But the physicial mask that hides the horrible, or a face to be pitied (or both)? That’s unique to Romantic fiction. Carl Jung would say those are masks of the persona: the ego adapting to its circumstances. Sorry.Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, The Phantom of the Opera, has been filmed at least a half a dozen times, turned into a very successful Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, and used as inspiration for one of the most ubiquitous halloween masks. I had been eagerly prepared to really like this classic. But here the camera is trained on her and it just goes on and on and on … I was actually surprised at how bad it all was. They should not last more than about fifteen seconds, in my opinion, then cut to something else, then cut back. As an example, making a silent film about an opera has a built-in challenge, doesn’t it? Dialogue is one thing, you can use cards, but singing? All the shots of Christine Daae singing are far too long. Almost all the scenes are too long, could easily have been cut by a third.

The camera lingers on uninteresting scenes. I am a big fan of silent comedy and many silent dramas, so it’s not the lack of sound that bothers me here, it is mostly the snail-like pace. Sound and picture quality aside, I didn’t think this was a very good movie. There is a restored version that includes the sequences that were shot in color. The sound track has nothing to do with the action on screen, it’s just some random classical stuff. There are several versions, and since it is in the public domain, there are many kinds of copies out there. It’s actually hard for me to rate this movie. What we all know is the famous scene of Lon Chaney being unmasked, and the horrific ordeal he had to endure to look like that. This is the most famous, the one everybody remembers … but I don’t think many people have actually seen the movie. There is a German one from 1916 and of course the musical version from 2004. The IMDb lists eleven versions of this story.

Phantom of the opera 2004 unmasked