11th Annual
Silents in the Cathedral
Grace Cathedral
701 SW 8th - Topeka, Kansas
Friday, Oct. 31st, 2008
7:30 pm — note new time!
Sponsored by the
Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library
Free to the Public

Music by Dr. Marvin Faulwell playing the Cathedral organ
Introductions by Denise Morrison

Shorts:
The Headless Horseman (1934)
    One of the (if not the) first animated cartoon version of the classic spooky story. This cute short Color cartoon was created by Ub Iwerks, who spent his career working on and off with Walt Disney. This film is from one of the ‘off’ periods when Iwerks was working out of his own studio, producing a series of delightful short cartoon fables. This is one of his best!
A Clever Dummy (1917)
starring Ben Turpin
    When it came to fun, no one in the silent film era seemed to manufacture it faster than the cross-eyed Ben Turpin. This is one of his best early Keystone comedy shorts. Ben plays a love-struck janitor whose employer’s daughter is the object of his affections. Her fiancée invents a robot of Ben that manages to do all manner of tricks. Ben hatches on the idea of taking the dummy’s place in his first stage appearance and wrecks havoc with everyone onstage and off. There’s even a climactic chase involving Wallace Beery and the Keystone Kops – one chasing Ben, the other chasing the dummy. A clever short!

—There will be a brief intermission between shorts and our feature. Popcorn and bottled water will be sold as a fundraiser for the Cathedral —

Feature:
The Headless Horseman (1922)
starring Will Rogers
    The classic tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving gets its first feature-length screen adaption in this 1922 film. Ichabod Crane, the smarmy school master is played by Claremore, Oklahoma native and future great sage of Americana, Will Rogers. He arrives to teach school in a small New England town and promptly falls for the local belle, Katrina Van Tassel. At a social event at Katrina’s home, Ichabod hears the tale of the phantom horseman who appears on spooky moonlit nights in search of his missing head. A rival suitor sees some advantage to this when Ichabod takes his own wild ride home later that night. The Irving story was later the basis for the Johnny Depp film, “Sleepy Hollow” (1999) and an excellent cartoon featurette produced by Walt Disney in 1949.