Larry Adler: Refugee From the Blacklist

Ask most anyone born before World War II, and he or she will be able to tell you that Larry Adler has long been considered the world’s greatest mouth organist.

The reason most young people are unlikely to be familiar with Adler, who turns 85 on Valentine’s Day, is that he has been living in England since 1949, a refugee of the nefarious Hollywood blacklist era.

The diminutive, debonair Adler’s vital personality, talent and intellect, his seven-decade career and rich life are the subjects of Joachim Kreck and Detelina Grigorova-Kreck’s captivating 1993 documentary “Larry: My Life in Music,” which screens Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater as part of the Academy Documentary series.

Trained in piano, the Baltimore-born Adler took the opportunity to learn to play the mouth organ as a child, soon becoming a prodigy. Adler’s virtuosity in both popular and classical music led to an exceptionally varied and colorful career, which included appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies and many movies. (The stretch of Adler’s career is summed up in shots of him performing at different times with two famous but rather different violinists, Itzhak Perlman and Jack Benny.)

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In Beverly Hills, his neighbor Charlie Chaplin asked him over for doubles tennis, subbing for champion Bill Tilden; Adler found himself playing with Greta Garbo and Salvador Dali as well as with his host.

While entertaining the troops during World War II, Adler fell in love with Ingrid Bergman. He says that since both were married, they broke off their romance, but it was Bergman who persuaded him to study musical composition. Adler became a target of the Communist witch hunts over the flimsiest of pretexts, and although appreciative of having lived such a long and remarkable life, he remains understandably bitter about his blacklist experiences.

The Krecks have done an outstanding job in surrounding the charismatic Adler with an exceptional array of artfully assembled clips. “Larry: My Life in Music” is totally absorbing. (310) 206-FILM.