I recorded The Gold Rush off of TCM the other day and I found that it was a version with Chaplin talking narration over the film. It may have been Chaplin talking but the narration was pointless; it described what was obviously happening on the screen.
So I can mute the sound, but I am wondering how common this kind of thing was. TCM hasn’t done this with other silent films I’ve watched on the channel so was this version of The Gold Rush an experiment on the part of UA? Are silent prints of The Gold Rush just in terrible shape and TCM chose the better re-release?
There are silent prints of The Gold Rush that are in fine condition, and in fact the 1925 and the 1941 versions are sold as a double DVD pack. I don’t like Chaplin’s unnecessary narration, either, and prefer the 1925 version. That was the only time he did that; when he reissued the feature The Pilgrim (1923) as part of The Chaplin Revue in 1959, he added a music score, a song “I’m Bound for Texas”, and sound effects, but no narration. Ditto for his later reissues of The Kid, The Circus, and A Woman of Paris.
There was a version of From the Manger to the Cross (1912) with a score and narration that circulated in 16mm to churches and schools in the 1930s. The Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera (1925) was reworked by Universal as a sound film in 1929 with a creepy narrator with a lantern (not Chaney) who appears at the beginning, but I don’t believe he does a voice-over anywhere else in the picture.
There was an abridged version of Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), about an hour long, that was released in I think the late 1950s with music score and narration; I remember seeing it later at my local library.
Robert Youngson compiled features using clips from silent comedies, with added music, sound effects, and narration: The Golden Age of Comedy (1958), When Comedy Was King (1960), and several more.
That’s about it; none of the other reissues of silent features I know of added narration.
I’m too lazy to look up the specifics for the films you quote, but it was standard for silent films to come with a score (or score suggestions in the form of “cue sheets”), which might include sound effects, and sometimes even called for singers or actors reciting dialogue (all of which had to be performed live in the movie theatre). Usually the score or score sheet would be arranged in such a way that a greater or lesser number of musicians / performers could be used, depending on the budget of the theater. For most of the surviving films of the era, the score and the film have become separated, so we don’t know exactly what the original performance experience was like, but the movies were never truly silent.
It wasn’t common for silent films to be rereleased that way. Once sound came in, Hollywood just let silent films rot. Few people were willing to put up the money for a soundtrack.
Chaplin was different. He was fabulously rich, and he owned the rights to his films. So in order to appease audiences who demanded a soundtrack, he’s record them so his films could be released again.
There was quite a bit more sound recorded, and you can hear samples of it on the two-disc deluxe edition. They DID record a voice for the “Angel of Music” when he’s talking from behind the wall. Chaney was furious, because he thought it was debasing his art (it’s not his voice).
Jay Ward and company (the folks behind Rocky and Bullwinkle, and later on many other cartoons) also added their own narration and voices to obscure silent ciomedies. They called the result Fractured Flickers, and it ran for a brief time in the early 1960s.