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FRIDAY: The Devil Music Ensemble presents Big Stakes at the
Movies on Exchange
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FRIDAY 26
Last fall the Devil Music Ensemble rolled into town and
played a live music score for the silent film The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari. Tonight they return with a much more obscure film and a country-style
score. The movie is Big Stakes, a western made in 1922 by
Clifford S. Elfelt. DME tracked down a print of this unknown movie and
is touring the nation with it and the score they’ve written. This is
hardly a restoration project, however. Back in the day, few directors
wrote or commissioned specific scores for their silent films. With the
notable exception of super-controlling supergenius Charlie Chaplin,
directors supplied only notes and suggestions for the accompanist. For
Westerns, it was common practice to play popular songs of the era,
regardless of how little they had to do with musical tastes in the
west. So the DME has created their own score, and tied it to the film’s
setting — old movie, new music. The film deserves a freshening up. Just
seven years after D. W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation, Big
Stakes has the Ku Klux Klan in the antagonist role, not the group’s
usual place in old westerns. The Mexican army plays a pivotal and
helpful part in the adventures and the cowboy doesn’t get the girl at
the end. And it’s a comedy. It’s iconoclastic media-melding tonight at
the Movies on Exchange, at 10 Exchange Street in Portland. If it’s been
too long since you’ve seen a newly scored, silent western comedy then
tonight at 9 p.m. you can spend $5 and indulge yourself. Call (207)
772-8041 with questions.
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