The NFR Project: 'The Phantom of the Opera' (1925): Chaney's finest hour

 

The Phantom of the Opera

Dir: Rupert Julian; (Uncred: Lon Chaney, Ernst Laemmle, Edward Sedgwick)

Scr: (Uncred: Walter Anthony, Elliott J. Clawson, Bernard McConville, Frank M. McCormack, Tom Reed, Raymond L. Schrock, Jasper Spearing, Richard Wallace)

Pho: Charles van Enger; (Uncred: Milton Bridenbecker, Virgil Miller)

Ed: Edward Curtiss, Maurice Pivar, Gilmore Walker, Lois Weber

Premiere: Nov. 15, 1925

93 min.

Lon Chaney was the chameleon of silent film, the master performer known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces.” His incredible make-up work and acting versatility made him a legend, and his work in this, the first film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, represents the pinnacle of his career.

Chaney’s adept transformations made him a favorite for horror-movie parts. His first big hit, as Quasimodo The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), made him a household word, and a fortune for Universal Studios.

When studio head Carl Laemmle went to Paris on vacation, he ran across the French author Gaston Leroux, who gave him a copy of his 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. Laemmle immediately optioned it as a vehicle for Chaney.

The now-familiar story is that of a disfigured, psychotically wounded man who dwells beneath the Paris Opera House, a would-be composer who fixates on a young soprano, Christine. Lurking in the background, he mentors her and blackmails the opera’s management into letting her perform. When his instructions are defied, he drops n immense chandelier onto the listening audience.

Christine finds a secret passage and confronts the masked Phantom, who takes her to his underground lair. He instructs her never to take off his mask, which she promptly does – exposing the iconic and still truly terrifying visage of the Phantom, a skull-like face with hollow eyes, distended cheeks, and a nose seemingly eaten away.

This look consumed all of Chaney’s attention and skill. He kept the make-up a secret from the cast and crew, forbid press photographs, and kept pictures of the Phantom out of promotional materials. The result was a shock that still resonates. The girl creeps up behind the Phantom, absorbed in playing his organ in the depths of the theater. He gasps – he gapes – he whirls around – she screams.

Chaney’s Phantom is pitiable, but clearly and diabolically mad. Eventually, Christine’s lover Raoul explores the hidden corridors and arrives to save her in the nick of time, while the Phantom is torn to pieces by an angry mob.

No expense was spared to recreate the Palais Garnier, with a massive set of steel girders and concrete built to hold the weight of hundreds of extras. (This set stood for nearly a century, so strongly was it constructed.) Early “two-strip” Technicolor was used in the masked ball sequence in the film. It was a prestige production all round.

All this added up to a huge investment of time and money, and the producers got nervous. The titular director, Rupert Julian, feuded with everyone and eventually left the production. A quick check of the credits above show that the film was scrapped and remounted multiple times, shown over and over to test audiences to try to find a salable product.

Screenwriters came and went. Endings were changed. Sixty per cent of the original footage was reshot, after which much of it was edited back into the final film. Finally, it was released and proved to be a big hit.

The combination of rich and lavish detail, and Chaney’s horror at the heart of it, make this still a compelling film. Notably, it sparked two remakes, one in 1943 and one in1962. Most memorably, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 theatrical adaptation has dominated Broadway and world theater for decades.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Theodore Case Sound Test: Gus Visser and His Singing Duck.

 

 

'The Lost World' (1925): Silent sci-fi

 

The Lost World

Dir: Harry O. Hoyt

Scr: Marion Fairfax

Pho: Arthur Edeson

Ed: George McGuire

Premiere: Feb. 2, 1925

92 min.

The fantasy film took a while to develop. Initial technological limitations meant that not everything that the imagination could conceive could be placed convincingly on film (except for, seemingly, Georges Melies). The fantasy film took a major step forward with this outing, which married innovative animation techniques to a successful adaptation of an early science fiction novel.

