Silent movie show to benefit Brandon Town Hall restoration

BRANDON | It's a candidate for Hollywood's first-ever "rom-com": a silent film comedy that inadvertently pioneered an enduring cinematic genre. The movie "Girl Shy" is a frenetic, kinetic, get-me-to-the-church-on-time Harold Lloyd silent comedy classic, to be screened on Saturday, June 19, at 7 p.m., at Brandon Town Hall, 1 Conant Sq. (U.S. Route 7), in downtown Brandon. A live musical score for the movie will be performed by Jeff Rapsis, a New Hampshire-based silent film accompanist featured by The Sun-Vermont Eagle recently. In recent years, Rapsis has helped make Brandon the "silent movie capital" of Vermont. Admission is free but donations are encouraged, with all proceeds supporting the ongoing restoration of the Brandon Town Hall. The June 19 screening is sponsored by local residents Peter and Louise Kelley, and Harold and Jean Somerset. "Girl Shy" (released in 1924) stars Harold Lloyd as a timid young man from a small town who pens a book about imaginary female conquests. Trouble begins when bashful Harold falls in love for real and then must rescue his beloved from marrying the wrong man in the big city. Comic Harold Lloyd's dilemma prompts a climactic race to the altar that stands as one of the great chases in all of cinema. The sequence was so successful that MGM used it as a model for the famous chariot race in the original silent film version of "Ben Hur" of 1925. "These films were designed for the big screen, live music, and large audiences. If you can put those conditions together again, you get a sense of why people first fell in love with the movies," Rapsis said. "It's the 10th year of Brandon's popular silent film series, which gives residents and visitors a chance to see great movies from the pioneering days of cinema as they were meant to be shown—on the big screen, with an audience, and accompanied by live music."

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Silent movie show to benefit Brandon Town Hall restoration

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