The live orchestral accompaniments, by their very nature, have been unique. Also, the prints of the films themselves have been of better-than-average quality.
In every other way, though, the silent classics featured on the Utah Symphony's Cinema Series to date have been movies you might also have viewed at home via the occasional public-television broadcast or on home video.Not so the 1924 "Peter Pan." Here is a movie so rare that, despite its reputation, only two or three prints are known to exist in the world. Indeed, it's so hard to run down that several people are flying in from out of state to catch the symphony's screening of it Friday and Saturday, Feb. 17 and 18, at Abravanel Hall. And, to put this in perspective, you might be interested in knowing that one of them is Stan Laurel's daughter.
"My mother was in that picture!" Lois Laurel Hawes reportedly exclaimed when the president of the local Laurel and Hardy fan club mentioned this week's symphony showing at last summer's convention of the Sons of the Desert in New York. "I'm coming to see it!"
"It's true," Hawes confirms from her home in California. "She went by the name of Lois Nielsen then and was one of the mermaids. She almost drowned."
To Hawes' knowledge, her mother never actually saw the completed film, however. "I once asked her why and she said, `Well, you did your work every day, you went home and you didn't have time to go to a movie.' " Then, in 1926, she retired from the screen to marry Stan Laurel. The following year "Lois Jr." was born.
Hawes has fond memories of not only her dad but also "Babe" Hardy. "It was like having two fathers," she says, recalling happy visits to the studio where many of the now-immortal Laurel and Hardy comedies were being filmed.
"Today when I watch some of them, I can remember seeing actual shots, including the dunking scene in `Babes in Toyland.' "
"Peter Pan," however, has proven far more elusive.
"We're always looking for still photographs and posters," she says of her and her husband, retired British TV producer Tony Hawes, noting that some of the latter currently fetch as much as $5,000 on the collectors' market. "Then when my mother came to live with us in 1986 we tried to borrow a videotape of it, but couldn't. So I've never seen it either. But we've got our tickets."
Another longtime "Peter Pan" buff is film historian Richard Bann, who first caught up with it via a semi-private showing at a film convention in the early '70s.
"I was absolutely transfixed," he says, "and immediately tried to buy a 16-millimeter print, but you couldn't. It's the one silent feature film I want and can't get. It's virtually a lost film."
A great one, too, Bann believes.
"In my opinion it's the definitive version of `Peter Pan,' " he proclaims. "First of all, it's a silent film, and fantasy or comedy are always going to work better in a silent film because they require the viewer's imagination. Then Herbert Brenon was an important director" (his other credits include the 1926 "Beau Geste"). And most importantly the other versions, stage or screen, didn't have Betty Bronson as their star."
Seen today, Bronson's performance is indeed one of the film's major strengths. Personally approved by the play's author, Sir James M. Barrie, the winsome New Jersey teenager is alternately plucky, high-spirited and wistful as the boy who never grew up.
"Her charm and grace and mischief are so exhilarating," Bann states. "If Paramount had used her right, she could have been another Mary Pickford." Instead Bronson's career bogged down in a series of less suitable vehicles (including a couple of westerns) before she retired from the screen in the early '30s to marry a wealthy Southerner. (Frank Capra later brought her back for his "Pocketful of Miracles" in 1961.)
Someone else who retired early to marry was "Peter Pan's" other teenage star, Mary Brian, after leading roles in "Beau Geste," "The Virginian," "The Front Page" and W.C. Fields' "The Man on the Flying Trapeze." Today she lives quietly in Studio City, Calif., and says she'd also be at Friday's screening - which, as it happens, is on her 87th birthday - except for a shoulder injury that kept her from coming to Park City for the holidays.
"My godson, Stuart Erwin Jr., has a home up there and has had me up every year," she says cheerfully. "But I'm afraid I'm only flying on one wing these days."
Back in 1924 the then-16-year-old Brian flew on wires, making her motion-picture debut as Wendy.
"I had met Albert Kaufman, Jesse Lasky's brother-in-law," Brian recalls, "and he told me they were using a lot of young folks as background in `Peter Pan.' So I thought I was trying out for maybe one of the little fairies.
"Well, Herbert Brenon had just had eye surgery and was in his office with the lights out, except for a spotlight trained on the person he was interviewing. I actually think it put me at ease - I certainly wasn't experienced with interviews - and he decided then and there I should play Wendy."
Brenon later went on to direct Brian in four more films, including one, "The Little French Girl," with "Peter Pan's" Mrs. Darling, Esther Ralston, who became a lifelong friend.
"We remained in close contact the rest of our lives," Brian states. "She even named her first child after me. I was so upset when she died last year in Ventura."
Brian also remembers Brenon as being "wonderful to me always, even though he was supposed to be quite a taskmaster. I think he felt I was his protegee." At the same time, she admits work on "Peter Pan" was such that "it made everything after that seem easy.
