lasm.blogg.se

This is a film where all emphasis has been placed on the spectacle – the colour, the costuming, the sets, the music and staging – such that the horror elements ends up being forgotten. Even though Claude Rains plays the title character and central figure in the film, for instance, he is only third billed on the credits with the lead positions going to romantic hero Nelson Eddy followed by Susanna Foster who plays this version’s Christine. Everything in the film happens at a sedate pace as though it were a standard soap opera romance of the era. Even if nobody else is going to let the production be an interesting, the set-designers are – when Nelson Eddy catches his fall on a curtain, it is not merely a curtain but a hundred foot velvet drape, while Claude Rains’ Enrique doesn’t get to live in a mere poverty-laden flat but instead gets one with an angular roof and giant-sized intruding ceiling beams like something out of German Expressionism.ĭespite such, Arthur Lubin’s plodding direction is determined to wring any interest out of the proceedings. The cutting of the gold chandelier decorated with dozens of candles is the film’s most exquisite set-piece. The underground system of tunnels is a fabulous series of (studio-bound) lakes and crumbling stone caverns. The opera house is a marvellously gilted coliseum of multi-storey boxes (which was actually rebuilt using the set from the 1925 film) filled with audiences in the hundreds. Claude Rains as Enrique Claudin, The Phantom of the Opera It was shot in Technicolor at a time when the bulk of films made in the US studios were still in black-in-white so the lushness would have been even more amazing if you consider the film through the eyes of the audience of its time. A huge budget was thrown at the film and Phantom of the Opera 1943 is a production that cannot help but impress with its sumptuously colourful sets and costumery.

Unfortunately, in remaking The Phantom of the Opera in sound and colour, all that Universal ended up doing was embalming it. (See bottom of the page for the other versions of The Phantom of the Opera). In the mid-1940s, Universal were enjoying a good deal of success with their Frankenstein and Dracula sequels and so, rather than create any kind of sequel to the Chaney film, which was really the first of their classic monster movies, they decided to remake it with the addition of colour and sound. The 1925 film is an absolute classic due to Chaney’s memorably mad and contorted performance and a superbly Gothic climax venturing down into the cellars of the Paris Opera House.

This was the second screen version of Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera (1909), following the still definitive silent version The Phantom of the Opera (1925) starring Lon Chaney.