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The opera is Faust, the beneficiary is Cocteau in La Belle et la Bête and Orphée. A vertical arrangement, opulence of the Paris Opera House and beneath it "dismal haunts of creeping things," up and down skulks the ghoulish fool for love. The callow nobleman (Norman Kerry) courts the ingénue (Mary Philbin) but her romantic imagination belongs to the angelic voice beckoning from behind the walls, the "Spirit of Music" better known to terror-stricken stagehands as The Phantom. "A strange force that drives me on," the mysterious patron met at last behind the dressing-room mirror, the gondola ride in the murky pond five cellars underground. (The maiden flits about the subterranean chamber and stumbles upon an open coffin, "This is where I sleep" is the host's matter-of-fact explanation.) The celebrated unmasking becomes the discovery of Mrs. Bates in Psycho, and there's Lon Chaney in all his putrefying grandeur, a grimacing Death's head that makes the camera go blurry. "Feast your eyes—glut your soul on my accursed ugliness!" Rupert Julian is the single credited director but many hands shaped the primordial shocker, above all Chaney's in the presiding spirit of repulsion and yearning. Gaston Leroux gets compared to Poe in the opening credits, "The Masque of the Red Death" is duly adduced for the grand ball in early Technicolor. (The Phantom perches himself on Apollonian statuary as his gargantuan cape billows above the pallidly normal couple.) The line of ballerinas before a Moloch's mouth backstage, the curtain rising on the corpse dangling from the "Punjab lasso," the jack-o'-lantern visage encroaching in the darkness. "To you I have imparted the full measure of my art." Choice of scorpion and grasshopper, or, in terms of subsequent recompositions, of De Palma and Argento. With Arthur Edmund Carewe, Gibson Gowland, Virginia Pearson, John St. Polis, Snitz Edwards, and Bernard Siegel. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |