As much as they would have liked to, the Hayes office, the censorship board of the 1920s, could not touch "Sadie Thompson," the 1928 silent film classic.
The lack of sound was the very thing which saved the film from being cut to ribbons by the censorship boards of the 1920s -- and it was this sound that the Dartmouth Wind Symphony brought to the film on Friday in Spaulding Auditorium.
In the original movie, lead actress Gloria Swanson was free to mouth off whatever she liked to her co-star Lionel Barrymore without fear of being censored. The directness of the language and the vastly more tame renditions written in white on black which followed produced a few chuckles.
Although the movie begins as a comedy -- at first Barrymore's character seems to be a humorous foil for Sadie, a straight-laced dupe placed on Pago-Pago solely for the purpose of generating laughs -- the film takes a dark turn about a third of the way through.
Turrin's score captures this shift with remarkable clarity. While most of the score in the opening of the film is swinging Dixieland and ragtime, the music becomes very dark and tense towards the end.
Nonetheless Turrin's score was at times overly dramatic and heavy, and while humor was injected throughout the movie, even in its darker moments, sometimes the score bulldozed over the levity.
The Dartmouth Wind Symphony did a remarkable job, for the most part blending song effortlessly with the action of the film. The excitement of having live musicians perform the music brought back a historic multimedia experience.
