Three great comedy shorts get you laughing!
“Liberty,” 1929, is among three comedy shorts screened, with musical accompaniment by Walt Strony, at 4 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, at Peace Lutheran Church.
Start the new year with an evening of laughs! Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and the great Charley Chase will entertain you with their antics in three short comedies, with musical accompaniment by our inimitable Walt Strony at the organ. A production of Arts @ PEACE!
“Laurel and Hardy and Keaton are well-known, but Charley Chase isn’t well-known today,” says Walt, who chose these films to kick off our 2019 calendar of Silent Movies with Walt Strony. “Chase does have many loyal fans. His style is not slapstick, but he has some amazingly funny scenes.”
After the three films, please gather in the Fellowship Center for a wine-and-cheese reception. This event is a production of Arts @ PEACE. Admission is by donation; any gifts received will benefit the Peace Organ Fund and our effort to replace our aging organ with a new instrument capable of accommodating real pipes.
We’ll show “Liberty,” 1929, by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as two escaped convicts. They get their laughs by inadvertently exchanging their pants, then get chased onto a skyscraper under construction. (Watch for the crab!)
Keaton filmed “One Week” in 1920. It features the woes of two newlyweds who receive a build-it-yourself house – buildable in one week – as a wedding gift. The humor comes when a jilted suitor sabotages the instructions. “One Week” was preserved by the United States Film Registry for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” according to Cynthia Littleton, cited by Wikipedia.
Charley Chase was one of the great comedic actors of the 1920s. He filmed “Mighty Like a Moose” in 1926, produced by the great Hal Roach, who also produced Laurel and Hardy films and the “Our Gang” series. “Mighty Like a Moose” features a homely husband and wife who each uses plastic surgery to improve their looks. Some critics consider this Chase’s greatest film. “Mighty” also was preserved by the United States Film Registry, and it’s considered among the great silent shorts, according to film historian Leonard Maltin.
Vivien Oakland and Charley Chase portray spouses with protuberant features in a hilarious story of love, flirtation and surprise identities in the 1926 comedy, “Mighty Like a Moose.”
“My favorite scene in ‘Mighty’ is the fight Chase has with himself – for the benefit of his wife!” Walt says. “It’s brilliant and very clever. He was definitely a genius.”
In addition to accompanying the films on his own Walt Strony Signature Series theater organ, which is on loan to Peace, Walt will get us into the mood of the period with music that was popular in each of the years the films were created. Selections will include “Japanese Sandman” from 1920, “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” from 1926, and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” from 1929.