This Christmas Day, receive the gift of laughter with a program of vintage silent film comedy screened with live musical accompaniment at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre.
The screening, on Dec. 25 at 4:30 p.m., will be highlighted by classic slapstick from Laurel and Hardy, the most popular movie comedy team of all time.
The featured attraction is “Tramp Tramp Tramp” (1926), a full-length comedy starring Harry Langdon and written by a very young Frank Capra, who would later direct the classic Christmas film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Joan Crawford, at the very beginning of her career, co-stars with Langdon, a comedian whose popularity rivaled that of Charlie Chaplin for a brief period in the 1920s.
The family-friendly program will be presented at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre, 40 Main St., in Wilton. Admission is free; a donation of $5 per person is suggested to help defray expenses.
Live music will be provided by Jeff Rapsis, a New Hampshire-based silent-film accompanist who performs regularly at screenings around the nation.
In “Tramp Tramp Tramp,” Langdon plays a young man determined to rescue the family shoe business from a much larger manufacturer.
To win money, he enters a cross-country walking race, but things get complicated when be develops a hopeless crush on the daughter of the rival factory’s owner, whom he only knows through her picture on billboards.
Can Harry beat the odds, win the race, get the girl, and save the family business?
Langdon, a vaudeville performer and late-comer to silent film comedy, rocketed to sudden stardom in the late 1920s on the strength of “Tramp Tramp Tramp” and other popular movies. His character was that of an innocent child-like man constantly bewildered by the complexity of modern life. Unlike many comedians of the era, Langdon earned laughs not by overreacting, but instead by his extreme slowness to respond.
“It was a whole different way of doing comedy at the time, and was a breath of fresh air in the frenetic world of film comedy,” says Rapsis.
Langdon’s popularity fizzled as the movie business abruptly switched to talkies in the late 1920s.
As Langdon’s career faded, that of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy was taking off. Paired in 1927, the duo first became popular in the final years of silent film-making.
The Christmas Day program will feature one of the last silent comedy short subjects made by Laurel and Hardy before their successful switchover to sound.
’Big Business ‘ (1929) finds the pair selling Christmas trees door-to-door in sunny California, where their interaction with potential customers leads to everything but peace on earth and goodwill toward men.
The screenings will give local audiences a chance to experience silent film as it was meant to be seen – on a large screen, with live music, and with an audience.
“All those elements are important parts of the silent film experience,” said Rapsis, who improvises a movie’s musical score live during the screening. “Recreate those conditions, and the classics of early Hollywood leap back to life in ways that can still move audiences today.”
Rapsis performs on a digital keyboard that reproduces the texture of the full orchestra and creates a traditional “movie score” sound.