Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-presented by the Chicago Film Society

Vaudeville star Charles (Chic) Sale was already well-known as America's foremost interpreter of rustic tomfoolery when he transitioned to the silent screen with HIS NIBS. This comedy about the Slippery Elm Picture Palace serves as a sloppy, starstruck valentine to rural cinema exhibition. Sale plays no less than seven different characters, including Slippery Elm proprietor and projectionist Theo "His Nibs" Bender, theater organist Miss Dessie Teed, and The Boy, star of this week's attraction, He Fooled 'Em All. Colleen Moore plays Sale's costar in this film-within-the-film. Gregory La Cava, himself transitioning to live action after several years of making animated, is a capable guide for Sale. Together they concocted a surprisingly rigorous hick comedy that, per Richard Koszarski, "suggests Pirandello more than Sennett or Roach."

35mm courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive