Login
It has a tremendous amount of things in common with Dracula, it’s a canonized lion of a film despite not being much good and interminably boring, yet it’s blessed with a central performance that is probably the entire reason that the film continues to endure. I suppose the most accurate way to describe to would be: classic-by-default.
Gaston Leroux’s source material, on the surface level, should lend itself incredibly well to stage and screen, but there has yet to be a totally satisfying adaptation. Some lean too strongly in favor of musical numbers and lavish sets and costumes (the 1943 version and the thundering, inexplicably popular Andrew Lloyd Weber stage show) or too far into Gothic horrors and grotesque makeups (the 1989 version springs to mind). None of them have been able to marry the two diametric sides together and create a satisfying complete and whole film. The best of the various versions remains the silent one, which is ironic all things considered, yet this one still is far from perfect.
The main problem is how the plot lacks any distinct sense of construction or structure. The alleged romantic triangle at the center of the whole thing is anemic and undercooked. Never for a minute do we believe that Christine and Raoul are hot and bothered for each other under the collar. Erik’s deranged phantom is obviously consumed by his sexual obsessions and greedily lusts after the young Christine after training her and giving her the tools to succeed in the Paris Opera House. But there’s no reason given for his obsession with Christine, how did they meet? Why did he choose her? The Faustian bargain at the center is a wispy thing that barely holds the plot together.
For all of the money thrown into the production (the behind scenes story of bringing this film to theaters is often more fascinating than the film it birthed), the hack director manages to make the whole affair look pretty pedestrian. These are some lavish, opulent sets and costumes, true things of beauty, and Rupert Julian doesn’t do much to create a sustained atmosphere of gothic dread or horror. He points and shoots like a layman effectively making all of his production look matte and removed of any/all textures.
Phantom of the Opera remains a classic solely due to Lon Chaney’s masterful performance as the titular character, which ranks amongst Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein and Lugosi’s Dracula for sheer greatness. His Erik is a living skeletal fragment of a man, a twisted and broken thing which is consumed with rage and desire that will never be met. His unmasking sees him churn this rage from inward towards the outward world and the angelic figure that breaks his heart.
Chaney works doubly hard to create something in this vacuum, and he succeeds through sheer force of will, artistic magic and a makeup job that still provokes a reaction. He’s capable of creating a few moments of pure terror through his acting choices alone. None of them are more disturbing than when he calmly walks into the murky underground canals in search for the intruders to his lair. He becomes a man possessed of distilled revenge and defense. And when his hands reach out from the water to pull the intruders off their boat, everything has come together in synchronous harmony.
I know everyone will bring up the infamous chandelier scene, which plays out in every variation of this story. All I can say is that it doesn’t live up to the hype. It plays out in a disjointed, poorly edited manner. There is no tension built up since it takes so long for us to realize that Erik is indeed cutting it down, and it proceeds to cut back and forth without creating any kind of rhythm between the two shots. A more interesting scene isn’t one of horror but of great pathos in which Erik follows Raoul and Christine out of a ball and listens to them discuss their love for each other and running away. Erik’s wounded nature is given a full-bodied reaction in which he collapses as if stabbed by her very words and reaches out towards the sky at the laughing gods who give him no moment of peace.
How exactly Erik came to be both his disfigured image and living in a very ornate underground layer is never fully explored or even explained. He’s dubbed a practitioner of the black arts, which we’re never really shown nor is anything done with it, and an escaped sadistic criminal, which is evident by the very nature of the plot’s twists and turns. He is an opaque sketch, yet Chaney manages to color his personality and try to build up a more substantial image of him through his immense talents as both makeup artist and actor. The plot may not work in service of his fantastic creation, but Chaney makes Opera worth watching at least once.
