Bustered: Taking the hits for laughs
Big-budget silent movie with international accompanist to play Central Hawke's Bay
International and freelance organist Chris Hainsworth is touring New Zealand in February and March with an Organ Proms Concert featuring Scarlatti, Kreisler and Monti, Mendelssohn, Vaughan William, Saint-Saens and Bach’s Prelude and Triple Fugue in E flat.
But he’s making a detour in his road trip and his programme by travelling to the Central Hawke’s Bay Municipal Theatre in Waipawa to play piano accompaniment for the silent slapstick movie The General by Buster Keaton.
Chris grew up in Wellington and studied languages and music at Victoria University before heading for Toulouse, France, to complete his doctorate. He studied organ with Jean Ferrard in Brussels, Belgium, taught for 15 years at Waikato University and another 15 at the Beziers Conservatoire in the south of France and is now organist “titulaire” of the Cathedral of Beziers.
Chris is also keen on silent movies, which he has accompanied regularly for several decades in New Zealand and Europe, notably at the International Film Festivals of St Tropez, France, and Wroclaw, Poland.
His Waipawa performance will contribute to fundraising for the Takapau Health Centre Building Fund.
The General was a lavish production, filmed in 1926 with Keaton as the lead actor and the director, and was at the time the most expensive
silent film released, with an initial budget of US$400,000. The scene of a locomotive plummeting through a burning bridge was the most expensive single shot in silent film history.
The cast and crew were accompanied by 18 freight cars full of Civil War-era cannons, rebuilt passenger cars, stagecoaches, houses, wagons and labourers. They filmed in Cottage Grove in Oregon, United States, and employed 1500 locals.
But the film was a financial flop when originally released. The storyline re-enacted an actual wartime incident and reviewers questioned Keaton’s judgment in making a comedic film about the Civil War.
Today it is regarded as a masterpiece and Keaton’s crowning achievement, ranked among the greatest American films made, and in 1989 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Keaton performed dangerous stunts in the film, on and around the
moving train including jumping from the engine to a tender to a boxcar and running along the roofs of the railcars.
He was no stranger to stunt work, having been performing in his parents’ vaudeville act since he was 3.
“The Three Keatons” specialised in knockabout acrobatics, with the child thrown against the scenery, into the orchestra pit, or even into the audience. A suitcase handle was sewn into his clothing to aid with the
tossing. This led to accusations of child abuse, and occasionally, arrest, but Keaton learned to take trick falls safely and was rarely injured.
He also learned how to get laughs, discovering “the more serious I turned, the bigger laugh I got”, and adopted the deadpan expression that earned him the nickname “The Great Stone Face”. He never smiled on camera.
With the advent of “talkies”, Keaton was relegated to obscurity before being rediscovered by film lovers in the last years of his life. In 1959 he was honoured with a special Academy Award. Four months before his death, he received a five-minute standing ovation — the longest recorded — at the Venice Film Festival.
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him as the 21st-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema.