The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Halloween is fast approaching. Arrive it will, like a stereotypical witch on a broomstick, in just a few days.

I've taken the liberty to revisit a few cinematic friends this month. One of them being the masterful Phantom of the Opera (1925), a definitive adaptation of the Gaston LeRoux gothic mystery classic, made in 1925, silent, and starring the late, great Lon Chaney Sr., the "Man of a Thousand Faces."

Mary Philbin stars as Christine Daaé, an opera singer at the ancient and famous Paris Opera, a place wherein vast vaulted catacombs and an underground river stretch beneath the gorgeous, opulent old edifice like the shadows in a dream. Her rival, the haughty and vain diva Carlotta (Virginia Pearson), begins to receive threats from the "Opera Ghost" a legendary figure that sits in Box Number 5, and which few believe exists ("Exist he did," though, assures Leroux to the Reader in the original novel, he was "not an invention.")

The ownership of the Paris Opera is changing hands, and this deal is done, and the new management is warned about the Phantom. Comte and Vicecomte De Chagny, the younger one being Raoul (Norman Kerry), the handsome and dashing Norman Kerry, are both quite taken with Christine. But, she seems to be having a relationship, a special one, with a mysterious shadow on her dressing room wall, a masked, hat-wearing "vocal coach," teaching her the "gift of music." Lines of frightened chorus girls, meanwhile, see the shadow of the Phantom and question, Joseph Buquet about him. "The nose? THERE IS NO NOSE." He intones with spookshow melodramatics, agreeing with the description of one of the beautiful little ballerinas who all line up to question him as he cradles a wax head that resembles Christ. (His brother, Simon, is portrayed by Gibson Gowland, incidentally, whose most famous and immortal silent film role was that of the doomed and murderous McTeague, in Erich von Stroheim's forgotten masterpiece Greed, from 1924.)

Now that the scene is set, and everyone is properly frightened, Carlotta is warned yet again NOT to appear, and that the role she was to play MUST go to Christine. Carlotta becomes mysteriously ill. Her domineering bitch of a stage mother warns that such threats (even when they come as letters edged in black) will not be accorded any seriousness and that Carlotta will go on the next performance, anyway.

The giant chandelier is brought down by a dramatic figure seen only in shadow. Meanwhile, Raoul de Chagny finds himself in love with Christine, whose mysterious vocal coach warns her against him. She proceeds through the hidden corridor behind her dressing room mirror, following her "Angel of Music," and is shocked to discover the underground river (which is crossed by a Venetian-style gondola), and that her Angel is Erik, the "Ghost," the "Phantom" of the Opera.

She disobeys and sees Raoul anyway. I suppose they were planning their escape at the masked ball, wherein the Phantom appears as a skull-faced character, the "Red Death" (a possible allusion to Poe). Christine is kidnapped. Far below, in the Phantom's secret lair, he plays the organ, the proto-type for Doctor Phibes and all the mad, monstrous geniuses that have come after. It is here, while she is a prisoner, that we have the famous scene of Christine "unmasking" her Angel, revealing the famous, skull-like, and genuinely shocked visage of the deformed Erik beneath; a scene startling enough for 1925 audiences to cause some women to faint.

The Great Unmasking

Raoul, meaning to reclaim his love, has meanwhile joined with a detective LeDoux (referred to in the novel as "The Persian") and they have entered the torture chambers and vaulted crypts below, holding their arms up in a silly fashion to prevent the suddenness of the phantom, who is an "expert strangler."

The last twenty minutes are thrilling. Simon Buquet organizes a lynch mob (all carrying classic Frankenstein torches) to penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of the Phantom, and avenge his brother's death. The Phantom, an erudite, brilliant inventor, has a special "Grasshopper and Scorpion" test for Christine, in which twisting one will blow the opera house to kingdom come (and them with it, of course), and escapes in a coach with De Chagny and a mob on his heels.

At the edge of the Seine, he holds up one hand, and the crowd shrinks back in terror. But his hand is empty. The final card has been played.

This is a pure gothic melodrama mystery of a kind that is no longer written or filmed. That it is the basis of Andrew Lloyd Webber's most famous piece means little when compared to this early film, which is a thing of rare, wondrous, ghostly, and magnificent beauty. Faces swim up from the darkness below, and faces are expressive canvasses of love. The Phantom is a cloak-wearing image of the dark and romantic, whether straddled atop the statue of an angelic woman on the roof of the opera house, or coming down the grand central staircase during the masked ball, as the "Red Death, who is another skull atop a neck, wearing a plumed hat.

It is said that Lon Chaney Sr., who did his makeup for these roles of pathos and fear, had "A Thousand Faces." Surely this was the greatest of them.

The "Phantom of the Opera" is in Public Domain and can be viewed on YouTube