In keeping with its name, the Nova Chamber Music Series generated a different kind of music Monday at the Museum of Fine Arts - the music of laughter. And I don't mean chuckles. I mean shrieks and howls of merriment, all directed at Harold Lloyd's 1925 silent-film comedy "The Freshman," screened as the series' second program of the season.
I don't know how old the woman sitting next to me was, but she was trying to remember if she had seen this movie as a child. On the other end of the spectrum, others in the audience couldn't have been more than 8 or 9. Yet they were likewise convulsed with laughter at the antics of Tate College freshman Harold Lamb (Lloyd), as he tries to become the big man on campus."I'm just a regular fellow - step right up and call me Speedy," Harold says to everyone, copying a line he himself has cribbed from a movie. Instead his classmates lure him into a series of comic misadventures without letting him in on the joke.
He's tricked into giving a welcoming speech with a kitten inside his sweater, then treating the whole class to ice cream (with the kitten bringing up the rear). The football coach ("so tough he shaves with a blowtorch," the title card informs us) turns him into a live tackling dummy before making him the team's water boy. His hastily-stitched-together tux comes apart piece by piece at the Fall Frolic. But finally, with no more players on the bench, he persuades the coach to put him in the big game with Union State where, to everyone's surprise, he scores the winning touchdown.
Obviously there's room for a lot of pain in that scenario. But Lloyd never lets the pain predominate. (Scenes were actually eliminated that showed him getting taken at the ice cream parlor and breaking down after the dance.) Rather the tears come from his marvelous sense of comic timing and inventiveness. Time and again he seems to know just when to spring a gag - and then when and how to top it.
That inventiveness was matched on this occasion, moreover, by the instrumental score of Shannon Roberts, director of the University of Utah Jazz Band and assistant director of the Marching Band.
Put together from an original cue sheet supplied by local silent-film collector Hunter Hale, it catches the mood of the era, and the picture, at nearly every turn.
Whether accompanying the beanie-topped Harold to Tate on the train (via a clever rhythmic segue from the song "Collegiate") or following his romance with the girl (Jobyna Ralston) he meets in the dining car (to the tune "Sweetheart"), the leitmotifs are aptly chosen and cunningly varied. Witness the minor-key treatments of the "I'm Just a Regular Fellow" theme and "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" following his humiliation at the dance. Or the lyrical handling of Fucik's "Entrance of the Gladiators" amid the mounting agony of the big game.
But the big moments are there as well, from the jazz-age music for the dance ("Yes, Sir, That's My Baby" and "Has Anybody Seen My Gal") to the last-minute dash to the goal line, here to "You've Got to Be a Football Hero" and a triumphant statement of the "Regular Fellow" theme.
The result, with Roberts directing the musicians to the left of the screen, was wonderfully flavorful, capturing the salon air of the sweeter music and the brassy edge of the rowdier stuff.
"We made the finish!" I heard Roberts exult backstage to producer William Sargent as I exited - a sentiment I'm sure Harold Lamb could relate to.