Here, though, she's flat and disaffected. Philbin certainly was capable of more than this - she's very good, if hardly one for the ages, in the wonderful 1928 costume drama The Man Who Laughs. But one particular cast member isn't really any good at all, Mary Philbin, and that's rough, since she's playing the character with the most screen time. It's certainly the case that none of of the other performers in the movie are on the same level as Chaney, which isn't a surprise - I can't name a single one of his films where he isn't giving the most interesting performance.
But there's a great deal of movie above and beyond that design, even beyond that character, and much of it is pretty unreservedly terrific. I don't want to diminish anything: Chaney's Phantom design is glorious, and it deserves every molecule of its fame. And now the housekeeping is done and we can go on with the actual movie review.Īnd how glad I am to do that! The Phantom of the Opera, in any cut, is one of the great classic horror masterworks, for reasons that are hardly limited to its most famous element - I refer to the make-up designed by actor Lon Chaney for his performance as the Phantom, among the most iconic images in all of silent cinema, and perhaps the most famous make-up design in the entire history of screen horror. This review is primarily in response to the 114-minute 1925 cut, though I've also checked in with the quite spectacularly different 92-minute edition of the 1930 cut (enough of the footage is new to that version, and the plot sufficiently different, that I'd argue it should be thought of as a different film entirely). Thankfully, the film has been one of the best-served of all silents on high-def video, and there is an edition collecting the 35mm print in both 24 fps and 20 fps, running to 78 and 92 minutes, respectively, as well as the 16mm original at 114 minutes. This 1930 cut has been the basis for almost all subsequent editions of the film, given that it has been preserved (not quite in a complete form) in 35mm, while the 1925 cut now exists only in 16mm home copies that look pretty beaten and battered. The short version of the story is all we need, which is that in 1929, Universal shot a large amount of new footage and heavily revised the movie for a 1930 re-release including sound passages, chopping a huge portion of its running time off in the process, and requiring the frame rate bumped up to 24 frames per second, sufficiently faster than the 20 frames per second at which the film was shot that it obvious that it's moving too fast. The other is a thorny mess to talk about, so we need to have some history. One of these is the best of the small population of pure horror films made in the United States during the silent era. The 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera is two things.
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