The Phantom of the Opera
Lon Chaney transforms himself into a ghastly character
In today’s gif, we are watching the unmasking scene from 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera, starting the dreadfully frighteningly made-up Lon Chaney as the titular villain who haunts the dark catacombs and labyrinthine backstage areas of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris, France during the 1880s. The silent horror film is based on the novel Le fantome de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux, published 1910, with plot changes made (and remade!) to the 1925 screenplay at the behest of the studio, and again for the film’s re-issue with sound added in 1929. Riding the wave of the success of this horror film and Chaney’s prior horror movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), studio Universal Pictures would go big into the monster movie business and create a series of others, including Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), The Wolf Man (1941) and sequels and tie-ins to all of these (see the Universal Monsters link—it’s a lot!).
The story centers on Christine Daaé (played by Mary Philbin), a bit-part singer at the Paris Opera House. Her sweetheart, the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Norman Kerry) would like her to retire so that they may marry, but Christine believes she must continue to develop her career, for she grew up listening to her father’s tales of “The Spirit of Music” and she believes it is that very spirit that is tutoring her through the opera’s walls, setting her on a inextinguishable mission to sing. Others in the theater company’s cast and crew, however, have seen shadows and glimpses of this lurking character and fear him, dubbing him The Phantom.
The Phantom sends a threatening letter to the company’s prima donna Mme. Carlotta (Virginia Pearson) threatening her with dire consequences if she does not let Christine replace her that evening as the lead in the current production of Faust. She reluctantly does so, the mysterious voice from the wall urging Christine on to take the starring role, for which manages aptly and is dubbed a resounding success. When Carlotta and the management receive letters demanding that Carlotta step aside for a second performance or else, the star defiantly refuses to be sidelined. One of the stagehands is murdered, found hanging from a noose, foreshadowing further violence and prompting members of the crew to declare revenge. Undeterred, Carlotta takes to the stage, but the performance is interrupted when the Phantom drops a large chandelier hanging from the ceiling onto the audience, killing several of them.
Soon after, the voice leads Christine to a secret passage behind the mirror of her dressing room. There she meets her “spirit,” a masked man who conveys her by horse down, down, down a wonderfully spooky staircase and then by boat to his lair. Once within, she realizes she is in the company of the Phantom, who introduces himself as Erik, claiming that her love will redeem him. She faints in fear, and Erik settles her in a lavish bedchamber. The set, designed by Ben Carré, is marvelously Gothic and atmospheric and is itself a worthy star of the show. It was built on the Universal Lot, Stage 28, a massive undertaking requiring steel and cement construction in order to support the hundreds of extras that would need to be on it. It would be used and reused for other Universal productions until its eventual demolition in 2014, although the studio did save and restore the Paris Opera House segment of the set into storage for historical posterity. Interestingly, while Carré’s set design was an important and integral part of the success of the film, the designer himself didn’t know that they had been used until he saw a screening of the film in 1970.
Christine awakes the next morning to find a note from her host, saying she must never look behind the mask. But she cannot resist, playfully removing his disguise while Erik is distracted, playing his organ (not a euphemism… or is it?!). And it is here that we get one of most memorable moments in horror movie history, the grotesque, deformed visage of Erik revealed, an effect so frightening that when audiences first saw the movie, many screamed or fainted. As was his established practice, Lon Chaney did his own makeup for the film, using for his model an image from the novel done by illustrator Andre Castaigne. To appear more skull-like, Chaney raised his cheekbones by wadding stuffing behind them and donned a skullcap to increase his forehead height and affect a balding appearance. He glued his ears to his head and applied black paint all around his eyes with white highlights underneath them to appear more skeletal. His creepy smile was accomplished thanks to a set of rotted false teeth that he’d fitted with prongs, lifting lips that he’d coated with greasepaint. As for his nose, he pulled his nostrils up with wires, hiding them beneath putty, which sometimes caused him to bleed. He was an actor that truly did suffer for his art.
