Phantom of the Opera

Movie Review: Phantom of the Opera

Year of Release: 1943
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Arthur Lubin
Cast: Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster, Claude Rains, Edgar Barrier

Plot outline: A disfigured violinist secretly loves a rising operatic soprano and haunts the Paris Opera House (IMDb).

Nelson Eddy is no phantom in this movie; he is very much in solid evidence, and his lungs are working as strongly and as loudly as they have ever worked before. Indeed, you might almost think the picture was made just so he might sing. And that is the principal reason why this remake of the old Lon Chaney movie is bereft of much of the terror and macabre quality of the original. The role of the Phantom has been very much watered down, and Claude Rains has been made to play it in a sort of "lone ranger" style. In this rewritten version of the old Gaston Leroux tale, he is nothing more than the unsuspected father of an understudy who tries very hard and in secret to advance his daughter's career. When Mr. Eddy isn't singing or preparing, he is usually making ponderous love, which is oddly supposed to be funny, to Miss Foster, along with Edgar Barrier (he is the high-hat detective who tries to solve the mysteries of the opera house). Together they make about as boring a pair of rival suitors as we dread to see. The sequence in which the Phantom drops the huge chandelier on the heads of the glittering audience is the only moment in the movie in which the potential excitement of the story is realized. Here the blend of monstrous violence with the wild Russian music on the stage achieves the realization of terror which is lost in the rest of the yarn. Even the scenes in the catacombs beneath the opera, where the Phantom lives, receive a kid-glove treatment. It's a nice little spot the boy has there. To be sure, the production is elegant. Settings and costumes are superfine, they all make a lavish display. But that richness of décor and music is precisely what gets in the way of the tale. Who is afraid of a Phantom that is billed beneath Mr. Eddy in the cast? (NYT)

My judgement: **1/2 out of 4 stars