When moviegoers first meet the villainous Sgt. Gonzales, he arrives with a score that’s heavy, almost plodding, as he revels in his plans to stop the masked bandit Zorro.
When the foppish Don Diego Vega — Zorro out of disguise, played by Douglas Fairbanks — first meets love interest Lolita Pulido, played by Marguerite De La Motte, the romantic backing track comes to as awkward a stop as their first “date.”
In the final scenes, the score grows tense through a chase scene as Zorro bounds up walls and off roofs to elude the corrupt colonial governor’s men.
Moviegoers at Kiggins Theatre Sunday heard all that music and more, and it was all performed live in accompaniment.
The Vancouver Symphony teamed up with composer Rodney Sauer to deliver music with the 1920 silent film “The Mark of Zorro” that afternoon, as part of the organization’s running chamber music series.
Sauer lives in Colorado, where he’s the pianist and director at the Mont Alto Motion Picture orchestra, which has a large collection of music that used to belong to silent film theaters.
He says he’s more of an arranger than a composer. In the silent film era, movie theaters kept libraries of sheet music for musicians, to sift, re-arrange then play through as the movies ran on screen.
“All of the music you’re hearing was available for performance at the time this movie came out,” he said. “I have put this music together in this order for this film in the way that it would have been done back then. So this is not a score that was heard back then, it was a score that could have been heard in 1920.”
Fairbanks was among the brightest stars of his time. The actor, screenwriter, director and producer spent the early part of his career in comedies, before becoming, as Sauer said, a kind of action hero of his time.
“He improved the story considerably” from the source material, Sauer said.
The novel the movie’s based on, 1919’s “The Curse of Capistrano,” didn’t have anything about Zorro’s iconic Z mark, and it held off on revealing Zorro’s secret identity until the last pages. Fairbanks, the film’s producer, brought those elements in.
“Douglas Fairbanks had a cinematic mind,” Sauer said. Fairbanks saw the public-facing rich loafer as masked hero concept and realized he could make it into a story hook, one that proved quite memorable.
“It turns out Bob Kane, who invented Batman, was a huge fan of this particular film,” Sauer said.
The movie’s also significant, Sauer said, in that it shows how films started to mature as a storytelling medium through the early 20th century
Narratives in early films could skip around, he said, but in “Zorro,” the scenes and shots transition in a way that’s professional and familiar.
“To a modern audience, you don’t have to explain this film. You just show it and you’ll get it.”
The Vancouver Symphony has been working with Sauer for about three years, putting on these silent film performances.
Principal clarinetist and orchestra executive director Igor Shakhman said the pairing has been fruitful. The event Sunday saw what appeared to be the best turnout of any of the orchestra’s other silent film screenings.
The four accompanists and Sauer rehearsed twice before the show, Shakhman said, which meant a lot of individual practice and study to prepare.
Trumpet player Bruce Dunn joked his sheet music looked like a “Chutes and Ladders” game with all the arrows and notations it needed to keep up with the hour-and-45-minute film.
It’s an exciting way to work as a musician, Shakhman said.
“A lot of watching each other, a lot of interaction. You look at each other. It’s like acting, playing off each other,” he said. “It’s almost like playing opera or a Broadway show. Same style.”
Sauer and the orchestra’s chamber music series will return for another silent film screening May 20, with Ernst Lubitsch 1925 film, “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” based on the Oscar Wilde play.
