Silents by the Sea

‘Silents by the Sea’ is one of a number of events organised by the volunteers working on bringing back Morecambe’s Winter Gardens, opened in 1897, as a music venue with 1,600 seats. The building is Morecambe’s premier heritage site ( and has recently received two significant grants to get work started. ‘Silents by the Sea’ is part of a programme of events from Northern Silents and this was the final event for 2024 involving three sessions. I could only get to the afternoon ‘Comedy Silents’ slot.

The programme was very well selected I think with four short films – three ‘2-reelers’ from Hollywood and a 10 minute film from France. They were all shown on the big screen to a healthy crowd and accompanied by the excellent Jonny Best on piano. First up was a Laurel and Hardy film from 1927 confusingly titled Duck Soup (the well-known Marx Brothers film with the same title was released in 1933, but it’s a completely different film). According to Simon Louvish in his book Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy (2001) Duck Soup was the first genuine film of the partnership between Laurel and Hardy and was faithfully adapted from the stage play/sketch Home from the Honeymoon by Arthur J. Jefferson. Louvish suggests that perhaps this was performed by Stan Laurel on stage in the North of England in 2005 and revived and revised for American audiences.

The plot is familiar from more recent stories of someone taking over a house while the owners are away and then panicking when they return. In this case Stan and Ollie are vagrants enjoying sitting on a park bench when they realise that the military are rounding up vagrants to press-gang them to fight forest fires threatening Los Angeles – a very live issue these days! Our comic heroes escape despite a chase and stumble across a large mansion which has just seen the departure of its owner on a hunting expedition overseas. The two servants lock up the house with instructions displayed for anyone who wants to rent the property for a couple of months. Stan and Ollie enter the house and begin to settle in when a couple of ‘swells’ ring the bell and announce they are on their honeymoon and have rented the house. Stan and Ollie quickly adopt the guise of servants – Stan in drag as the maid. Already Ollie is being portrayed as the organiser of their adventures and Stan casts himself as the creator of mayhem. Glorious chaos follows.

I’ve always been aware of Harold Lloyd’s amazing stunts but I don’t think I’ve watched a full length film before. High and Dizzy (1920) was something of a revelation. Produced and directed by Hal Roach and distributed by Pathé Exchange, this one of a batch of two-reelers featuring Lloyd as the ‘boy with glasses’ on the make. In this case he is masquerading as a doctor but also involved in a moonshine operation. When a young woman is brought to his ‘surgery’ with a sleep-walking condition he is immediately smitten. Her uncle sees through his doctor scam and Lloyd and his partner end up drinking all their hooch when it starts exploding out of the bottles. Drunk as a skunk, Harold somehow ends up in a large hotel stumbling across the sleep-walking girl played by Mildred Davis (who he married in 1923). The hotel and specifically the ledge overlooking the street several floors below becomes the location for daredevil stunts. Harold does get the girl with a well thought-out ending. Overall both funny and astonishingly well-performed.

Max Linder (1883-1925) was a multi-talented filmmaker, a producer-director-performer active from 1905. His 1910 film Max takes a bath, is a single-reeler about a man who is prescribed cold baths to cure the ‘twitch’ in his left shoulder. He buys a bath and struggles to get it back to the rooming-house where he lives. Once home he takes into his room but the water supply is on the landing. He drags the bath there, fills it, strips off and slides in. But the women of the house are not impressed and a street fellow (an ‘apache’?) decides to join him. A dispute develops and Max is arrested. The one innovation here is that Max escapes from the police station carrying the bath over his body and when he reaches his home he climbs up the outside wall, just like a giant insect (a wood louse?). The quality of the print, originally distributed by Pathé, is very good for 1910 but French plumbing remains mysterious! Linder has some claim to be the first international film comedy star but his later career foundered when he moved to America.

The final film was billed as featuring the ‘female Laurel and Hardy’. There are other claimants to that title as well but Anita Garvin and Marion Byron certainly have links to Laurel and Hardy. A Pair of Tights (1929) is a late silent comedy shot at the Hal Roach studio and featuring production and possibly story by Leo McCarey who would have a very successful career as a writer-director later in the 1930s. The two women don’t adopt the same personae as Stan and Ollie but there is a physical difference between the women that does possibly match Stan and Ollie. Anita Garvin is tall and rather stern/dour compared to the shorter and more ‘bubbly’ Marion Byron. They share rooms together and on this day they have no money and are very hungry. Then Marion remembers that her boyfriend is going to bring his boss over – perhaps they can persuade the boss to take them all out for a meal? But the boss (and the boyfriend) turn out to be ‘tightwads’, spending as little as possible on the women. Nevertheless the women try hard to inveigle the boss into taking them out and he eventually relents. When their car is passing an ice cream parlour Marion persuades him to stop so she can buy four cornets (with his money). But fate will not allow this. Marion will make repeated attempts to carry four cornets back to the car but each time a different calamity will befall her. It’s the only real gag of the film apart from a few familiar pratfalls but it gets better and better as each new calamity is presented and eventually the whole pavement outside the parlour is covered by a throng of people sliding about.

This was a very enjoyable event despite the arctic wind sweeping through the auditorium. There is still a long way to go in refurbishing a building that is over 125 years old as Prof. Vanessa Toulmin, Chair of the Morecambe Winter Gardens Preservation Trust, explained to us in her introduction. Northern Silents was formerly Yorkshire Silent Film Festival and changed its name to focus on developing these programmes in Lancashire and Cumbria as well (Morecambe was once known as Leeds/Bradford by the Sea because of its historic rail links). I look forward to future events. You can find out more on the website. Here’s some reaction to previous events: