I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Some rather stilted acting characterizes this melodrama about a man who confessed to a murder his wife did and got life in prison for it. Henry B. Walthall who played a lot of noble and self sacrificing characters on the silent screen and in talkies was at the top of his game in both those categories. The title of the film is a misnomer because there are no ghostly apparitions here, simply Walthall hanging around his family under an alias. But his daughter Nancy Welford bonds with him and can't explain the connection she feels.Walthall was an inventor and his patents were assigned over to his wife Grace Valentine which has made her a most wealthy society dame. She wants a title for Welford to marry and there's some silly English earl played by Rolfe Sedan hanging around probably looking to give some woman his title for her money. That's not what Welford wants, she wants to marry earnest young Ricardo Cortez. But Valentine threatens to ruin him if he marries her.Into this mess walks Walthall back into their lives, given parole after 15 years. He's traveling incognito at first as the daughter has been given a whole different story about a father who died in the late World War. I won't go any farther except that in the end both the women come to a radical reassessment about things. And Walthall once again thinks of others.I doubt we'll ever see a remake of this old fashioned story. The Phantom Of The House was written for a different with different tastes in literature and different ideas about what constitutes a hero. Also it is plain the players were getting used to sound and both Walthall and Cortez did much better work in sound very shortly.It's a real museum piece of a film.

Not a bad effort for its era. People seeing the audience reaction in "Singin' In the Rain" are seeing an anachronism.That would be the reaction of a 1950 audience used to perfected talking pictures.But for audiences accustomed to silent movies,even imperfect sound was marvelous,making complicated plots like this far more practical than with silents. As others said, Henry Walthall and Ricardo Cortez give very professional performances. The film of course is "stagy", partly due to the limitations of sound equipment at the time but more due to the type of story it was.Even later efforts like"The Mask of Demetrius" were just about as stagy because of the nature of the plot. For one thing, this and other movies allow us to see basically what a stage melodrama of the period was like,something almost impossible to completely duplicate today,because todays actors simply didn't grow up in that old tradition. Still, the sets are very interesting, and it is somewhat filmic, allowing scenes and shots such as closeups that stage can't provide, so it is better than merely a filmed stage play. All in all a rather interesting movie.

Nancy Welford could sing a song, but she couldn't act to save her life. Grace Valentine, to judge from this effort, couldn't act period. Not that this is exactly what you would call a class "A" production. It's a "B" through and through, so poor acting doesn't matter all that much – nor does a believable script – so long as the movie delivers plenty of thrills. This it does not do. There's a bit of a climax certainly, but nothing temperature raising. Phil Rosen has directed with all the expertise of his counterpart at the Podunck Amateur Dramatic Society. True, Ricardo Cortez, Henry B. Walthall and Jack Curtis manage to extricate themselves from this dreary "B" with one or two kudos, but everyone else sinks with it.

THE PHANTOM IN THE HOUSE is a very, very old fashioned film--the sort of film that was common back in 1929 when studios first began making talking pictures. So, I cut it a lot of slack. However, when seen today, it really comes off very, very poorly.One of the first problems you'll probably notice is the sound track. The voices and lip movements are way out of sync on the DVD from Alpha Video and I assume all existing copies have that problem. One reason it was common in early sound films was that initially the sound was NOT included on the film strip but came on an accompanying record. Invariably, the record and film not be matched up perfectly--and this film is no exception. Additionally, like all such early films there is very little incidental music and sound effects--making for a strangely quiet film. By the early 1930s, this problem was eliminated, but the only way they knew to add music was to literally have a small orchestra stationed just off camera! h These were not the major problems in the film--just two you'll no doubt notice. However, a few more serious problems did impact how much I liked the film. The dialog was generally bad and the acting quite wooden, though there were some exceptions. Ricardo Cortez and Henry Walthall were professionals who already looked comfortable in front of the camera. This is especially true of Walthall who had been on stage quite a bit during his long career. The rest of the cast were not so skilled and it showed.Still, these were not the most serious problem in the film. The biggest single problem is the plot. It was hardly believable and the way some of the people acted was ridiculous. For example, when the film began, Walthall and his wife are in the room with a dead man--a man the wife had just killed. Walthall THOUGHT she'd been having an affair yet HE claimed it was him who killed the man! It was clearly self-defense--so why did he say he did it?! He spent 15 years in prison for something he did not commit AND he thought his wife was guilty! This made no sense. Additionally, while he was in prison protecting his wife, he was also sending patents for inventions to her and she became wealthy. When he was paroled, she wanted nothing to do with him!! Think about it--he saved her and provided for her so well that she now was quite rich YET she wanted him to just disappear! This, too, made no sense.Overall, the sound issues and dialog can be forgiven--after all, that the was the norm for 1929. But a clichéd and silly plot cannot--so I can't recommend you see this soapy film.