by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Thursday night Charles
and I had some time to spare between all the dire news reports on the
SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and we looked for something to watch in between news shows
and Law and Order reruns. We found it in Phantom
of the Opera — note the lack of the
first definite article you’re used to from most of the famous versions (Gaston
Leroux’ original 1911 novel, the classic 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, Sr.,
and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical) and an odd item to find in the Blu-Ray
boxed set of Universal’s horror classics because it’s the only one that isn’t a
series film and it’s also the only one in color. It’s the 1943 Phantom directed by Arthur Lubin and starring — in this
order of billing — Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster and Claude Rains. Though it
doesn’t have the legendary status of the 1925 silent with Chaney (still the
best-ever adaptation) it’s probably the most important in terms of the later
history of the story because screenwriters Hans Jacoby, Eric Taylor and Samuel Hoffenstein
made key changes in the Leroux storyline — and those have been followed in most
of the subsequent versions: the Hammer remake from 1962 (with Herbert Lom as
the Phantom after Cary Grant — Cary Grant? — wisely turned it down); the rock adaptation Phantom of the
Paradise from 1974 (starring Paul
Williams, who also wrote the score, and a damned good movie worth being better
known); and the Lloyd Webber musical. In Leroux’ original and the 1925 Chaney
version, the Phantom is a former carnival freak named Erik, deformed from
birth, who got a job building the Paris Opera House and while he was doing that
he also built for himself a subterranean hangout under the Opera House, accessible only by gondola via
the Paris sewers, and lived there until he heard the remarkable soprano voice
of Christine Daaé (played by the quite good Mary Philbin in the Chaney film),
whereupon he determined to make her the biggest star of the Opera no matter how
much mayhem he had to cause and how many people he had to kill — not only rival
soprani but also audience members in the famous scene in which, to protest that
Christine isn’t singing the lead of Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust that night, he saws through the chain holding up
the opera house’s chandelier and it falls into the orchestra seats during the
performance.
For this 1943 version the writers changed the Phantom’s real
identity to Erique Claudin (Claude Rains), a violinist in the Paris Opera
Orchestra, and in the opening scene the conductor notices that the violins seem
to be a bit “off” in the overture to Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha (the only one of the three pieces performed in the
movie that’s a real opera — more on that later). He traces the problem to
Claudin, realizes that the violinist has arthritis (the disease isn’t named in
the script but it’s pretty obvious what it is) and that he can no longer play
up to the standard of perfection required by the Opera. Claudin goes home to
the hovel in which he lives — which looked to both Charles and I like a set
recycled from the magnificent 1932 Universal horror film Murders in the Rue
Morgue (a vehicle for Bela
Lugosi, one of his three finest films — along with White Zombie, also from 1932, and the 1934 serial The Return
of Chandu — and one of the classics,
along with the 1934 Black Cat, The Raven, The Invisible Ray and others not included
in the Blu-Ray box because it isn’t a monster movie with a continuing lead
character) — and is faced with the typical hard-assed landlady who wants to
throw him out onto the street because he hasn’t paid her rent in several
months. Both she and the conductor taunt him for not having saved any of the
money he was making as a violinist for the Opera, but we soon realize why he’s broke: he’s been subsidizing
the vocal training of Christine DuBois (Susanna Foster, who was only 19 when
the movie was made), a singer in the Opera chorus with the potential to be a
huge star. Meanwhile, Christine is juggling the affections of two boyfriends:
Anatole Garron (Nelson Eddy), a star baritone who wants to partner with her
both professionally and personally; and Raoul Daubert (the almost insufferably
stuck-up Edgar Barrier), inspector with the Sureté (the French plainclothes police force — their
uniformed force is called the gendarmerie), who wants her to quit the opera, marry him and lead a “normal” life
as a wife (and, presumably, mother). The conflict in the story between art and
love, between a great public career and a “normal” life, that was at the heart
of the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy masterpiece Maytime (she acclaimed it as the best film she ever made,
and it’s arguably Eddy’s best, too) and would later be dramatized equally
wrenchingly in the 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes, gets touched on here but little more than that.
