Phantom Of The Opera (1925)

The Phantom of the Opera is a 1925 silent film directed by Rupert Julian adaptation of the Gaston Leroux novel of the same title. The film featured Lon Chaney in the title role as the masked and facially deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House, causing murder and mayhem in an attempt to force the management to make the woman he loves a star.

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 fiancee, 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.

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, recoiling in horror from Erik's bed before he's even been unmasked.

Chaney's appearance as the Phantom in the film has been the most accurate depiction of the title character, based on the description given in the novel, where Erik the Phantom is described as having a skull-like face with a few wisps of black hair on top of his head. As in the novel, Chaney's Phantom has a full facial deformity present since birth, as opposed to the partial facial disfigurement caused by acid or fire (depending on the adaptation) seen in later adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera. It is in the appearance of the Phantom that Lon Chaney is most associated with in the mind of the public.

Following the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923, Lon Chaney was once again given the freedom to create his own make-up as the Phantom, a habit which became almost as famous as the films he starred in. Chaney pulled his eyeballs out from their sockets with thin wires, so that his eyes appeared to bulge out and their sockets became very deep. He then kept his eyes in their bulged-out position with wires and painted his eye sockets black, giving a skull-like impression to them. He also pulled the tip of his nose up and pinned that in place with wire, enlarging his nostrils with black paint, and putting a set of jagged false teeth into his mouth to complete the ghastly deformed look of the Phantom. Although nowhere near as elaborate as his make-up for Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, it was no less painful, and no less effective either. When audiences first saw The Phantom of the Opera, they were said to have screamed or fainted at the scene where Christine pulls the concealing mask away, revealing his skull-like features to the audience (but not, for a few seconds, to 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.

Directed by: Rupert Julian
Produced by: Carl Laemmle
Starring: Arthur Edmund Carewe, Gibson Gowland, Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry
Crew: Charles Van Enger, Edward Curtiss, Gilmore Walker, Maurice Pivar, Milton Bridenbecker, Virgil Miller
Copyright: Public Domain
Format: Black + White
Duration: 106 mins
Year: 1925
Tags: 1890s, 19th Century, Atmospheric, Ballerina, Catacomb, Catacombs, Disfigurement, Drama, Drowning, France, Horror, Kidnap Haunted Gothic Disturbing, Kidnapping, Madness, Masked Ball, Mob Scene, Monster, Murder, Obsession, Obsessive Love Mask, Opera, Opera House, Opera Singer, Panic, Paris, Phantom, Phantom Of The Opera, Public Domain, Rescue, Secret Door, Secret Police, Singer, Trap, Underground Stylized, Understudy, Unrequited Love

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