Silent Movies Made Musical with the Mighty Wurlitzer

Sponsored by Bahl & Gaynor Investment Council, The Friends of Music Hall presents our popular silent film concert series featuring master organist Clark Wilson mastering the Albee Theatre Mighty Wurlitzer organ in Music Hall Ballroom while screening five short films featuring Laurel and Hardy.

Laurel and Hardy were a British-American comedy duo during the early Classical Hollywood of American cinema, consisting of Englishman Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and American Oliver Hardy (1892–1957). Starting their career as a duo in the silent film era, they later successfully transitioned to “talkies”. From the late 1920s to the mid-1950s, they were internationally famous for their slapstick comedy, with Laurel playing the clumsy, childlike friend to Hardy's pompous bully.

Screening on April 13 are these favorites: That’s My Wife (1929), Leave ‘Em Laughing (1928), Putting Pants on Phillip (1927), Habeas Corpus (1928), and The Finishing Touch (1928). 

Since 1980 organist Clark Wilson has been one of the most prominent and recognized scorers of silent photoplays in America. With his own pipe organ business, he is skilled as a tonal consultant and finisher of both theatre and classical pipe organs. A skilled arranger, he develops accurate and historic musical accompaniments as they were performed in major picture palaces — such as Cincinnati’s Albee Theater, the original home of Music Hall’s Mighty Wurlitzer — during the heyday of silent films in the 1920s.

Joe Horine, a film historian and university teacher of courses in Cinema History as well as the films of Hitchcock and Kubrick, will host the program and lead a Q & A after the screenings.