Timid opera violinist Erique Claudin (Claude Rains) is fired, which is awkward as he’s been using all his money to secretly pay for voice lessons for Christine DuBois (Susanna Foster). He hopes publishing his concerto will fix everything, but when he thinks it’s been stolen, he breaks and murders the publisher and has acid thrown in his face. He then hides under the opera house and threatens and murders to propel Christine’s career. But none of that matters. What’s really important is that Christine wants to be a great singer, and both bland baritone Anatole Garron (Nelson Eddy) and police inspector Raoul Daubert want her.
The Phantom of the Opera was never horror, but the 1925 version was horror-adjacent. It had a gothic look, macabre elements, and thrills, and those are what made it famous. So Universal remade it, without any of that. What it has is more opera. Well, faux opera as the studio didn’t want to pay for the rights to actual operas, so they constructed them from classical melodies and sometimes unrelated lyrics, not that I’d know the difference. The problem isn’t that the operas aren’t real, it’s that there’s so much opera, and so little Phantom. Claude Rains as third billing, and he shouldn’t even have that. This is a cross between a melodrama, and operetta, and a romcom. The Phantom is just there to complicate the love-triangle.
Universal wanted to class things up and they didn’t give a damn if the result was interesting. So they put big bucks into costumes and sets, and revamped their original Phantom opera set from ‘25. They paid for technicolor, and they got their money’s worth. It’s beautiful. Everything is beautiful. And that includes the music. You’ll rarely hear better singing in any film. Fisher is a mediocre actress, but a superb singer. The same can be said for Eddy. So if you are here for the singing, like absolutely no one, then you’ll be happy. I doubt if many others will be happy. This sold tickets, but didn’t thrill anyone, with critics at the time having the same complaints I have now.
After the many songs killing the pace, the biggest problem is the story. At 92 minutes, there’s not enough time for musical numbers, the secondary plot of the Phantom, and developing the characters. So the characters suffer, and that’s a problem for the romance. Really, they’d have been better off pulling out the Phantom all together and making this a comedy. Anatole and Raoul would make more sense then.
Everything with the Phantom doesn’t work. Rains only signed on if the makeup wouldn’t be grotesque, so instead it’s not much of anything. Since the story takes place in a short time period, and Claudin just snapped, there’s no legend of the opera ghost, and no mystery. There’s also no explanation of why this quiet little old guy suddenly knows poison making, is great at killing, and has become an athlete. In an earlier script, Claudin was Christine’s absent father, which at least makes the motivations clear. But they trimmed that, instead having him love her for some reason. I guess because she’s cute. All of which makes it absurd that they kept the masking-pulling scene; Christine knows what Claudin looked like a short time ago, knows he was splashed with acid, and has no particular connection to him, so why does she have an urge to see his face?
But then it turns out Christine is an idiot as she just really wants to interfere in a police investigation.
I do like how they wrapped up the love-triangle. It was the ending of a comedy, but I still liked it. And I like the costumes and sets, which makes Phantom of the Opera bearable for one watch, but I won’t be going back.
Universal wanted to make a sequel the next year, because making a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera has always been a good idea… Yes… Always… However they didn’t have Rains or Eddy under contract and couldn’t come to a deal, so they altered the plot a bit, and made a very similar film, called The Climax, using the same sets and costumes, keeping Foster in essentially the same part, and getting Boris Karloff to step in as a pseudo-Phantom.