Silent Film Sources - Reviews

Carl Laemmle Presents The PHANTOM OF THE OPERA From the Celebrated Novel by Gaston Leroux. 

With LON CHANEY, MARY PHILBIN and NORMAN KERRY. 

Directed by RUPERT JULIAN. A Universal Production Copyright MCMXXV, By Universal Pictures Corp. Carl Laemmle, President, MPPDA 

The Players: LON CHANEY, MARY PHILBIN, NORMAN KERRY, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Gibson Gowland, John Sainpolis, Snitz Edwards, Mary Fabian, xxx (carlotta's mother) 

Sanctuary of song lovers, The Paris Opera House, rising nobly over medieval torture chambers, hidden dungeons, long forgotten. 

What really separates Phantom from other silents is its elemental mix of eroticism and horror.  A nightmare of thwarted passion is revealed in Chaney's repulsive makeup for the Erik the Phantom.  Isolation and unrequited longing have turned him into a monster.  His co-star, saucer-eyed Mary Philbin is as loaded a presence as Chaney.  She quivers with defenselessness -- neurotically pure -- recoiling in horror from Erik's bed before he's even been unmasked.  The Victorian images of desire and fear in Phantom take male sexual masochism to literally operatic extremes. 

Philbin plays Christine Daee, a young singer being groomed as a great artist by a mysterious voice emanating from the walls in her dressing room.  Christine comes into her own as a singer, thanks to her mysterious mentor.  In payment, she agrees to forsake her fiancée, Raoul de Chagney.  She accompanies her masked teacher to his lair in the watery lower levels of the Paris Opera.  There he demands her love and reveals himself.  He is the Opera Ghost, a gruesome monstrosity that haunts the opera house.  Raoul and his ally, a police agent known as the Persian, descend into the Phantom's netherworld to rescue Christine. 

The Phantom of the Opera is bravura, shoot-the-works filmmaking.  Universal's president, Carl Lammlae spared no expense, going through two directors, numerous endings and more than a year of on-and-off shooting to get it right.  Little of this agony is evident in the final product.  It's an indelible, crowd-pleasing thriller with an affecting lead performance. 

The only element seriously lacking is a proper mise en scene for the second half.  Phantom starts out in a wonderfully brisk -- almost Lubitschy -- spirit.  This impudence ends with the chandelier's fall and the nightmare's onset.  What's called for next is an atmosphere based on the developing relationship between Erik and Christine, perhaps something like the famed erotic tone of The Island of Lost Souls. 

Instead, we get serial-style adventure as the two (nominal) heroes escape death, time and again, to rescue Christine.  The film becomes prosaic just when some poetry would have completed its macabre romance. It's never routine, however, and delivers nothing less than royal entertainment.  There are plenty of highlights even after the famous unmasking scene.  Most spectacular is the Bal Masque, making glorious use of Technicolor as the Phantom appears costumed as the Red Death.  Another highly effective set-piece is the secret meeting between Christine and Raoul on the Opera roof.  The Phantom hovers over them on a statue of Apollo, perched like an evil angel.  And there's a deadpan surrealism unique to silents as Christine's rescuers descend into the Opera's netherworld -- arms upraised to ward off Erik's deadly lasso. 

Chaney's arrogant pathos anchors Phantom.  He carries the film through its various changes in tone from mystery to romantic spectacle to action-adventure film.  It's the villain's agony, his complex mixture of menace and vulnerability that we remember best. 

In my humble opinion, a good screening of The Phantom of the Opera constitutes an excellent introduction to silent film.  The Kino International tape duplicates that experience as much as any tape could.  It derives from Eastman House's 35mm acetate master print with the addition of two-strip Technicolor material (the first half of the Bal Masque sequence) originally uncovered by David Shepard twenty years ago and preserved by the UCLA Film and Television archives.  It is missing approximately six minutes of additional Technicolor sequences present in the original release (including some scenes of the opera ballet, I believe). 

Gabriel Thibauteau's orchestral score for the Kino on Video release is an achievement in itself.  It uses melodic and dissonant themes to heighten the macabre atmosphere without upstaging the film, itself.  The performance is by I Musici De Montreal with soprano solos by Claudine Cate. (Review © 1998 Christopher Clotworthy)