Review: Phantom of the Opera (1925/29)

It's something of a miracle that this, the first of many film versions of Gaston Leroux's novel, is watchable at all.

First, consider that its director, Rupert Julian, was, by all accounts, a tyrant on the set despised by the entire cast and crew, but most especially by its star, Lon Chaney. Second, previews for the film went poorly, leading Universal to re-edit and reshoot scenes numerous times, including a completely reshot ending directed by western/comedy specialist Edward Sedgwick. (The original ending had Erik the phantom, played by Chaney, dying at his organ of a broken heart; footage of this ending no longer exists, but stills of it have turned up in movie magazines for decades.) Comedy scenes were jammed in, then taken out again. (Pioneering female director Lois Weber also aided in the subsequent editing process.) And lastly, when the movie was reissued with a soundtrack in 1929, more scenes were shot and inserted, including a spoken introduction by a character in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House.

It is this later, revised version of Phantom that is most readily available today, as prints of it are more watchable than the few prints extant of the 1925 edit (and even these vary from print to print, with some including other scenes and continuity shifts that others don't). But since the sound discs were later lost, the sound scenes inserted (including the spoken-word intro) are rendered mute and, upon viewing, even more glaringly disconnected from what surrounds them than they did upon their initial release.

All of this post-production futzing leaves us with a drastically (though not fatally) flawed product. There is really only one element that hold Phantom of the Opera together and makes it a classic, no matter which release print you view: the physical, frightening, sympathetic and performance by Lon Chaney.

Denied facial expression for much of the movie--either by the mask he wears for the first half of the picture or the restrictive, horrific makeup he created for Erik's face--Chaney gives most of his performance with the rest of his body, but most especially with his hands. Consider the scene in which we see Erik reaching for Christine (adorable Mary Philbin) from behind. We can't see anything but Erik's hand, yet Chaney is able to convey, through gesture alone, desire and apprehension--and thus generate immediate sympathy for the Phantom, even though we know he's the villain of the piece. Later, he's able to convey menace with the way he points his finger when Christine asks about the coffin in his "home" beneath the Opera House: "That," he helpfully explains, "is where I sleep," his hand elegantly inclining toward the casket in question. And body language is all Chaney has to work with in the masked ball scene (filmed in two-strip Technicolor), where, as the Red Death, he terrifies and rebukes the whole crowd and, when he spies Christine with Raoul, her true love (played by Norman Kerry, who also co-starred with Chaney in Hunchback of Notre Dame), his open hand slowly contracting into a fist is all the explanation we need to know how betrayed and angry Erik feels at that moment.

Of course, Chaney still gets emotion across with his face through the layers of self-applied makeup-which, no matter what account you choose to believe, was, at the very least, uncomfortable--especially in the justly famous unmasking scene. The look on his face--and most particularly in his eyes--encompasses surprise, rage and, yes, sadness. He trusted her to do as he told her and not remove his mask. He loved her in his own, demented way. Even disfigured madmen don't want their hearts broken.

Chaney's presence lends gravity to the rest of the film, which would fly off into the air and never come back down without his performance to tether it to. The pacing is rapid and serial-like, with Philbin's Christine coming off as a damsel who keeps finding new ways to put herself in distress (when Erik tells her he'll let her go only if she doesn't see Raoul again, does she somehow think he won't be watching her every move?) and Kerry's Raoul the prototype for the dashing but nonetheless useless hero who would populate many a horror Universal horror film in years to come.

In addition to Chaney's performance, Phantom of the Opera also boasts some of the finest production values of any of the Universal horror pictures, with a detailed recreation of the Paris Opera House and dark, damp catacombs for Chaney to lurk around in. (At one point near the conclusion, the Phantom races past the Notre Dame set--no doubt an in-joke referring to Chaney' earlier success as the Hunchback.)

So even with all of the shifts in continuity and material being plugged in and yanked out again, Phantom of the Opera manages to remain the best, most definitive film version of this story, despite more elaborate productions (Universal's own remake in 1943, filmed in Technicolor) and more violent interpretations (Hammer's distasteful remake in 1962), mostly on the star power of Lon Chaney, who creates his most memorable character and gives the audience, in the unmasking scene, one of the greatest moments not only in the history of horror films, but the history of cinema itself.