The Phantom of the Opera (Universal, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I had been to last Sunday’s free 2 p.m. concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, and at the end of the show San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, had announced that on Saturday, October 29 the Pavilion would be presenting a special Hallowe’en evening concert (two days before actual Hallowe’en, but any relation between actual holidays and the dates they’re observed has got so fleeting over the years it didn’t matter) featuring a showing of the 1925 classic film The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Rupert Julian (and Edward Sedgwick, mostly a comedy director, who was brought in to restage the final chase scene after Julian’s version fell flat during previews) and starring Lon Chaney, Sr. with Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry. The event was in three parts: a pre-game show at 5:30 p.m. featuring Raúl doing a truly awful pretend “monster” voice and promoting a trivia contest at 5:30 p.m.; a performance by soprano Victoria Robertson and tenor Bernardo Bermúdez (the singers from last week’s “Opera4Kids” presentation of The Enchanted Tail, a pastiche opera based on themes from Carmen, Don Giovanni and The Merry Widow) doing a medley of the Big Tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera musical – “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Think of Me,” “Music of the Night,” and “All I Ask of You,” in that order – and the showing of the 1925 film.

I was curious as to how Raúl would do as an accompanist to a silent movie, but as it turned out he didn’t; the accompanist was Mark Herman, a Los Angeles-based piano and organ player who was there to accompany Robertson and Bermúdez and also to play for the movie. In 2002 (have we really been together that long?) Charles and I attended a live screening of the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera with a much better organist, Jim Riggs, whom we had a chance to talk to before the film began. Riggs said he wouldn’t include any of the music from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical because he can’t stand it, and he also wouldn’t include any music from Gounod’s opera Faust even though it’s the opera the Paris Opera is performing in the film. Mark Herman made musical choices that were considerably kitschier than Riggs’s had been (yes, that was 20 years ago, but I remember Riggs’s score as considerably darker and more dramatic, while Herman’s was more sentimental), and while he blessedly didn’t include any references to Lloyd Webber’s score (well, we’d already heard the Big Moments from it!), he did rather annoyingly use the big aria “Even bravest heart may swell” as a theme for Raoul de Chagny, the juvenile male lead, which in the opera is actually the big number for the baritone singing Valentin, brother of the heroine Marguerite. He also more logically incorporated the music from the big final scene from the opera, in which Marguerite (the woman Faust seduced, got pregnant and abandoned under the influence of the devil Mephistopheles) literally is lifted into heaven by angels as she dies in prison for having killed her and Faust’s baby, as aspiring opera singer Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) performs that scene on screen at the Paris Opera.

As far as the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera is concerned, I’ve commented on it pretty often over the years (one can read my previous posts on it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/11/phantom-of-opera-universal-1925.html) and it’s an amazing film, even though it’s not what it could have been. It’s still far and away the best adaptation of Phantom ever done, and though the script-writing committee (Elliott Clowson, Bernard Conville, Frank McCormick, Raymond Schrock, Jasper Spearing and future director Richard Wallace, plus Walter Anthony and Tom Reed supplying the intertitles) included only one of the six torture chambers the Phantom maintains on the way to his underground lair, that’s still one more than any other film adaptation has used. Carlos Clarens, in his 1960’s book An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, claimed that Lon Chaney himself directed most of the Phantom’s scenes (and if Chaney was personally responsible for the sense of doomed romanticism in such haunting images as the veil of Christine’s dress floating on the water as the Phantom takes her in his gondola to his redoubt, it suggests he might have made an excellent director), and imdb.com credits Chaney and Ernst Laemmle, studio head Carl Laemmle’s nephew, as one of four directors on this project along with Julian, Sedgwick and Chaney. (Carl Laemmle was so notorious a nepotist that Ogden Nash joked, “Uncle Carl Laemmle has a large faemmle.”) One thing I hadn’t realized before I saw Phantom on this go-round is how it anticipates Universal’s later Frankenstein movies in having essentially a posse of backstage crew members at the Paris Opera House go after the Phantom and drown him in the Seine at the end. In Phantom the posse is recruited by Simon Buquet (Gibson Gowland, star of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed) to avenge the Phantom’s murder of Simon’s brother Joseph (Bernard Siegel). But the origins of the famous mobs of villagers who stormed the Frankenstein castle in just about every movie Universal made featuring the Frankenstein Monster are clear here.