The Phantom of the Opera 1925
I recently watched Phantom of the Opera from 1943, starring Claude Rains. However, the more iconic Phantom was played by Lon Chaney in the 1925 version, so I wanted to go back and watch that. Universal lost the copyright, so it is public domain, but there are a lot of versions of the movie. I watched a version on YouTube that looked pretty good. When it was filmed originally it weighed in at 4 hours, but was pared down and reshot before release. Then the reshoot was mostly discarded and they went back and edited together a release version based on elements of both movies. This was a silent film. Interestingly, it had some color. They could tint a movie towards green, blue, or red, which they did in various scenes, but it was still two tone. However they also have some scenes that are 2-color, namely red and green in addition to grayscale. In 1929 they released a new cut with sound, but it was a different version of the movie, shot with a second camera (certainly they didn't use a second camera for everything) that was shooting at 24 frames per second instead of the original's 20 frames per second. 24 frames per second was the standard for sound movies. Over time a lot of footage was lost or damaged, so I don't know what they have put together now. The quality of what I watched varied wildly, sometimes amazingly sharp, sometimes with damage, sometimes out of focus, and sometimes with pixellation from some kind of digital artifacts. I did not even realize the movie was silent nor that it had such a twisted history.
The movie itself must have been expensive to produce. There are a lot of opera performances with a large cast of costumed dancers and extras in the audience. Plus a lot of the movie is in the Phantom's lair which has water running through it. I can't imagine the 4-hour version, but the much shorter version I watched still seems quite slow. The story is pretty simple and it isn't like they are doing a lot of character development. Instead it seems like there are a lot of scenes of groups of people looking for things or scenes of characters being distressed. And of course there is a lot of time for intertitles to be shown with the dialogue. It seems like it would make sense to add sound to a lof of the silent movies to keep things moving, but maybe it isn't that easy.
The movie is maybe a great accomplishment, but not that enjoyable as a movie. The Phantom's motivations are never really explained fully except that somehow he thinks Christine will love him. And Christine is just a trophy, barely taking part in her own story. The heroes are perhaps brave, but also inept. It picks up a little towards the end, but even so there are things that don't make much sense. It is hard to gauge the quality of acting in a silent movie, especially one that is in rough shape, so all I can say is that Lon Chaney did a nice job with his makeup, but his mask isn't that great. I was impressed with the use of color and tints for such an old movie and the music seems to work well with what is on screen. The movie is decent, more to be admired for what is trying to do than for the end product.
Written: 10 Nov 2024