Arthur Conan Doyle is best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but he was a writer of catholic tastes and surprisingly broad range, who created work in multiple genres. His most prominent work of science fiction, inspired by writers such as Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, is the novel The Lost World. In it, he postulates an isolated escarpment that holds dinosaurs, and other ancient flora and fauna, in abundance. There an expedition led by the irascible and vigorous Professor Challenger meets up with, thanks to stop-motion miniatures and a split screen, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and more.

As in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), the mission is to save a previous explorer lost there. The film adds a love interest; appropriately Bessie Love, a popular actress of the day. A couple of comic servant are shown, one unfortunately in blackface. The travelers manage to escape the plateau, and capture a live Brontosaurus as well. They bring it back to London, where it breaks free and causes a bit of havoc (a narrative strategy to be pursued in King Kong eight years later).

The stop-motion photography is a bit clunky, but no one had tried to execute the painstaking craft of moving small models frame by advancing frame to create the illusion of life before, and everyone who saw the film was astonished. This was the work of pioneer Willis O’Brien, who began by working with clay models, and moved onto rubber figures crafted over metal armatures. In its day, this kind of movie magic was as mind-bending as certain CGI accomplishments a century later.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Phantom of the Opera.

 

 

The NFR Project: 'Lady Windermere's Fan' - the Lubitsch touch

 

Lady Windermere’s Fan

Dir: Ernst Lubitsch

Scr: Julien Josephson, Maude Fulton

Pho: Charles van Enger

Ed: Ernst Lubitsch

Premiere: Dec. 26, 1925

89 min.

Ernst Lubitsch was famous long before he came to America. The legendary king of film’s sophisticated comedies of manners got his start in movies in Berlin as an actor in 1913. He was drawn to working behind the camera, and by 1920 had transitioned to directing duties alone. Varying his output between frothy comedies and weighty historical dramas, Lubitsch soon found his work noticed by Hollywood. By 1922, he had relocated to America.

Soon he was churning out romantic comedies based on popular stage plays. Lady Windermere’s Fan comes between two other stellar Lubitsch features, The Marriage Circle and So This Is Paris, and is of a piece with them – a tale of middle-to-upper-class relationship angst, rife with mistaken identities and false assumptions, a blend of farce and melodrama.

Lady Windermere’s Fan is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s successful and well-made 1892 play. In it, the lady of the title suspects her husband of having an affair with a Mrs. Erlynne, to whom he has given large sums of money. In fact, it turns out that Mrs. Erlynne is the disgraced mother of Lady Windermere, long thought dead.

Lady’s Windermere’s suspicions drive her into the arms of Lord Darlington, who seeks an assignation with her. It is up to Mrs. Erlynne to protect her unknowing daughter from scandal, without revealing her true identity.

Lubitsch’s directing style is elegant and smooth, light and witty, deliberately paced. He doesn’t do any flashy camera moves – his focus is on the human face and gesture. As social niceties play out on the surface, the turmoil of emotions roils beneath. In a time of melodramatic action and overstated acting in film, Lubitsch’s restraint, wit, and careful and compassionate powers of observation make for an urbane and humanistic kind of filmmaking that has yet to be equaled.

It is of particular note that none of Wilde’s famous quips or aphorisms are referred to here. Fortunately, the skeleton of the play’s plot is strong, and Lubitsch and his scenarist Julien Josephson wisely lean into the familiar mechanics of the story’s melodramatic underpinnings, relieving them of the obligation to drop in Wilde’s bon mots.

Lubitsch had an extraordinary amount of creative control over his output, leading to his admirers referring to his unique sensibility as “the Lubitsch touch.” Billy Wilder famously had a sign on his office wall that said, “What would Lubitsch have done?”

Lubitsch would be remembered for his silent films of this period if for nothing else. Yet he had much more to come – the codifying of the movie musical, for one, and his increasingly wily and wise meditations on human frailties, including Ninotchka, To Be or Not to Be, The Shop Around the Corner.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time:  ‘The Lost World’.