Anyway, broke and about to be rendered homeless, Claudin makes one last
desperate stop at the offices of music publisher Pleyel (who really existed; he
was a deus ex machina in the
1948 Chopin biopic A Song to Remember and here he’s played by Miles Mander, who’d played the lead in Alfred
Hitchcock’s first film as a director — The Pleasure Garden from 1925 — but by this time had descended to the
character ranks either as a slimy villain, as here and the 1944 film
Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death, or as the hapless milquetoast rich guy who married femme fatale Claire Trevor in Murder, My Sweet, the classic 1944 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s
Farewell, My Lovely and to
my mind the Raymond Chandler film the
way the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon is the Dashiell Hammett film) and
pleads with him to publish his concerto — which for some reason he’s written
for piano as the solo instrument even though what he plays professionally is
the violin. Pleyel literally denounces his concerto as trash, and just then Claudin hears someone
performing it in Pleyel’s office, immediately decides the publisher has stolen
it, and goes into a murderous rage. He strangles Pleyel, and Pleyel’s female
assistant throws a tray of acid in Claudin’s face (it was there to be used for
engraving plates to publish music). Claudin staggers out, permanently
disfigured, and takes up residence in the sewers under the Opera House.
Meanwhile, the Opera is presenting a new work, Amour et Gloire (“Love and Glory”), actually cobbled together by
the film’s music director, Edward Ward, from piano works by Chopin: the
“Military” Polonaise in A major, Op. 40, No. 1; the Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op.
64, No. 2; and the Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2. (In quite a few of
Nelson Eddy’s films the sequences featuring opera performances were assembled
this way from previously existing classical music; they couldn’t use real
operas because in most operas the tenor is the romantic lead and the baritone
—Eddy’s vocal Fach — is usually either
someone’s father or the villain. So there are not many real operas that feature
romantic duets for soprano and baritone.) At least two other divas are penciled in for the leading role — Biancarolli
(Jane Farrar, voice-dubbed by Sally Sweetland), whom Claudin as the Phantom
drugs in the middle of a performance and forces to withdraw; and Lorenzi (Nicki
André), whom the Phantom kills in the famous chandelier-dropping scene. The
Phantom kidnaps Christine and, as in the 1925 film, tells her she’s going to
live with him in his underground grotto and sing only for him (so he’s yet another would-be boyfriend
who wants to run her life for her!), and Anatole and Raoul hatch a plot to get
the Phantom to release her.
They call on Franz Liszt (Fritz Leiber), who was in
Pleyel’s office the day Claudin killed him and became the Phantom, who’d been
impressed by Claudin’s concerto, and the three hatch a plot: after the
performance of the latest opera, The Masked Prince of the Caucasus (which for some reason is sung in Russian even
though the real Martha and the
fake Amour et Gloire were
both performed in French — perhaps because it’s set in Russia and perhaps
because it’s another faux opera, this time assembled from the first and fourth movements of
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony), Liszt and the Opera’s orchestra will play
Claudin’s piano concerto and hope that will lead him out of his grotto and onto
the stage, where he can be captured and Christine freed. There’s an engaging
sequence in which Edward Ward turns the concerto into a work for two pianists and orchestra — Liszt playing it on stage
and Claudin at the piano he’s installed in his underground hideout — only
Claudin doesn’t come out and Anatole and Raoul have to descend into the depths
below the Opera to find her. They do so, but the foundations are so rotten the
pistol shots they aim at the Phantom weaken the beams and bring down the whole
thing — though the final scene shows a pile of rubble under which the Phantom’s
body is presumably buried, the sort of we’re-not-sure-he’s-really-dead ending that Universal used on a
lot of their monster-series films so they could have the next set of
screenwriters figure out a way the monster survived the apparent cataclysm.
