Films: 1920s
(1925) The Phantom of the Opera
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The Phantom of the Opera
Director: Rupert Julian
Release: 1925
Director Rupert Julian's "The Phantom of the Opera" is sometimes described as a Grand Guignol, and in the sense that Julian's movie emphasizes the representation of death in actor Lon Cheney's portrayal of Erik, the Phantom, it is an apt label.
Cheney's Phantom is an actual death's skull, a walking incarnation of a man half through the threshold of expiration. He sleeps in a coffin five basements below the Paris Opera House where he was incarcerated and left for dead by torturers during the revolution.
Now, during performances in the theater above, the Phantom lurks in Box Five. He has set his heart upon understudy Christine Daae, who is already betrothed to the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny.
Daae, a stunning vision of untouched beauty played with a convincing streak of ambition by 25-year-old Mary Philbin, makes a deal with the Phantom. He reveals to her his subterranean lair and promises her a life on the opera house stage.
Her repulsion at his strange mask doubles as a magnet that draws her to him, and although Erik forbids her to touch the expressionless face he wears, Daae cannot resist. When he is exposed, Erik's misshapen and malevolent face terrifies Daae. Her terror drives him to despair, but he promises to coach and propel her stardom, so long as she will abandon Chagny.
The arrangement is short-lived.
She inevitably returns to Chegny and so the Phantom exacts a broad and awful revenge on the opera house, including hangings, drownings, poisonings and an attempt to roast alive Chegny and Parisian investigator Ledoux.
The contest ends with an aborted kidnapping by carriage, Daae is gravely injured and the Phantom makes his last stand before a mob of enraged theatre goers.
Julian tells this story in measured and precisely beautiful shots. White-skirted dancers coil up and down spiral stairs, flanked by grotesque and beautiful scenery stored in the upper basements of the opera house.
The stage itself, the proscenium arch, is replicated throughout the film by careful placement of photographer Milton Bridenbecker's camera. Walls, doors, props and flats are placed in the foreground and background to form "accidental" demarcations of the fourth wall. Julian never allows the story to become entirely separate from the theater in which it is based. In a sense, he communicates the layers of metaphor by attaching the physical action to a carefully ordered visual border.
Light plays a key role in the creation of this dense and fantastic world-apart in "The Phantom of the Opera." Shadow is nearly as complex and awesome in effect here as in F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu." Faces float in blackness, approaching from afar and growing as the vanished body approaches. The silhouette of a hanged man tilts crazily toward and away from a wall, gorily enlarging and diminishing as the discovering character cowers within its lightless shape.
Meanwhile, Cheney is powerfully angry and his Phantom only flirts with the notion of pathos. Instead of the lover-in-monster-form, Cheney's dehumanizes his Phantom. Instead of portraying a beauty-and-the-beast monster, he concentrates on the ugliness of insanity and the brutality of obsession.
The Phantom's mask is unsettling, a bizarre approximation of a handsome man. Unmoving, eerily placid in expression, it is ringed by a vaguely erotic flap of clear tissue that bobs and dances when he speaks. Daae is understandably unnerved.
But it is words that communicate the strangeness of the Phantom's mind.
The Phantom does nothing to communicate passion or the tenderness he says he feels for Daae. Instead he can only grovel briefly at her bedside in the dungeons. He is towering, overpowering and a creature of absolutes. That he owns Daae is never in doubt. That she will leave abandon him, however, becomes his self-fulfilling prophecy. When she does, his anger is ecstasy.
Since he cannot have Daae in a place of marriage or consummate a union, the Phantom's pleasure in love seems to erupt from the opportunity to wreak vengeance and jealous punishment upon Daae's friends and colleagues.
But the Phantom means something different outside of this explosive relationship. His interaction with the opera-house staff and audience is based upon a dynamic of loss and restitution.
The Phantom's real face, disfigured so as to appear permanently enraged, is a direct representation of "The Phantom of the Opera's" prevalent subtext of torture (that of the past, that of the present - inflicted upon the Phantom and then inflicted by the Phantom upon others).
The Paris Opera House and its ghastly denizen have their roots in human cruelty. The Phantom redirects that source material at the audience inside the newer structure.
Notes and commands and flitting appearances never allow the cast and crew to forget the legacy of the dungeons underneath, and when they fail to acknowledge the Phantom's skewed version of personal empowerment (when they rob him of absolute decisions over the cast) he destroys their audience. Early on, when diva Carlotta plays the stage instead of the Phantom's preferred Daae, the massive house chandelier plummets into the orchestra seats, crushing patrons as a act of his disapproval.
In another direct interaction, the Phantom dons a scarlet cape and costume, topped with an oversized skull mask. Skull within skull, this mythology-incarnate version of the Phantom moves among the Bal Masque, a yearly free-for-all of opera patrons in garish costume. For one Technicolor moment (and the film does, in fact, switch from hand-colorized frames to Technicolor), the Phantom is in a world that looks like him, and he commands it.
Shortly thereafter, he follows the forbidden lovers to their rooftop rendezvous and can only cling, red cloak billowing around him, as the elements threaten to unseat him from his statuary throne. In the face of natural love, elevated physically and metaphorically, the Phantom is nearby but powerless.
The end of "The Phantom of the Opera" is a telling moment about the nature of what power the Phantom cannot posses away from his completely controlled opera house environment. His tricks and traps in the dungeons are effective, and deadly, but his mind is too warped by Daae's presence to follow through on all of the murders he has planned. When he makes this concession to her pleas, the process of his undoing begins.
Fate seems to have a hand. His frenzied whipping of the horses (in perhaps the most frightening scene: Lon Cheney's face twitching and leering in a field of blackness) pulling the carriage in which he make his final kidnap of Daae, causes the whole apparatus to come uncoupled.
The Phantom's subsequent flight and, notably, his abandoning of Daae to the street where she was ejected, places him in the pincer-grip of a converging mob on the banks of the Seine.
Here, Julian plays his final symbolic card. The Phantom holds something in his hand, forcing the crowd away until he reveals what it is he holds. When that happens, and the nature of his power is exposed, the Phantom's fate is sealed.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
