Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
The Phantom of the Opera
Beneath the Paris Opéra a masked man coaches a young soprano toward stardom, and asks for everything in return.
Lon Chaney designed his own face for this: wire in the nostrils, the lips drawn back, the eye sockets darkened. Universal kept it out of the publicity so that the first audiences met it at the same moment Christine does. That unmasking at the organ is still the greatest jump in American silent film, because Mary Philbin is standing behind him and he does not know she is there. The opera house set on Stage 28 stood at Universal until 2014. This is the 1925 release, not the 1929 reissue re-cut around a soundtrack. Watch the Phantom on the roof of the Opéra above the lovers, his cloak spread across the frame.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Lon Chaney · Edward Sedgwick · Rupert Julian
- Photographed by
- Virgil Miller
- With
- Carla Laemmle · Mary Philbin · Lon Chaney · Snitz Edwards · Gibson Gowland · Cesare Gravina
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Universal’s two silent nights of 1925–27, both made under Carl Laemmle before Dracula. Leni builds his dread out of a house and Julian builds his out of a face, and the studio’s horror of the 1930s needed both.
Two ways to make a monster with a face. Barrymore shows the change happening in front of us before the make-up arrives; Chaney hides his work under a mask until the moment it is torn off. One horror is becoming, the other is being seen.
Lon Chaney at Universal, two years apart and both times in Paris: a disfigured man who loves a woman from a height, an opera house roof or a bell tower, and a mob coming for him at the end.
Lon Chaney in consecutive years as a man an audience laughs at or runs from, each time in love with a performer who knows him only in costume. The Phantom hides behind a face he built; the clown wears greasepaint over a face the film lets you see.