The Phantom of the Opera

A silent film set in the Paris Opera. The building is being handed to new owners. The old management gives a warning: box five is to be left empty. Nobody takes it seriously. There is said to be a ghost in the opera. The staff believe it. Christine is a singer in the chorus. She has been working for some time with a hidden teacher. She has never seen him. He comes through the wall of a dressing room. He promises her something: she will be a star. The lead singer cannot go on one night. Christine takes her place and the house rises to her. Then there is an accident. The chandelier falls on the audience. Christine is taken below. From there the film takes place beneath the opera house. Cellars, an underground lake, candles and a boat. The man is masked. He shows himself but not his face. Christine asks him one thing. Then she pulls the mask from behind. That scene is the centre. The camera shows the man's face directly and for the period that is unusually hard. Lon Chaney did the makeup himself and never explained the method. What the narrative is interested in is not horror but ownership: its idea is that the man sees the woman not as a pupil but as property, and counts her voice as his own work. There is Raoul as well. Christine's lover, trying to bring her up from below. The last section is a chase. Paris streets, a crowd and the river. A masked ball sequence was shot in colour. It was made with the two-colour process of the period and the figure in the red cloak first appears there. The production was troubled. The film was reshot several times, different directors came in, and more than one version went into circulation. Most surviving prints today come from the 1929 reissue. The source is Gaston Leroux's novel. Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry and Snitz Edwards are in the cast. Rupert Julian is credited as director. Who it is for: anyone interested in silent cinema and the history of classic horror. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative flow; the subplots are scattered and the versions differ seriously.