Having resurrected horror icons Frankenstein, Dracula, the mummy and the werewolf, it made sense that Hammer should want to tackle another of the genre’s pantheon of monster stars. They’d had their eye on The Phantom of the Opera for several years, but the scale of the production was a disincentive. Only when Hollywood royalty Cary Grant suggested that he might be open to appearing in a Hammer film – or so the story goes – did the phantom suddenly spring back into life as a suitable vehicle for him and for one of Hammer’s periodic stabs for respectability. There’s been some debate as to who Grant might have played in the film – would one of the most recognisable faces in the world have wanted to be hidden away behind a mask for most of the film? And if he was being lined up for the leading man role, surely now that he wasn’t his mid to late 50s he was a little long in the tooth for that too? It’s a moot point as clearly, he never made the film – his agent reportedly had a word and advised him against it.
The script, written by Anthony Hinds/John Elder, was tailored towards Grant though Hinds knew there was very little chance that he would ever actually turn up at Bray Studios, and takes its inspiration more from the 1943 Claude Rains adaptation than from the novel or the classic Lon Chaney version from 1925. In 1900 London, the cast and crew of the London Opera House are preparing for the opening night of a new opera based on the life of Joan of Arc composed by the arrogant and bullying Lord Ambrose D’Arcy (Michael Gough). Opera manager Lattimer (Thorley Walters) mutters ominously about a supposedly haunted box in the theatre that no-one will sit in and producer Harry Hunter (Edward de Souza) tries to calm the nerves of a jittery cast headed by diva Maria (Liane Aukin). Things aren’t helped much when a murdered stagehand swings out of the wings on opening night. Maria refuses to carry on and Harry finds her replacement in Christine Charles (Heather Sears), one of the chorus singers who D’Arcy leches over shamelessly and who hears a disembodied voice warning her about the obnoxious lord.
After the murder of a ratcatcher (Patrick Troughton) by a diminutive killer (Ian Wilson), Christina is menaced by the masked Phantom. Harry eventually comes to understand that D’Arcy’s opera was stolen from a Professor Petrie (Herbert Lom) who was supposedly killed in a fire at the printing press running off copies of the score in D’Arcy’s name. But of course, he survived and is now the scarred and masked Phantom, living with the murderous dwarf in the sewers beneath the opera house and determined to make Christina the new star of the opera.
For many years it was a long-held belief that The Phantom of the Opera was a disaster for Hammer, one that soured their relationship with Terence Fisher. It was panned by the critics certainly, but it did well enough at the box office, particularly in the States where an uncut version of the film was on offer (the British censors, as always, had their scissors out for the film). It’s true that Fisher decided not to work for the company again for two years, returning for The Gorgon in 1964, though that has much to do with the fact that Hammer were mothballing Bray Studios for a while after Phantom was finished and he simply went where the work was.
Hammer certainly saw The Phantom of the Opera as a prestige project and it was afforded a much higher budget than was usual for a Hammer film and it shows – it’s a gorgeous film, making fine use of the Wimbledon Theatre and Bernard Robinson’s characteristically stunning sets, the most ambitious of which is large dockland set, but the most memorable is the Phantom’s eerie subterranean lair. And Fisher’s direction is flawless, whether framing the Phantom in dim lighting in a doorway, a trademark introduction for Fisher and his “monsters” or collaborating with his director of photography Arthur Grant to shoot Petrie’s flashback to the origins of the Phantom in a woozy series of Dutch angles. And he’s not afraid to drop in a few laughs here and there, mainly involving Christina’s landlady but there also a silly but very amusing shot of the frozen face of Michael Ripper’s cabbie.
Fisher saw the film as a love story, though interestingly it’s not the romance that’s present in most adaptations. The Phantom shows no sexual interest in Christina at all, he just sees her as a hugely talented singer who can do his music justice. The romance instead is between Christina and Harry and Sears and de Souza play it beautifully, their burgeoning relationship feeling entirely natural and charming. Had Grant been cast in the role it would have swung it in a different direction, with Grant being old enough to play Sears’ father, a dynamic that simply wouldn’t have worked as affectingly as it does here.
All that said, Fisher doesn’t skimp on the kind of grisly moments that were expected from a Hammer film. The skewering of the ratcatcher’s eye is an odd moment and there seems to be no reason for his gruesome demise (it was inevitably trimmed by the British Board of Film Censors) – he’s barely involved in the story by the time he’s killed off though the Phantom later tries to explain it away as the diminutive killer being like an animal. But there’s a marvellous moment early on wherein a hand slices through a sheet of canvas to admit a hanging body that swings right up into the camera lens. The oft-repeated claim that the film is light on horror simply doesn’t hold water and may be based on the fact that the British version was very heavily cut.
Michael Gough is nicely supercilious as the repellent Lord Ambrose, though as was his way in his genre films, which he clearly looked down on, skates perilously close to going completely over the top, but it works well enough for the film, his arrogant, overbearing sex-pest more monstrous than the Phantom. Martin Miller’s flamboyant conductor Rossi is a joy and Patrick Troughton may not be around for long but he’s a lot of fun as the Cockney rat catcher ludicrously proud of his latest catch, announcing “they make a lovely pie, you know,” to which de Souza deadpans “we’re vegetarians.” And of course, there’s Herbert Lom as a fantastic Phantom, hidden from view for most of the film by Roy Ashton’s eerily blank-faced mask, doing sterling acting work with body language and a single eye. He makes the Phantom a more complex character than usual, less of a monster, more of a damaged and complicated man dealing with multiple tragedies and traumas.
Certainly, there are problems – Lord Ambrose infamously gets away with his abhorrent behaviour apparently unpunished and it all goes slightly awry as we near the end. There’s an unseemly rush at the last minute to get the story tidied away that another few minutes might have avoided, allowing the story to breathe a little. But it’s the grace notes that make the film work, from Renee Houston’s lovely comic moments as the dyspeptic landlady Mrs Tucker to the moving shot of the Phantom weeping tears of joy from his mask as he hears Christina singing in front of an audience.
The Phantom of the Opera remains one of the most vibrant and energetic adaptations of the story and has been much undervalued over the years. It’s a much better film than it’s often believed to be and the 1925 version aside, it may well be the most satisfying and enjoyable adaptation of the film ever made. Beautifully acted and directed, it was a worthy addition to the Hammer Gothic line and deserves to be better loved than it often has been in the past. As with The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), The Phantom of the Opera was expanded for its small screen debut in the States. New material was shot, without Hammer’s involvement, of a pair of Scotland Yard police inspectors (Liam Redmond and John Maddison) searching for the Phantom was shot to bulk up the running time.
The EOFFTV Review 