 2 p.m. organ concert and last night made a big to-do about how he regularly plays the world’s largest indoor organ — the one built in Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City between 1929 and 1933, which I knew about because PBS recently showed a documentary about the in-progress restoration of it (and which, with spectacular ill timing, was built just when theatre organs and the people who played them were reeling from the double whammy of talking pictures and the Depression). Ball is an excellent theatre organist and silent-film accompanist, and for his half-hour mini-recital in advance of the movie (since the people in charge at the Pavilion wait until darkness falls to run the film) he played William Stocking’s march to celebrate the opening of Boardwalk Hall (the place was built to be huge enough that a football game could be played on its floor, and the reason its organ had to be so big was so the sound could carry throughout the hall), a “Total Eclipse Quickstep” by 19th century composer E. Mack written to celebrate an 1869 total eclipse in Philadelphia (the day before he’d played three other eclipse-themed pieces, including the “Eclipse” section from the end of Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon, the “Eclipse Waltz” from G. Kunz’ Flowers of the Ball Room, and Charles W. Nathan’s “Eclipse Galop”), and a medley of songs from The Sound of Music which I liked better than the Wizard of Oz medley he’d performed the day before even though I generally like the score for The Wizard of Oz better than that for The Sound of Music.
Ball ignored “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” and the songs Richard Rodgers added to the original Sound of Music score for the film version, “Confidence in Me” and “Something Good” (the original librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II, had died before the film was made — indeed, The Sound of Music was the last project he ever worked on — so Rodgers wrote both words and music for the new songs). But the pieces he did play — “The Sound of Music,” “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,” “My Favorite Things,” “Do-Re-Mi,” “The Lonely Goatherd,” “So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye,” “Edelweiss,” “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and a reprise of “The Sound of Music” to close — at least provided a representative picture of the score. The featured movie was Seven Chances, a 1925 production by Joseph M. Schenck directed by and starring Buster Keaton, who according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster was unhappy with the project because Schenck had bought the rights to a hit play by Roi Cooper Megrue about a young broker named Jimmie Shannon (Buster Keaton) who’s the junior partner in a financial firm that’s about to go under because they took on a corrupt client. (This is an interesting premise for a movie made four years before the Depression and suggests that a lot of people — including the authors of the song “Buckle Up Your Overcoat,” in which among the dangers the singer warns his lover against is “stocks and bonds” because “you’ll get a pain and ruin your bankroll” — were skeptical of the late-1920’s stock bubble, enough so that their doubts filtered into popular culture.) An outside attorney (Snitz Edwards) shows up with a will from Jimmie’s uncle, who’s just died and left him $7 million (in 1925 dollars!) provided he’s married by his 27th birthday. Of course, Jimmie’s 27th birthday is that very day. I’m not sure how Megrue’s play, originally produced by David Belasco (who had such a major reputation then his name is in bigger letters on the credits than Megrue’s!) “played” on stage, and the early parts of the movie may be quite close to it, but for the second half of this film Keaton turned its story into a framework for his typical slapstick antics, including elaborate “trajectory” gags and … well, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Seven Chances begins with a short prologue in two-strip Technicolor (though, alas, the footage is badly faded and no attempt has been made to restore it) in which Jimmie Shannon visits the home of his lady love, Mary Jones (Ruth Dwyer, who doesn’t have enough screen time to make the surprisingly spunky screen presence of Keaton’s best silent-era leading ladies, Kathryn McGuire, Marion Mack and Marceline Day), but can’t muster up the nerve to tell her he loves her. In the opening scene he has a puppy on a leash and with each new season (the sequences are spread at three-month intervals and reflect the changes of season) the dog is larger. So when Jimmie gets the word that he has to marry that day to collect his inheritance, Mary is the first person he proposes to — only he blows it by saying he has to marry someone that day to get his inheritance, and the more he tries to explain, the more she thinks she’s being used and turns him down. (Keaton’s acting is a finely honed fiesta of comic embarrassment and one could well imagine the young Cary Grant playing this scene if Seven Chances had been remade in the early 1930’s.) Jimmie’s friend and business partner, Billy Meekin (T. Roy Barnes), has a list of seven potential brides for him — hence the title — only Keaton strikes out with all of them as well as his own receptionist (played by the young Jean Arthur in the Louise Brooks helmet-like bob) and a similarly bobbed hat-check girl. Then the film, which up until now has been a quite amusing romantic comedy, really becomes special: Billy and the Snitz Edwards character hit on the idea of getting the evening newspaper to run a story about Jimmie’s plight, announcing that he’s in line for $7 million and “all he needs is a bride.” After an exhausting search for someone — anyone — to marry him (including a famous sequence in which Jimmie sees a poster of a beautiful woman outside a theatre, then a crate blocking part of the poster is removed and we see the “woman” is really the well-known female impersonator Julian Eltinge, who was famous enough in 1925 the original audiences got the joke immediately: it would have been like doing the same gag in the 1990’s with RuPaul), Jimmie makes it to the church where he’s been told that if he shows up by 5 p.m. there will be a bride waiting for him — and promptly falls asleep in the front pew. When he wakes up the church is filled with a small army of women in bridal dress, all carrying bouquets and all grimly determined to be the lucky one. The minister shows up and tells the women they’ve been the victims of a nasty practical joke, and rather than simply slink away in disappointment they form a sort of unofficial posse, determined to catch Jimmie and have their nasty revenge on him.
