Movie Review: 1925 – Phantom of the Opera
Today’s old movie review – Phantom of the Opera, 1925.
It’s a silent horror film which is surprisingly watchable and actually scary at times with very ominous music, great make-up, and well a faster speed than the 1910s movies has a speed similar to many suspenseful modern movies.
Like the other movies from 1910s through at least the 1950s, the woman is led by a man though in this case, it’s more like seduced. Frankly, I never understood this story about a woman being lored into a basement crypt and forced to ‘marry’ the man. Is this Josef Fritzl?
There is a great scene with ominous music while the abductor guy slowly leads his seductee down a circular staircase all with large stone blocks – this clearly seems to be the inspiration for an almost identical looking scene in the opening song of Ducktales.
The set itself was constructed to hold 3000 extras in concrete. For this reason says Wikipedia, the sound stage was not destroyed until 2004 – 79 years later!
This movie was also one of the first uses of Technicolor – a process of using a prism to split red, green, and blue colors and record three black and white film strips and then expose them together with color filters. It must have been expensive as it’s only used for some short scenes. It probably wasn’t displayable in most theaters of the time and printed without the color – it has to be restored in 1996 based on the Technicolor records showing what was colored – and it’s creepy:
