Last night's showing of The Godless Girl at the Paramount was a bad night at the silent movies. Before the show, several people were protesting Seattle Theater Group, the nonprofit group that produces shows at the Paramount and the Moore, for not contracting "the legendary" Dennis James to play the Paramount's Wurlitzer organ during this silent movie program. The protesters handed out pamphlets that read "without Dennis James, it's not Silent Movie Monday."

Instead, STG flew San Francisco organist Jim Riggs up to Seattle yesterday to play the organ during The Godless Girl. Last time I went to Silent Movie Mondays, I called James "probably the best silent movie organist I've ever heard," but I lamented the fact that he read the Wikipedia entry for the movie before the show as an introduction.

Riggs did James one better in annoying pre-show infotainment by reading comments on IMDB posts praising The Godless Girl. He also told us the entire plot of the movie we were ten minutes away from watching, sharing major plot points and interesting lines of dialogue rather than just allowing us to enjoy them. What's more, Riggs' soundtrack for the movie was bland and uninteresting. But after the movie, he gave a very good reason for his poor showing: Riggs informed us that due to his sudden replacement of James, he had never seen The Godless Girl before one o'clock yesterday afternoon.

Worse than all that, the Paramount seems to have shown the wrong cut of the movie. Cecil B. DeMille madeThe Godless Girl at the very end of the silent movie era, and the film did very poorly on its release. The panicky studio reassembled the cast and had an actor reshot the ending with sound equipment, pasting a talkie scene onto the end of the movie. In the business, this was known as a "goat gland scene". This website describes the derivation of goat gland:

Goat gland took its name from a surgical procedure developed around 1920 by quack doctor J.R. Brinkley, who implanted goat testes into humans as a way to cure maladies such as impotence, arteriosclerosis, and dementia.

Before the film began, Riggs informed the audience that there was a talkie cut of the film out there, but he assured us that we were witnessing the original cut of the film, "as DeMille intended." But the print of The Godless Girl that ran at the Paramount last night had title cards all through the film until the last five minutes. In the final scene, characters made long monologues, but this particular print of The Godless Girl apparently didn't have the talkie soundtrack attached, so Riggs just played over it and we watched the actors talk mutely with no explanation before the screen went abruptly black. Seemed like a goat gland to me.

I have a call out to Jason Ferguson, the Director of Programming at STG, to ask about the Wurlitzer situation at the Paramount and about the cut of The Godless Girl that they showed last night, and I'll let you know if he gets back to me.

(Photo still from Godless Girl from Teleport City.)