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:
The Portly Politico 