Christine is acclaimed as the new star of the Opera, and instead of picking
either Anatole or Raoul she walks out of her dressing room and is greeted by
the usual assortment of stage-door Johnnies and would-be sugar daddies — the
ending reminded me of Katharine Hepburn in the 1933 film Morning Glory (the weakest of the three films she made that
year, and of course the one that won her her first Academy Award), in which the
actress who’s just become an overnight star rejects both the producer who gave
her the big role and the poor
but honest guy who loves her for the embrace of the crowd, even though she
knows she’s “just a morning glory” and the acclaim, money and men won’t last.
This leaves Anatole and Raoul with each other, and in the last scene they try
to exit Christine’s dressing room at the same time and end up walking out arm
in arm, a scene that reads quite
differently than it no doubt did in 1943!
That’s not the only part of the 1943 Phantom that reads differently now than it did then: film
historian Michael Druxman interviewed director Arthur Lubin for his book about
movie remakes, Make It Again, Sam, and revealed that in the original script Claudin was Christine’s
father, and his interest in her success was paternal, not romantic. “In the
original script, it was made quite clear that Susanna Foster was [Claude]
Rains’ illegitimate daughter,” Lubin told Druxman. “Claude insisted on changes
and we, therefore, only hinted at the relationship.” That change actually made
the story seem kinkier and more perverse than it would have if the
father-daughter relationship of the characters had been kept. Also, according
to Lubin, “Rains insisted that the Phantom be played as a sympathetic
character. He didn’t want to do the entire picture with a scarred face, as he
considered himself to be a ‘romantic’ character and that a pure monster role,
such as was played by Chaney, would harm his future career. We compromised by
having him wear a mask until the final scene — and then he would only allow the
make-up people to apply a minimum amount of ‘scarring’ to his face.” Universal
often had these problems when they cast an actor who wasn’t a horror specialist like Chaney, his son Lon Chaney, Jr. or Boris Karloff
in one of these movies; like Henry Hull, who starred in The Werewolf of
London (1935) but insisted that
makeup genius Jack Pierce use only a minimal amount of extra hair on his face
when he was the werewolf (though to my mind that actually made him more
frightening than Lon Chaney, Jr. was in 1941’s The Wolf-Man and the subsequent films in the series), Rains
neither had Karloff’s patience for long waits in Pierce’s make-up chair nor his
willingness to have his real face smothered by Pierce’s elaborately sculpted
collodion creations.
The 1943 Phantom of the Opera is the sort of film I like to call a “portmanteau
movie,” a relic of a previous concept of entertainment in which, instead of
aiming towards one and only one potential audience the way most modern films and TV shows do,
producers threw in various elements so there would be something in the final film for everyone to like: romance,
music, thrills, horror, and even a few bits of comic relief. It’s not a patch
on the Chaney film — somehow, both through his remarkable acting and his skill
as a makeup artist (Chaney always did his own makeups and for the 1925 version
he worked out a special design for the Phantom’s face, including rings inside
his nose to push out his nostrils and make him look skeletal, and frameworks in
his eyes so he could not blink; asked how he could do such painful things to
himself for his movies, he replied, “Unless I suffer, how can I get my audience
to believe me?”), Chaney was far better able to make the Phantom a figure of
real pathos as well as menace — but in its own right it is a quite estimable piece of entertainment and holds
up surprisingly well even though the color restoration isn’t as remarkable as
the one given in the Boris Karloff Collection DVD boxed set to The Climax, made at Universal a year later and featuring
Karloff as a Svengali-like voice coach and Foster as the young singer he goes
crazy for because she reminds him of the wife he murdered years before but kept
in a high-tech mausoleum (which he somehow managed to keep frozen so her body
would be preserved even though the film takes place in an age before electric
light and refrigeration!) — though it’s still good enough you can see why Hal
Mohr won his second Academy Award for cinematography for this film!
