The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Director: Rupert Julian
Writer: uncredited, “from the celebrated novel by Gaston Leroux”
Stars: Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry

Index: That's a Wrap!

Just six months after a mysterious phantom wreaked havoc at the famous Paris venue, the Moulin Rouge, in the feature by René Clair, a fresh phantom followed suit at an even more famous Paris venue, the Opera House.

Lon Chaney’s make-up, designed himself, is a marvel that had the audience screaming and perhaps fainting in their seats when Christine unwisely rips off his mask to reveal the horror of his disfigured features. The scenes at the Bal Masque, shot in Process 2 Technicolor, are still gloriously striking, the Red Death’s robe a vivid reminder of blood. No wonder it meant a series of Universal horror movies that would define the genre for decades. After all, Chaney had given them their most successful film two years earlier, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The success of this thematic follow up guaranteed a whole lot more. It merely took the advent of sound to progress the genre further.

I haven’t seen this take on The Phantom of the Opera in twenty years and it doesn’t stand up as well as I’d hoped to posterity. Lon Chaney is a marvel still. In both above and below ground scenes, the architecture of the colossal sets is magnificent and the props littered backstage are just as wonderful. I was also impressed by the cinematographers’ ability to show the full scale and grandeur of the opera house stage in 4:3 aspect ratio. Only when ballerinas take full flight do we ache for widescreen.

However, the production was a troubled one as director Rupert Julian clashed with many of the cast and crew, most obviously Chaney, and much of his version was discarded, reshot by a new director, Edward Sedgwick, then put back again after test audiences received the newer version even more poorly.

These problems are especially noticeable in the script, which is credited to nobody except the author of the source novel, Gaston Leroux. What we end up with isn’t particularly deep at all and we’re thrown into this tale of obsession without any grounding. Only a pair of strong performances by Chaney and Mary Philbin—their co-star Norman Kerry is easy to ignore—match the visual power.

Of course, Chaney is the Phantom, who used to be known as Erik—no last name given—and now lives in the deepest cellars but is a regular in one of the boxes upstairs. The prima donna at this point is Carlotta, an arrogant soprano, but the Phantom has taken a shine to a newer performer, Christine Daaé, and he uses threats to ensure that she play the lead female role of Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust instead.

As we don’t see the Phantom for a full third of the movie, except in shadow or through his hand reaching out from a wall, it helps greatly that Philbin plays a worthy Christine. We find out soon enough that her character is hardly flawless—look at how long it doesn’t take her to do the one thing her master asks her not to do—but she outshines Carlotta with panache.

And, of course, the love affair between them is doomed to failure before it even begins, the dreams of a madman. Christine’s horror at the sight of his face, as shallow as it might seem, is more than enough to nail that point home. As Erik memorably states, “Feast your eyes—glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!”

As you might expect, this is theatrical to a spectacular degree, not just because it’s a 1925 movie but because it’s set at the opera, the most theatrical art form of all. It’s fair for an opera buff wearing a mask to display grand gestures physically. After all, that’s all he does in any fashion. He elevates an understudy to prima donna in a series of threats delivered by letter through a wall, he professes his undying love to her and then he kills a whole bunch of opera patrons by dropping a vast chandelier on them. What is he but grand gestures?

For me, that’s fine. This is a silent opera that takes place at the opera, with the magnificent Lon Chaney in the lead. Nobody could suffer as tragically as he in the silent era. He’s spurned and sees it, so climbs up to the roof and hangs off the statue above it bleeding emotion while Christine and her lover conspire below him. It doesn’t matter that he’s the villain of the film; my heart bled alongside him, even as I wanted him to lose. Of course, I have vested interest. I don’t want Christine but I do covet his lair and its gorgeous furnishings five cellars down in a goddamn black lake that he navigates by boat.

While we think of The Phantom of the Opera’s source as a classic Victorian era novel to rank alongside Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, it wasn’t actually published till 1910. Carl Laemmle, the president of Universal, took a holiday in Paris only a dozen years later, and met Gaston Leroux, who had been working in film for a decade already. Leroux gave him a copy of his book, he read it in a night and then bought the rights to make this, even though it had already been adapted into a 1916 feature in Germany, Das Phantom der Oper, a film that’s sadly lost today.

Maybe we connect the book with the wrong era because Universal inadvertently linked the two with a succession of further horror films, moving on to Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and onward. Only The Mummy in between was an original story and even that didn’t feel like one, just another borrow from Victorians.

The thing was that there was a six year gap between The Phantom of the Opera and Dracula, so it wouldn’t have seemed like a movement at the time. It would have felt like a Lon Chaney vehicle, at a time when he was making a few each year. It’s a tragic story like The Hunchback and He Who Gets Slapped and so many others, a template he’d continue into The Unknown and West of Zanzibar. In some alternate universe, he didn’t die in 1930 as sound took over film and accepted Laemmle’s invitation to return to the Universal fold to play Dracula. Horror would have evolved very differently on screen.

He’s a force of nature here, always in charge until the mob takes him down and throws him into the Seine. During the Bal Masque scene he dominates so fiercely that the grand staircase empties for his descent. When a jester tries to interfere with him, he casts him aside with a mere flick. We feel his power.

The problem this has is that nothing in the film except the sets and props can match him. We’re left with many visuals of him against an array of backdrops, each of them glorious and so much more effective than how he was used only seven months earlier in The Monster. The catch to that is that we’ll remember precious little else, certainly not the script.