Making Silents Golden : Orchestral Scores for ‘The Immigrant’ and ‘It’ Let Audiences View Films Under What Composer Carl Davis Calls ‘Ideal Conditions’

Watching silent movie-era films with new orchestral scores is all the rage these days. And composer Carl Davis can take some of the credit.

He was there when the trend began in 1980. That’s when London saw Abel Gance’s historic 1927 silent film, “Napoleon,” accompanied by Davis’ new five-hour score. The film and music played to a sold-out Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles a year later.

Since then, Southern California has played host to a number of silent films set to new scores and live accompaniment--last fall, audiences experienced Carl Dreyer’s 1928 “The Passion of Joan of Arc” set to music by Richard Einhorn at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

On Sunday, Davis’ scores for a Chaplin short, “The Immigrant” (1917) and “It” (1927), the film that made Clara Bow “the ‘It’ girl,” will be played by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra while the films are screened at the center in Costa Mesa.

Since that first London screening, which launched a British TV series on silents, the composer has worked with his “Napoleon” collaborators--film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill--on a three-part television documentary, “The Unknown Chaplin,” which won an Emmy in 1987. He has also restored the scores for several full-length Chaplin films, including “City Lights” (1931) and “The Gold Rush” (1925), and written new scores for silents such as the 1926 “Ben-Hur” and the 1924 “The Thief of Baghdad.”

That’s in addition to his own classical music and contemporary film scores and a collaboration with Paul McCartney that produced the ex-Beatle’s 1991 “Liverpool Oratorio.”

A native New Yorker who has lived in London since 1960, Davis isn’t surprised by the public’s reaction to his giving new life to an old art form.

“From 1900 to about 1927-29, the silent film was popular cinema,” Davis said in a recent phone interview from his London home. “It wasn’t something for specialists, museums or clubs. It was popular film of the day. This was displaced by talking films, and we have the cinema we have today. A colossal body of work was produced, which then fell into neglect.”

Resurrecting the films and showing them under “ideal conditions . . . [seeing] them with an orchestra, not a pianist who improvised,” Davis pointed out, has become his passion.

Davis came to Orange County last year to conduct his reconstructed Chaplin scores for “The Kid” and “The Idle Class” (both 1921 films). This year, Davis won’t be here. Jung-Ho Pak, formerly associate conductor of the (now defunct) San Diego Symphony, will substitute.

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“I’m going on a tour of Holland to conduct ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ ” Davis said.

“My next project after that is to go to Athens to conduct ‘Napoleon’ and ‘The Thief of Baghdad.’ It’s my second season there. My first was with ‘Ben-Hur.’ ”

In some cases, as with “The Kid,” Davis uses a score that Chaplin or someone else may have written but which exists only in parts or on a soundtrack. But his music for “The Immigrant” and “It” is original. The scores had their U.S. premiere Wednesday in Escondido.

Either way, working with silent classics presents its own set of challenges and constraints. “There’s a difference between this and a new film,” Davis explained. “These are done, locked. A new film is quite a fluid situation.”

The first issue with silents is synchronizing the music with the film’s sequences. But “beyond that, it has to be the right sort of music, whether it complements, supports or makes an ironic comment on the film. I try to make my scores complement or directly support the film.”

Occasionally, a film director might even encourage him to extend the score. “About seven or eight years ago, Ken Russell, with whom I worked on ‘The Rainbow’ [1989], said he liked what I had written. He asked, ‘Do you want to go on a bit? I have a little more footage.’ That was the ultimate compliment.”

Because Davis has worked on so many types of films, he doesn’t see a common stamp to all his scores. But others see it differently.

“People say there is a Davis style,” he said, “but I don’t think about it because if you did, you’d just start repeating yourself.”

Davis calls his work on behalf of silents “very exciting. It’s not like contemporary film. The entire aural experience has to be in the music, and it has to bridge the gap between the decades that have passed.

“The main thing is to pull the audience in so strongly that they forget they’re looking at an archaic form of filmmaking.”

Regarding the films themselves, Davis said the Chaplin short “is marvelous. It treats the experience so basically, so movingly, it is just a little masterpiece--and every bit as funny as it must have been originally.”

As for “It”: “The revelation everyone will have is how wonderful an actress Clara Bow is. The film was a very slick studio production of the time. But then there is this sudden freshness which is Clara Bow. It’s a revelation. She’s very sexy and very funny and very modern. She’s very like Marilyn Monroe. The personality of Clara is a bit tougher, but the kittenishness and appeal are similar.

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“Definitely I created a musical ‘It’ theme. It’s like a soupy fox trot. One had to write period dance. The film was very much a product of its time, even though the theme is universal. A working-class girl falls in love with the rich boss, who’s inherited the store. It’s about her attempts to get him, and she does, through ingenuity. She’s surrounded by what we would call twits. She does not sacrifice her virtue to gain success, though she’s accused of it.”

* Jung-Ho Pak conducts the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on Sunday in Carl Davis’ scores for “The Immigrant” and “It,” while the films are screened, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The program is sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. 3 p.m. $10-$38. (714) 553-2422.