INTERVIEW: Cutting loose with the Dodge Brothers

Silent films belonged to their audience in a way long forgotten to today’s cinema goers. Films were often distributed to cinemas with only a scanty musical score that granted the cinema’s local musicians huge freedom to improvise at will. Popular local songs would connect the audience to the glamorous product of distant Hollywood, providing a one-off experience of the film that was theirs alone. So it was a rare treat when on Sunday the Cambridge audience was treated to a unique experience of William Wellman’s 1928 melodrama BEGGARS OF LIFE accompanied by a live performance from skiffle band, The Dodge Brothers.

BEGGARS OF LIFE is a late silent film starring Louise Brooks as a girl who murders her violent foster father and ends up in cahoots with a young tramp as they attempt to escape to Canada. The Dodge Brothers features Mike Hammond, an expert on pre-war and silent film; film critic Mark Kermode; Aly Hirji; and Alex Hammond, and this performance included ‘honorary’ Dodge Brother, master silent film accompanist Neil Brand, on the piano.

It may seem odd to pair a 1920s film with a band who define themselves through 1950s America; skiffle, rockabilly, and artists like Jimmy Rogers. Yet, the band argues, though their instrumentation might confine their music to a certain era, their attitude mirrors that of the film, while being accessible to a 2010 audience.

It was Neil Brand who introduced the band to the idea of accompanying silent films a year ago, and his idea to put them together with BEGGARS OF LIFE when he performed with it a year before that. “As I was playing I was thinking Oh My God this is a Dodge Brothers Movie” he exclaims, “It’s trains, it’s hobos, it’s threat of prison, threat of death, and drunkenness!” Long before this, Kermode had described the band’s main preoccupations as “trains, heartbreak, alcohol and death”. Ideologically speaking then; a perfect match!

In fact BEGGARS OF LIFE speaks of an older America in many of its themes. The runaways drift across the rail network, bumping into “Hobo Jungles” of other outcasts; this is Steinbeck’s dispossessed America of the 1930s – a far darker, dreamier America than that the film’s pre-Crash 1928. Emotionally there is much overlap between the yearning harmonica and mandolin of the band’s music and the characters’ quest for a quiet place to rest playing out on the screen.

Everyone knows that if you put a horror film on mute, it instantly loses its potency. Soundtracks pull out the emotional thread of the film, and can suck an audience into its world. Conversely, a poor soundtrack can confine a film to a certain era and truncate its meaning. Brand laments that he has heard that METROPOLIS is to be re-released on dvd with only its 1920s soundtrack. “The score from the 1920s is very classical” he explains.”It makes a mockery of the modern futuristic world because if anything the score is a little dull by 1920s standards.”

In 1984 Giorgio Moroder provided a contemporary soundtrack to METROPOLIS, which included pop tracks from Adam Ant, Freddie Mercury, and Bonnie Tyler. Though not a fan of this controversial version, Brand believes that if it wasn’t for Moroder’s re-release of the film we wouldn’t have METROPOLIS today. “The bottom line is it kept METROPOLIS in people’s lives”, he says.

The band agree that it is vital to keep silent films relevant to new audiences by rethinking their soundtracks. “It’s the only way the films are going to survive into future generations”, argues Brand. Hammond agrees: “It’s important to perform the function that live bands did perform, which was to connect the film with its audience.” Live music has the ability to bring a film to life for its audience, whether localising it to a neighbourhood, or to a generation.

FIONA SCOBLE

BEGGARS OF LIFE with live  accompaniment from the Dodge Brothers was screened on Sunday 19 September