A new opera, composed by insufferable Lord Ambrose d’Arcy (Michael Gough), is disrupted by a masked “Phantom” (Herbert Lom) and his psychotic, mute dwarf (Ian Wilson). Opera company producer Harry Hunter (Edward de Souza) is less interested in the disruptions than in the star, Christine Charles (Heather Sears), but she has also caught the eye of The Phantom who has his own plans for her.
Any film of Gaston Leroux’s novel about a madman haunting an opera house is limited by the source material. It is a mixture of melodrama, romance, and monster story, and those elements don’t meld well. Lon Chaney’s silent version, which took the monster movie approach (a sympathetic monster to be sure, but then the best monsters are) has not been beaten, and it doesn’t overwhelm when Chaney is off screen.
This colorful Hammer Horror rendition, transplanted to London, is almost straight drama, with the romance played down and the monster angle abandoned entirely. The Phantom is a sympathetic and wronged man who folds when confronted, and Harry Hunter and Christine Charles are pleasant people tossed into a slightly difficult, but far from terrifying situation. There’s little that’s horrific, exploitative, or all that interesting. With a mercifully swift pace, there’s little time for the relationships to be anything but superficial. The Phantom hardly seems to care about Christine; he just wants the opera to sound good. This is the story stripped of all it’s grand, mythic qualities, which saves it from being pompous, but leaves the production a slight affair.
For a Hammer film (the company that made the Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing Frankenstein, Dracula, and Mummy movies), it is shockingly mainstream. The acting is good across the board, although no one stands out. The sets are twice as opulent as those in their other productions, and there are sufficient extras to make it look like a show is being performed by a complete company and people are coming to see it (many Hammer films have under populated villages). In place of the normal heaving bosoms there is opera—quite a lot of opera. Like the rest of the flick, the singing isn’t bad, but it isn’t particularly good either.
Supposedly written for Cary Grant (although there is disagreement on whether he was meant to play The Phantom or Hunter), an evil dwarf character was scripted to carry out the requisite murders, possibly to allow Grant to keep his audience-friendly persona. Of course that only makes sense if Grant was to be The Phantom. Whatever the case, the dwarf is a poor addition. He is never explained and has almost no personality. As the dwarf (he really isn’t all that short) does all the “evil” deeds, The Phantom is left as a passive light-weight.
The cameos supply the most energy to the piece, although that isn’t necessarily a good thing. Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor Who, appears as a rat catcher for a violent scene that doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. And a cab driver is played by Miles Malleson, an important actor in the Post-War British Comedy movement, who appeared in seventeen of its movies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Naked Truth, Carlton-Browne of the F.O., and Heavens Above! He also wrote and starred in The Thief of Bagdad.
I didn’t dislike this rendition, but I found little reason to see it again. Hammer Horror completists may want to pick it up as it is included in the Hammer Horror Series DVD along with Brides of Dracula, Curse of the Werewolf, Paranoiac, Kiss of the Vampire, Nightmare, Night Creatures, and Evil of Frankenstein.
Other film versions include: Lon Chaney’s silent version The Phantom of the Opera (1925), which was re-release in a cut version in 1929, Claude Rains’s The Phantom of the Opera (1943), the short, Spanish language El Fantasma de la ópera, the Maximilian Schell/Jane Seymour made for TV The Phantom of the Opera (1983), the Robert Englund’s Slasher The Phantom of the Opera (1989), the stage-bound musical The Phantom of the Opera (1990), the TV mini-series The Phantom of the Opera (1990), and director Dario Argento’s Il Fantasma dell’opera (1998), and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version.