The best movie you’ll see this summer wasn’t even made in this century. It’s showing Saturday night, August 1 at the Alabama Theatre, and there’s no soundtrack on the film. It’s action, it’s adventure, it’s Civil War comedy, replete with The Mighty Wurlitzer. It’s time to salute The General.
There’s a lot to be said for air conditioning during summer in Birmingham, as many of you who attended the Sloss Arts Fest will attest. In the early years of the 20th century, movie theaters and air conditioning were widely believed to have been our only civilizing influences, baseball excepted. In newspaper ads, movie theaters were not shy about festooning their logos with make-believe icicles to let a reader know just how frosty a visit to that particular emporium might be.
That trend would not have been possible without the Alabama Theatre. An honest-to-Hollywood movie palace, when its doors swung open in December 1927, it became the first public building in Alabama to be air-conditioned. In sweltering summers to follow, it is safe to speculate that many of the thousands of moviegoers who streamed into The Showplace of the South to catch a matinee didn’t much care what feature was showing, as long as a properly icy atmosphere was maintained.
Until 1927, there was no dialogue to be heard in movies, but “silent” movies were anything but. As early as 1895, when the Lumiere brothers accomplished the first public screening of a movie in Paris, there was a guitar player to accompany the showing. When Thomas Edison presented the first U.S. movie show in New York City the very next year, he upped the ante by having a full orchestra perform along with the picture.
When films were still short and shown in nickelodeons, music would be played between films, not during, according to Rick Altman, author of Silent Film Sound. As films became longer and were presented in variety houses, it was more likely that there would be music played during a film, since such venues generally had a house band on hand to accompany live entertainment.
Music during movies, to help tell the stories being shown on the screen, became customary nationwide in the second decade of the century. In municipalities too small to have a vaudeville house, local pianists were generally used to play along with movies, creating the stereotype of jangly piano with jumpy visuals that many people today associate with “silent movies.”
Actually, films of that era were photographed well and, projected at the proper speed, revealed considerable artistry. As movies became bigger and bigger business, young auteurs such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton were among those seeking to expand the language of cinema.
Keaton had grown up on the vaudeville circuit and had developed a sure sense of what would entertain an audience, especially physical comedy, which he executed flawlessly. Returning from service in World War I, he transitioned into moviemaking in New York City, becoming a co-star and writer in many popular Fatty Arbuckle comedies.
He started appearing in his own comedies starting in 1920, and he quickly made a name for himself as an audacious director, for whom no gag was too extreme and no stunt too dangerous. One of the most famous bits he devised occurs in Steamboat Bill, Jr., when he risked his life for a laugh by having the front of a house fall on top of him. Historian Jeffrey Vance once wrote, “Keaton’s comedy is a whirlwind of hilarious, technically precise, adroitly executed and surprising gags, very often set against a backdrop of visually stunning set pieces and locations—all this masked behind his unflinching, stoic veneer.”
This all comes together in Keaton’s masterpiece, The General, an ingenious movie that, pardon another quote, none other than Orson Welles called “the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.” Hyperbole? Not at all, especially if you see The General the way it was meant to be seen, on the big screen at the Alabama Theatre.
The bonus, if you come to see it on August 1: you’ll get to hear it the way it was meant to be heard.
When the Alabama was completed in late 1927, it was built around a splendid musical instrument called the Wurlitzer Opus 1783, Style Publix1, known henceforth to generations of Birminghamians as The Mighty Wurlitzer. Visually striking, with its red console and gold trim, the giant organ delivered rafter-rattling sound to delight the theater’s audiences. It still does today, thanks to the caregiving of the Alabama chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society, which refers to the organ lovingly as “Big Bertha.”
It takes a special musician to master Bertha’s four manuals and 289 stops. Such a player is Tom Helms, whom theater regulars will recognize for his annual Halloween visit to the Alabama to play live with the showing of the 1925 film version of The Phantom of the Opera. Though he will not be delivered to the stage in a coffin, as is his wont at Halloween, the Florida native will deliver more than an hour of music he has written himself to accompany the Keaton masterwork.
This is about as close to time travel as you can get without dilithium crystals. On August 1, you’ll be viewing one of the classic American movies, projected in a classic American theater, with a soundtrack provided by the very instrument Joe Alexander or Lillian Truss would have played for its showing in 1927. (About the only difference? Thanks to Brant Beene and the Birmingham Landmarks folks, the print you’ll see will be even sharper than the original would have been.)
If this summer’s offerings at the multiplex have left you meh, come see—and hear—The General at the Alabama for a little movie magic in the city.