The film originally ended with a grimly funny chase scene through the streets of 1925 Los Angeles (like a lot of other comedy filmmakers, Keaton shot on real locations) with Keaton chased by that army of hatchet-faced women much the way he was by the small army of police officers who were after him in his 1922 short masterpiece Cops while he tries to make it back to the church so he can marry Mary, who in the meantime has thought it over, decides she really loves Jimmie after all and isn’t going to let her peeve over his unorthodox proposal put her off. For some reason, though, this sequence laid an egg when Keaton previewed it; his audience sat stone-faced during the entire chase and laughed only when he accidentally tripped over three rocks. (Our source for this story is Keaton himself, in an interview he gave to biographer Rudi Blesh in the last year of his life.) With a potential bomb on his hands, Keaton realized that his movie needed radical surgery to be releasable, so he figured, “If they laughed at me tripping over three rocks, they’ll laugh harder if I do a chase scene with hundreds of rocks.” Accordingly he had a set of prop boulders made in giant size — he tried making them out of papier-maché but that was too light to look convincing on screen, so he settled on plaster; they still look lighter than real rocks but not so light they aren’t believable — and though some members of our audience were wondering why the town in which the movie takes place is surrounded by hilly desert country, the final chase is a brilliantly inventive sequence in which Jimmie seems to be in as much mortal danger from the disappointed brides as he is from the avalanche, and it’s only in the nick of time that he finally gets to Mary’s house where Mary, the minister and Billy are waiting. Only according to Jimmie’s watch, the time is 7:02 p.m. — two minutes over the deadline — and though Mary is still willing to marry him, he doesn’t want to subject her to a life of penury and disgrace. (Keaton is sometimes criticized in comparison to Charlie Chaplin for not doing pathos, but his acting here is as bittersweet and moving as anything in Chaplin’s work despite his typical “Great Stone Face” understatement.) Then, in an ending Megrue and/or Keaton’s writers (Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell) may have ripped off from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, Jimmie goes outside and sees the clock in the church steeple, which reads two minutes before seven — so Jimmie gets both his bride and his money, and in the end he and Mary are kissing in front of her house when they’re overwhelmed by his dog, now at Great Dane size.
Though Keaton reportedly hated this film and didn’t want his friend Raymond Rohauer to restore it along with Keaton’s other features, Seven Chances emerges as a comedy classic, a brilliantly funny and subversive movie which runs roughshod over quite a few conventions, including some surprisingly Gay scenes (not only the Eltinge gag but also a sequence in which Billy, thinking he needs to give Jimmie a lesson in how to propose, gets on his knee and offers marriage to Snitz Edwards) and nervy racial gags (one woman Jimmie proposes to doesn’t know a word of English because she’s Jewish, which we realize when we see her reading a Yiddish-language newspaper in Hebrew script; another turns out to be Black — and there’s also a Black woman among the army in the church, surprising since in 1925 no U.S. state allowed a Black and white couple to marry) as well as some of Keaton’s spectacular acrobatic “trajectories.” Later, when sound came in, his marriage collapsed, he lost his berth at Joseph Schenck’s independent studio and thus artistic control over his career, and he responded to all this by drinking a lot (with his typical lack of sentimentality, in a late-in-life interview Keaton responded to a question about his alcoholism by saying, “No, I wasn’t an alcoholic — I was a drunk!”), Keaton started using stunt doubles, but in 1925 he did all his own stunts — including a life-threatening fall from a construction crane (one of the nastier women has impaled him on the end of it and is swinging him around on it) as well as some spectacular slides down hillsides during the chase scene with the rocks. (Indeed, Keaton would sometimes dress up as characters in other movies and, unbeknownst to those films’ stars and directors, do stunts for them: director Allan Dwan recalled that in his 1929 film Tide of Empire he saw someone he thought was just an extra do a spectacular pratfall out of a Western saloon, and after he called “Cut!” he realized that the man was Keaton.) I was also intrigued by the large man who briefly gets in Snitz Edwards’ way early on as he’s chasing Jimmie with the news of his inheritance, who looked enough like Keaton’s filmmaking mentor, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, I wondered if it was indeed he — if Keaton was helping out Arbuckle by giving him a day’s work in a barely recognizable bit part three years after Arbuckle’s star career had been destroyed by scandal.