"We literally worked around the clock. When we did the bedroom scene where we flew, they had two men with piano wire hanging down and had to make runways up above so the two of them could go from bed to bureau and so forth. And when they had to change the planks they would just put us to bed in the nursery, then wake us up later to do the scene."
To this day, Brian maintains, "Peter Pan" is her favorite of all the Barrie plays, "a lovely story. The last time I saw it was 10 or 12 years ago when the people from Eastman, who have a hand-tinted print, came out from Rochester, N.Y., for a screening at a theater on Wilshire Boulevard."
As she recalls, the only other member of the cast who was there was Philippe de Lacey, who played her brother John and is today the only surviving cast member besides herself.
What she found herself remembering, though, were the people who weren't there, among them Bronson - "a wonderful Peter Pan" - and Ernest Torrence, an almost-forgotten character actor whose flamboyant portrayal of Capt. Hook is one of the 1924 film's more delightful assets.
"He was so outrageous as the villain," Brian says, "but was such a very charming man."
Another of the movie's strengths is its camerawork, by the soon-to-be-great cinematographer James Wong Howe. In other ways, however, Brian acknowledges that much of it looks very dated today "because things have progressed so technically." (The crocodile, for example, is clearly a man in a crocodile suit.)
But, she points out, that didn't keep audiences from enjoying it then, especially the younger members.
"The children in the theaters were just awestruck," she recalls, something that extended to the personal appearances she and other members of the cast made around the country to help promote the film. "Always they wanted me to fly, and I had to tell them I didn't have my fairy dust with me. Otherwise they'd have been disappointed."
Donald Hunsberger, who is conducting next weekend's performances (and bringing with him the same Eastman House print Brian saw in Los Angeles), says the film has the same effect on young audiences today.
"Both adults and children are drawn into the film very early," he says, "when they see the dog do the nurse's work and the father portrayed as such a simpleton. But the kids I've been able to watch often get so entranced with what's going on that they don't have the verbal or other reactions the adults have. It's almost as if they become mesmerized, especially when we get to the spot where Tinker Bell is about to die from having drunk the poison Hook has left out for Peter.
"I think it's one of the great unknown films," he adds, "due to the fact that the only original nitrate negative rests in the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography." And, despite the various remakes (including Walt Disney's animated 1953 film) and stage versions, Hunsberger believes that in many ways the 1924 Paramount film is truer to the original story.
"They make the kids Americans," he admits, "but I don't know if it's any farther from Never Never Land to New York than it is to London."
The music the symphony will be performing Friday and Saturday is also a step closer to the original. Except for last season's "City Lights" (which used Chaplin's own score), Hunsberger's previous silent-film outings locally have all used scores compiled by him from film-music libraries of the period. In the case of "Peter Pan," however, the original Paramount cue sheet was discovered in the Eastman library, together with a good deal of the music.
Where that wasn't available, other pieces have been plugged in (such as Grainger's "Children's March" in place of the title music, now lost). Elsewhere, though, the audience will hear the very pieces the filmmakers prescribed, including the Ballet Music from Schubert's "Rosamunde" as Mr. Darling's theme and "Moonbeams Shining" from Victor Herbert's "The Red Mill" as Wendy and Peter sit on the edge of the bed together.
"It's actually a very theme-oriented show," Hunsberger explains, adding that the original compiler, James C. Bradford, used more classical sources than was usual for him.
"Thus Capt. Hook's theme is Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G minor and, when the boys shoot Wendy, Saint-Saens' `The Swan' is played." He also admits to making a few substitutions of his own in those places the cue sheet called for "some really dreadful pieces." Still, he believes the result is "basically the original sheet, but adapted the same way any local music director or pianist would have, based on their own library holdings and their own individual musical tastes."
So, if you come, you won't be hearing the songs from the Jean Arthur or Mary Martin stage musicals (the first of which had music by Leonard Bernstein), or even the Disney film. But you will, by and large, be hearing and seeing the show that undoubtedly influenced the creation of those, along with a good many others.
(I remember some years ago reading an interview with screenwriter Stewart Stern in which he acknowledged having based his screenplay for the 1955 James Dean film "Rebel Without a Cause" on "Peter Pan," which he had seen as a child.)
You'll also have a chance to savor Bronson's and Torrence's performances as well as a few now-classic title cards (my favorite being the one that reads, "Peter appeals to the Mermaid Queen"). But in that same mermaid sequence you can try to spot Lois Laurel Hawes' mother and, earlier, try to figure out how they did Tinker Bell (who here is portrayed alternately by a light bulb and a live actress).
Either way, be prepared to clap your hands if you believe in fairies.
Starting time both Friday and Saturday is 8 p.m., with tickets priced from $14 to $22 ($6 students). For information call 533-NOTE.