The original story and themes of 'The Phantom of the Opera' were tailor made for the Hammer treatment. The heart of the story about sexual frustration amid deformity is the kind of thing Hammer on it's A game would have been expected to deliver macabre goodness with. Terrence Fisher's 'Phantom' is in my opinion the weakest Hammer film precisely because it fails to remember what made Hammer what it was. This 'Phantom' does not indulge in grotesques or horror at all. It's a boring miss.
Fisher and Hammer chose to for the most part remake the 1943 Claude Raines 'Phantom' from Universal. This was a poor choice on his part. Gaston Leroux's Phantom was a bizarre deformed freak shunned at birth. If the 'Phantom' is to be adapted this is the version to follow. For some odd reason though the Raines film chose not to do this and instead created a Phantom who became disfigured through a backstage scuffle. Herbert Lom's Phantom is made in this vain. This story isn't that interesting however because this Phantom has not been shunned by the world. Lom and Raines choose exile. They know the stops of being human. I am brought back to Lon Chaney who bordered on the lines between human and being on a different plane. This Phantom yearns to be human. Lom's Phantom has already been. Believe it or not though this Phantom is not sexually interested in Christine and here in lies the film's greatest flaw. Lom's Phantom is a musical genius whose only interest is having his opera be properly credited to his name and performed by Christine. What?! Aside from the fact that Hammer is missing out in exploiting the kind of risqué material they perfected, the Phantom story just loses all it's meaning without this attraction. This sexual frustration is what drives the Phantom to be homicidal. It's far too much of a stretch to perceive this scenario as being capable of turning someone into the Phantom.
This film takes it's title perhaps a bit too literally. We get opera and music here and it is by all means ridiculous. A significant portion of screen time is spent going through awkwardly staged opera numbers. The singers are proficient enough in their abilities but Fisher doesn't know how to stage the numbers with the grandness and spectacle required for such a story. Foolishly this 'Phantom' does not take place in Paris but in London. The London Opera House has none of the grandeur or mystery of it's Paris counterpart. Worse than that though is that every song is in English. We go through musical number after musical number with lyrics which were obviously written by a horror film screenwriter who had no business dabbling in the opera. The music gets more screen time than our Phantom.
The saving grace of the film is Michael Gough who is absolutely fantastic as the villain Lord Ambrose D'Arcy. This character is fully developed and surprisingly intricate given all the shortcomings with the rest of the characters. Gough plays him as the mother of all theatre divas, who takes a perverse pleasure in the power working on the stage gives one. His performance relishes all the nastiness that someone with such a huge ego and disregard for others has. I would have liked to have seen even more of Gough's relationship with the Phantom because then I think Lom would have had much more to work with. Gough plays a brutal backstabber and does so quite well but we never get to know why this betrayal meant so much to the Phantom other than vague references to it being his life's work. I kept thinking how cool it would have been had they been rivals in a backstage war. But this is merely wishful thinking. For his part Gough plays a prima donna beautifully.
This is by far the weakest adaptation of the classic story. It's fundamental flaw is that it Hammer didn't recognize it's own creative gifts and the strongest aspects of the Phantom story. I can only recommend it as a fun example of Michael Gough's work.
Fisher and Hammer chose to for the most part remake the 1943 Claude Raines 'Phantom' from Universal. This was a poor choice on his part. Gaston Leroux's Phantom was a bizarre deformed freak shunned at birth. If the 'Phantom' is to be adapted this is the version to follow. For some odd reason though the Raines film chose not to do this and instead created a Phantom who became disfigured through a backstage scuffle. Herbert Lom's Phantom is made in this vain. This story isn't that interesting however because this Phantom has not been shunned by the world. Lom and Raines choose exile. They know the stops of being human. I am brought back to Lon Chaney who bordered on the lines between human and being on a different plane. This Phantom yearns to be human. Lom's Phantom has already been. Believe it or not though this Phantom is not sexually interested in Christine and here in lies the film's greatest flaw. Lom's Phantom is a musical genius whose only interest is having his opera be properly credited to his name and performed by Christine. What?! Aside from the fact that Hammer is missing out in exploiting the kind of risqué material they perfected, the Phantom story just loses all it's meaning without this attraction. This sexual frustration is what drives the Phantom to be homicidal. It's far too much of a stretch to perceive this scenario as being capable of turning someone into the Phantom.
This film takes it's title perhaps a bit too literally. We get opera and music here and it is by all means ridiculous. A significant portion of screen time is spent going through awkwardly staged opera numbers. The singers are proficient enough in their abilities but Fisher doesn't know how to stage the numbers with the grandness and spectacle required for such a story. Foolishly this 'Phantom' does not take place in Paris but in London. The London Opera House has none of the grandeur or mystery of it's Paris counterpart. Worse than that though is that every song is in English. We go through musical number after musical number with lyrics which were obviously written by a horror film screenwriter who had no business dabbling in the opera. The music gets more screen time than our Phantom.
The saving grace of the film is Michael Gough who is absolutely fantastic as the villain Lord Ambrose D'Arcy. This character is fully developed and surprisingly intricate given all the shortcomings with the rest of the characters. Gough plays him as the mother of all theatre divas, who takes a perverse pleasure in the power working on the stage gives one. His performance relishes all the nastiness that someone with such a huge ego and disregard for others has. I would have liked to have seen even more of Gough's relationship with the Phantom because then I think Lom would have had much more to work with. Gough plays a brutal backstabber and does so quite well but we never get to know why this betrayal meant so much to the Phantom other than vague references to it being his life's work. I kept thinking how cool it would have been had they been rivals in a backstage war. But this is merely wishful thinking. For his part Gough plays a prima donna beautifully.
This is by far the weakest adaptation of the classic story. It's fundamental flaw is that it Hammer didn't recognize it's own creative gifts and the strongest aspects of the Phantom story. I can only recommend it as a fun example of Michael Gough's work.