The excellent horror host Joe Bob Briggs opened the current season of The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs with a screening of the 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the classic starring Lon Cheney in the title role.  I had never seen the film, and I can see why it has stood up to the test of time.

It’s also wild to consider that this movie is 100 years old.  It released the year my paternal grandfather was born, between the World Wars, before the Great Depression.  The 1920s and the 2020s share more than we realize, but it was also a fundamentally different world.  That the movie is still enjoyable is a testament to the strength of the story.

There is no original print of The Phantom that survives today (according to Joe Bob), and the score to the film has, it seems, been lost to time.  The version Joe Bob presented seems to track closely with the plot on Wikipedia, and featured a score composed and recorded in 2011.  The version he presented also featured colored tinting, an early version of Technicolor.

Based on the music credit after the film, this version is not the one Joe Bob presented, but it’s a reasonable facsimile and worth your time:

Clearly, I enjoyed this film.  It involved a massive cast of extras and a huge set, which cleverly employed trapdoors and other space-saving devices to keep lots of action in a single scene.  I’d never really found the Phantom as a character to be all that scary, but Cheney’s classic makeup work, as well as the creepy atmosphere of the labyrinthine Paris Opera House, changed my mind.

The basic premise is that the Phantom is Erik, a brilliant musical genius who was born ugly—a deformed version of intense ugliness.  Other iterations of the Phantom stray from the source material (a novel) and give the Phantom a tragic cause for his ugliness, like acid to the face or a terrible burn.  I like that here, the Phantom just is hideous, and that this innate characteristic and people’s response to it drove him to villainy.

Probably my favorite scene from the film is when the Phantom shows up at a huge masquerade ball dressed as the Red Death.  The film uses Technicolor tinting to draw attention to the Phantom, with tinting in the rest of the scene to differentiate the location visually from the Paris Opera House.  The Phantom looks so menacing as the Red Death, and the huge number of extras just makes the whole thing look amazing.

The Phantom is the classic gamma male (lol)—he thinks that if he can give Christine everything she wants and make her an opera star, he will get the girl, in spite of his ugliness.  When his efforts fail, he pulls the whole, “I gave you everything, you owe me your love!” card and abducts her.  When Christine attempts to escape, the Phantom shows up and wreaks havoc.

And, to be clear, the Phantom is not all that sympathetic.  He’s a mass murderer.  When the operatic prima donna Carlotta refuses to step aside to allow Christine perform, the Phantom causes the Paris Opera House’s gigantic chandelier to fall on the audience, killing dozens of people.  He hangs several people and nearly roasts two others alive.

Nowadays, the Phantom would be played as the tragic victim of bullying, and his acts would be framed as empowerment.  Likely, “he” would be a ethnic “she”; but I digress.  The Phantom being clearly a villain, albeit it with an undeserved disfigurement, makes him much more compelling and interesting as one.

Even at 100-years old, The Phantom of the Opera (1925) is a must-see for any fan of classic horror.