The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Carl Laemmle's 1925 silent horror film The Phantom of the Opera was one of the early high points for Universal Studios. As a silent film, it is still very accessible today, with a fast-paced 77 minute running time. It stars one of the best actors of silent cinema, Lon Chaney. And it benefits from a high level of production with, as the original advertising proudly boats: "a cast of 5000 others", a well as a number of memorable sequences. If I was to show a silent film to someone for the first time, I'd probably choose this as one of the most accessible introductions to the period.

After the success of Laemmle's 1923 horror film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which had gone on to become the studios' most commercially successful silent film, it was only a matter of time before a followup was produced. The Hunchback had starred Lon Chaney in the title role, and so successful was the film that he was instantly elevated from being a reliable character actor to one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Consequently, he was by far the most popular choice to play the titular character in The Phantom of the Opera. Though nowadays the story has become synonymous with Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, at the time that this film was being produced the story was only 15 years old, being based on a novel written by Gaston Leroux in 1910 which quickly fell into obscurity. Apart from a possible 1916 production of which very little is know, this was the first adaptation of Leroux's story and contributed to a resurgence in the popularity of the original novel.

After the praise that had been given to Lon Chaney for his own self-applied makeup in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Laemmle was more than happy to let him do the same for The Phantom of the Opera (there's a reason he was known as the "Man of a Thousand Faces"), and in this case he determined to make himself look as horrific as possible. Universal had cleverly refrained from giving any indication of what the Phantom himself looked like behind his mask in trailers and advertising materials - this was to provide the film with excellent publicity when it was said that audiences had been so horrified his appearance in the scene in which the monster is revealed that they screamed or fainted in shock at the sight. It's a well built scene, as Christine, who the Phantom has taken into his lair in the catacombs deep beneath the Paris Opera House, suddenly unmasks the Phantom, despite his expressly forbidding her to do so. There's no suspense as she approaches him, as might be expected, but it's so sudden that the audience can't help but be shocked. Even watching it for the first time, and knowing full well what the unmasked Phantom looks like, it's a surprising moment, precisely because there's none of the expected tension. Immediately after the reveal, as the Phantom shows his anger towards Christine and begins to approach her, the camera switches to Christine's point-of-view, but the image continues to drift in and out of focus, as if to suggest the Phantom's appearance is so ghastly that even the camera is unable to fully process the vision.

Another standout scene comes earlier in the film. The Phantom threatens the opera houses' owners with ruining their performance should they continue forbidding Christine to take the starring role. When they continue to ignore his threats, another truly shocking moment occurs as the huge chandelier crashes down from the ceiling straight onto the unsuspecting audience members. Though this time we are aware that something is going to happen, it's the scale of the event that is shocking. One of the great things about such stunts in early cinema is that there were no CGI shortcuts - the massive chandelier really did fall, it really was smashed up on the ground, to lie scattered over the audiences' seats.

More revolutionary than any of this though, is that The Phantom of the Opera is almost unique in its use of colour for a silent film of this period. Tinting was very popular in silent films (though a tendency to ignore tinting in favour of black and white for VHS and DVD releases of silents has slightly distorted this opinion - a preference thankfully being rectified in more recent restorations), but there were very few films that would use more than one colour in a frame. Tinting was easy for a producer to create, he just had to have the film negative stained with dye of an appropriate colour - so many scenes set at night would be tinted blue, for example.

But to have more than one colour on the same image was far more complicated. As early as the turn of the century filmmakers like George Méliès were hand-colouring the actual nitrate film itself to give the effect of colour, but as each frame had to be coloured individually this was a very labour intensive task, and almost impossible for a full-length film. However, since the early 20s Technicolor had been experimenting with allowing different light filters to allow different colours to be exposed, and by 1925 this technique had been developed sufficiently to enable short sequences to be featured in The Phantom of the Opera. Of the two Technicolor scenes filmed for The Phantom, only one still survives, but it's still remarkable to see colour in a silent film. It's also one of the most memorable scenes in the film, as the Phantom turns up at the annual masked ball dressed as the 'Red Death' from Edgar Allen-Poe's novel. As he later spies on Christine and her lover on the roof, still in his Red Death disguise, a more rudimentary method, the Handschiegl colour process, was used to make the Phantom's clothes appear red.

The Phantom of the Opera is a great example of a classic silent film, and it's fully deserving of the praise it's been given. If it hadn't been for this film and the success it bought Universal, they would never have seen the potential for more horror films, and would never have started the Universal Monsters franchise, beginning with Dracula in 1931. It contains probably the best existing performance by Lon Chaney, who tragically died in 1930 (his acclaimed  role in 1927's London After Midnight is sadly now the stuff of legend as no prints are known to exist, but I'm still hoping one day I can write about it after some miraculous rediscovery), and never feels like any scene is unnecessary. The sudden and dramatic ending is still shocking in its finality, though apparently in the original cut there was an epilogue which has now been lost. This isn't as deep or emotive as many silent classics, but as an example of pure entertainment from 1920s cinema, there are few better. And it still says something that all these years later, after countless adaptations no Phantom looks quite as terrifying as Lon Chaney's portrayal.