Enraged at being unmasked, Erik vows he will keep Christine as his prisoner. But she convinces him that she must have one last performance, and he agrees to let her return to the opera stage, although he makes her swear not to see Raoul again. Her release coincides with the yearly masked ball at the opera house, and Christine takes this opportunity to meet again with Raoul under disguise, the pair vowing to run off together after her final show. Unfortunately for them the Phantom, in flamboyant disguise as Red Death, spies on them and overhears their plans. But their fortune turns for the better, for as the couple go to rejoin the masked ball, a man in a fez redirects them to a secret escape, away from a waiting Erik who would likely do them harm.
The next night heralds Christine’s final performance. We see backstage signs of the Phantom’s malevolent tinkering with the production, culminating with his kidnap of Christine mid-performance. Raoul rushes to her dressing room to try to save her and again meets the man in the fez (Arthur Edmund Carewe), who reveals that he is a policeman that has been tracking criminal Erik, a deranged escapee from Devil’s Island. The two men find the hidden entry to the Phantom’s lair but fall through a trapdoor into a torture chamber that Erik has devised, the captor subjecting the men to extreme heat and then—when they have escaped that trap—to drowning by flooding another room. An anguished Christine begs Erik to save them, promising that she will marry him, and Erik frees the men from their torture.
Meanwhile, the enraged stagehands of the opera have decided enough is enough, they will track down and punish the Phantom. They gather in a huge mob and descend into the underground chambers. Erik flees with Christine in tow, stealing a carriage and driving recklessly through the streets of Paris, the mob in hot pursuit. The carriage overturns, Christine flung from the interior without injury, and Erik is forced to continue to flee on foot. The mob surround him and after Erik performs one final showy slight-of-hand, pretending to brandish a noose, they descend on him and dispatch him into the Seine. The movie closes with a brief shot of a happy Christine and Raoul on their honeymoon.
The above-described plotline and in particular the ending for Erik was not faithful to the story of the book or the original screenplay. For example, the fez that the policeman wears makes more sense when one understands that in the original screenplay the character was a chief of police in Persia, and Erik a depraved executioner in the Sultana’s court who eventually fell out of favor and was condemned to be eaten alive by ants (hence the face deformations). But the studio had other ideas about the romantic elements of the plot that they wanted built up, specifically centering around the beautiful Christine and her love life. After the initial set of changes, the studio test screened two alternate versions of endings before settling on the one that was released to the general public. A less violent end to Erik, with him confessing that he is dying and giving Christine a ring that she might use to marry Raoul, or a redemption arc—wherein Erik is overcome by Christine’s purity and kindness after a kiss and relents his wickedness—particularly displeased audiences. The backstory of the intense reworking and salvaging of hours of filming into what has become a favorite movie is fascinating and can be read in detail in the links below. Adding to the difficulties of the production, the director Rupert Julian and the movie’s big-draw star Lon Chaney did not get along at all, the relationship devolving to the point where the director of photography had to act a go-between to ferry messages between the two and Chaney entirely ignoring any direction, doing what he liked. By the time the 1929 “talkie” reissue had been decided, Chaney was under contract with MGM, so the voice recordings and supporting reshooting proceeded without any input from him at all—a decision that strained the relationship between Universal and Chaney and led to the actor’s hesitancy to sign on to Dracula, a role he never got to play due to his untimely death in 1930.
I encourage fans that want to dive deeper into the backstory of The Phantom of the Opera to read Scott MacQueen’s thorough article, linked below. And to watch the classic movie, click on the video here:
Wikipedia: The Phantom of the Opera (1925 film)
AFI: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
This is another classic film I have seen but not in many years. I knew about Chaney's makeup and often wondered how he could stand to wear it for so long. Chaney's parents were deaf and communicating with them helped him learn to emote so well in silent films. Fascinating life he had. Thanks for all this, Martini.
Okay, guess I'm going to have to take the time to read through all this once I get home today. Thanks, Martini!