The Phantom Of The Opera (1943)

This was the second screen version of Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera (1909), following the still definitive silent version The Phantom of the Opera (1925) starring Lon Chaney [Sr]. The 1925 film is an absolute classic due to Chaney’s memorably mad and contorted performance and its superbly Gothic climax venturing down into the cellars of the Paris Opera House. In the mid-1940s, Universal were enjoying a good deal of success with their Frankenstein and Dracula sequels and so, rather than create any kind of sequel to the Chaney film, which was really the first of their classic monster movies, they decided to remake it with the addition of colour and sound. 

Unfortunately, in remaking The Phantom of the Opera in sound and colour, all that Universal ended up doing was embalming it. A huge budget was thrown at the film and Phantom of the Opera 1943 is a production that cannot help but impress with its sumptuously colourful sets and costumery. It was shot in Technicolor at a time when the bulk of films made in the US studios were in black-in-white so the lushness would have been even more amazing if you want to consider the film through the eyes of the audience of its time. The opera house is a marvellously gilted coliseum of multi-storey boxes (which was actually rebuilt using the set from the 1925 film) filled with audiences in the hundreds. The underground system of tunnels is a fabulous series of (studio-bound) lakes and crumbling stone caverns. The cutting of the gold chandelier decorated with dozens of candles is the film’s most exquisite set-piece. Even if nobody else is going to let the production be an interesting, the set-designers are – when Nelson Eddy catches his fall on a curtain, it is not merely a curtain but a hundred foot drape in pure velvet, while Claude Rains’ Enrique doesn’t get to live in a mere poverty-laden flat but instead gets one with an angular roof and giant-sized intruding ceiling beams like something out of German Expressionism.

However, Arthur Lubin’s plodding direction is determined to wring any interest out of the proceedings. Everything in the film proceeds at a sedate pace as though it were a standard soap opera romance of the era. Even though Claude Rains plays the title character and central figure in the film, for instance, he is only third billed on the credits with the lead positions going to romantic hero Nelson Eddy followed by Susanna Foster who plays this version’s Christine. It is a film where all emphasis has been placed on the spectacle – the colour, the costuming, the sets, the music and staging – such that the horror elements ended up being forgotten. In comparison to the 1925 film with its magnificent evocation of the Gothic, all that we get here is a few shots of the Phantom’s lurking shadow, while the climactic abduction and venture down into the cellars to rescue Christine is something that is over within minutes. It is here more than anywhere else that you can trace the descent of The Phantom of the Opera from a Gothic horror story to the weepy Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which bled out all horror elements and romanticised the story. It is no wonder then that this version of the story has gained a respectability more so than any other version up until Lloyd Webber – it is the perfect stuffily respectable desiccation of the story.

It is hard to take pint-sized Claude Rains’ Phantom seriously, he seems more like an indignant fox terrier than the forbiddingly mad figure that Lon Chaney memorably incarnated. Not to mention that with the casting of Claude Rains we have a Phantom who is only 5’6” in height, meaning that even when he is threatening this film’s equivalent of the character of Carlotta (Jane Farrar), she looks taller than he does. As modern horror fans come to understand, the addition of backstory is almost always something that weakens an iconic horror character – characters seem to work far better when they are simply evil without any need to have to make them sympathetic. It becomes extremely difficult looking at weak-jawed and backboneless Claude Rains throughout the first thirty minutes and thinking “This wimp is supposed to turn into the marvellously mad figure enacted by Lon Chaney?” Even the burning of the Phantom’s face is a laughably directed scene – the girl picks up a flatbed tray of acid as though it is the most obvious thing to throw and then proceeds to stand half-a-minute as Rains just waits there before deciding to throw it at him.

The film also suffers from the addition of comedy relief with the mugging idiocy of stage-manager Steven Geray and in particular the romantic triangle between Susanna Foster and lookalike heroes Nelson Eddy and Edgar Barrier. Eddy and Barrier are played as though they are doubles, each with ridiculous little fake pencil mustaches. Their scenes are played for bumbling humour as they are constantly mirroring one another’s actions, offering Susanna Foster the same thing or trying to walk through the door at the same time and reacting with mutual stances of popping discomposure.

The sets for the film were later reused in The Climax (1944), which also featured Susanna Foster as a singer being controlled by Boris Karloff.