For some reason villains in movies have a tendency to play the organ. It was only recently that I started asking myself why. Couldn't the villains' guild instrument equally well have been the saxophone or the kazoo? Do villains have to pass a test to prove that they can play the organ before they are allowed to be really evil?
And where does the idea come from? Who was the first villain with an organ? I spent the usual superficial 10 minutes on google and came up with no convincing answer.
One candidate on the screen would be Lon Chaney in the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, based on the novel from 1910. However, if we count captain Nemo as a villain, he played the organ already in 1870, in Jules Verne's book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin).
More research is clearly needed in this area.
Captain Nemo playing the organ.
(Image credits: Alphonse de Neuville, Edouard Riou, Nick Hobgood and Wikipedia. And me who cut and pasted.)
