Review: Phantom of the Opera (1962)

Toward the end of his career, Cary Grant was interested in doing a horror film--something he'd never done before--and he approached Hammer Studios, which had successfully revived the classic monsters of the Universal stable of the 1930s with a string of hits like Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula and Curse of the Werewolf. Hammer responded by presenting Grant and his agent with the script to its adaptation of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, which had already been filmed a couple of times (in 1925 and 1943 by Universal. Grant's agent rejected the script, turned off by Anthony Hind's lurid, violent take on the classic tale, and Grant never made a horror film.

Sometimes, agents are right.

This version of Phantom of the Opera, co-produced with Universal, is a dreary affair, with the action inexplicably moved from Paris to London, Where Professor Petrie (Herbert Lom) tries to enlist Lord Ambrose D'Arcy (Michael Gough at his reptilian best) as the patron for his music. Instead, Ambrose steals the music and puts his own name on it. Petrie tries to destroy all of the copies of the music by burning them, but the fire gets out of control and, when he tries to throw what he thinks is water on the flames, Petrie catches a face full of acid instead. Petrie escapes the fire and throws himself into the Thames, but a dwarf (Ian Wilson) finds him in the sewer and rescues him.

Meanwhile, at the opera, Christine (Heather Sears) is set to play the lead in a production based on the story of Joan of Arc, but loses the part when she won't sleep with D'Arcy, who wrote the opera (except he didn't--Petrie did). Christine gets fired, along with her boyfriend, Harry (Edward de Souza) and just about anyone else who doesn't like D'Arcy (which is, in fact, everybody), but the dwarf kidnaps Christine so Petrie can "teach" her how to use her voice. (His "teaching" method includes slapping Christine and splashing her face with sewer water.)

In fact, the dwarf gets most of the nasty bits the Phantom usually does, like hanging nosy stagehands and stabbing a ratcatcher (a pre-Doctor Who Patrick Troughton) in the eye. He even precipitates the "exciting" conclusion, where he causes the chandelier to fall, at which point the Phantom tears off his own mask (why?), leaps onstage to shove Christine out of the way (quite a jump--maybe the lack of a mask made him more aerodynamic?), and is crushed by the chandelier himself, even though the chandelier doesn't look much bigger than the one that used to hang in my grandmother's living room.

That chandelier points to another huge problem with this version of Phantom. Many of Hammer's movies were low-budget productions, but the studio was able to mask (no pun intended) that fact with gothic sets and fast pacing, both of which kept you from looking too carefully at anything but the action. But the opera sequences here look like they were put on by a particularly hard-up community theater (especially compared the 1943 version), and Terence Fisher can't pump much energy into the proceedings.

Lom's Phantom has the scariest mask of any of the big-screen "opera ghosts," but that's not the point. It's the man under the mask who's supposed to be scary. And this Phantom fails on that score. Just as the movie as a whole fails on every other score.