So the other night Chris was clicking around the dial, and he ran across a show that was showing clips of American silent movies. Fun to see, since we used to enjoy attending the silent movie shows at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto years ago when we lived in California. People like Buster Keaton were sheer genius, and I hadn’t known anything about Pearl White, who was the star of the Perils of Pauline and other action/adventure films, but after we saw the clips I looked her up on the internet. Known as the Queen of the Serials, Ms. White even did her own stunts! Anyway, at one point I was missing some of the nuance of the plot of one of the old silent movie clips, so I asked Chris to turn the volume up so I could hear the dialog better.

You read that correctly. You see, it turned out that these silent movie clips on German TV were shown with dialog dubbed in German that was timed to match the mouth movements of the actors. These movies were being shown without title cards in any language, and just with that German dubbed dialog.

Let’s see, an American silent movie with spoken dialog in German. Such an odd viewing experience on so many levels.

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BTW, the title of this post comes from the old Simon and Garfunkel song, The Sound of Silence. It has nothing to do with silent movies, nor is it from a Broadway show, but I thought I’d mention it here anyway. 😉

On the other hand, the song that always comes to mind when watching clips of silent movies is the song Movies were Movies, from the musical Mack and Mabel. I grew up listing to the Broadway soundtrack from that show with Robert Preston playing Mack Sennett, but I didn’t find that version on YouTube.  Instead here’s George Hearn singing the musical’s ode to classic silent movies. During an non-singing interlude in the performance, there are some clips of classic Sennett comedies shown with just a bit of music underscoring the action. A different kind of sound of silence — er silent — movies.