THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: NBC had the money and the time to tell
Gaston Leroux's story correctly and accurately to the book.
Instead they gave it to people with no respect for the novel
(by their own admission) and got a slow and uninteresting
version with most of the power of the original story missing.
Rating: low 0.
The day that Tony Richardson's made-for-television version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was due to be shown, my local newspaper did a feature on it quoting the writer Arthur Kopit as saying, "[After having read the novel] what struck me was that this story ... wasn't very good. Still it captured the imagination of people. Why? What bothered me about [the previous dramatic] versions, what I thought they essentially missed, was that you never knew why the Phantom was in love with Christine."
I had very high hopes for this version. There were four announced film adaptations in the wake of the success of the Broadway play. One starred Richard Englund, whose most famous role was the razor-gloved Freddy Krueger; one was simply a film version of the musical; one was set in Nazi Germany. Of the four versions, the only one that sounded like a genuine new adaptation of the novel was the announced four-hour television version. Then I read Kopit's quote.
What Kopit is saying is that he has no respect for the material itself, only for its ready-made market. He also thinks that the dramatic versions missed the point of why the story is popular. I could easily believe his comment if it really was the novel that people remember but, in fact, the book has not been what people have liked. For most of the years the story has been liked, Gaston Leroux's novel has been hard to find. Andrew Lloyd Webber tells an anecdote about how difficult it was to find a copy of the novel when he wanted to read it. The dramatic adaptations that Kopit thinks missed the point of why the story is remembered are really what made the story popular. And here they cannot have missed the point. Actually I would contend that they have all missed what I like in the novel, but not what has made the story popular.
The novel is about a man with a great intellect and a horribly deformed face. All his life he was treated as a freak and just occasionally exploited for his genius. Eventually he finds the opportunity to build for himself an empire in the darkness beneath the Paris Opera House. There he can enjoy the music and can be seen only when he wants. This is Gaston Leroux's Erik but he has never been done satisfactorily in a film or play. I had hoped that in the three and a half hours or so of story there would be time to show Erik's history. In fact, this version did show Erik's history but it bore little relation to anything in the novel.
Kopit missed the point entirely by making his Phantom a petulant young man (played by Charles Dance of THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN), who is being shielded by a former manager of the opera house (over-played by Burt Lancaster).
Kopit's screenplay intends this Erik to be likable and steers clear of the question in the novel of whether Erik might be psychotic. This Erik does not kill, at least in the course of the film. Oh, his face may startle and early on this causes a death, but that does not appear to be Erik's fault. This Erik has lost the feel of the sinister and instead controls the fate of the opera house with practical jokes. Even the cutting down of the chandelier is not a murder attempt but an act of angry vandalism intended to vent rage and for which the audience was intentionally given time to get out of the way. Of course, this Erik had less reason for rage than the one in the book. The script claims that Erik's mother at least found his face "flawlessly beautiful." In the book Erik's mother gave him his first mask because she could not stand to look at his face.
There are a few nice touches to the script. One of them is the handling of the issue of how to handle the unmasking. Sort of independently of the quality of the rest of the production there is the question of how to shock audiences when they do see the Phantom's face. The approach here was unusual and not badly done, though it was perhaps dictated by the screenplay's efforts to keep Erik as a romantic Phantom. Less endearing is Erik's unexpected forest beneath the ground. It isn't like the metal forest of the novel but a real forest with live trees and unexplained sunlight. It appears that Erik must have built himself a holodeck.
Charles Dance is a little whiny for my tastes, as well as not being sufficiently sinister. Lancaster as the former manager is overripe and Teri Polo as Christine Daee (in the book Daae) is unmemorable. She and her lover Adam Storke as Phillipe, Comte de Chagney, are pretty people but boring actors. (Again, they got the name wrong on the Comte. The character's name was Raoul. Phillipe is the name of Raoul's brother, older by twenty years.)
The whole mediocre revision of the story is directed by Tony Richardson, who directed TOM JONES. I am not a fan of that film but it certainly was better directed than this slow-moving version. If I had never heard of the story before I would have rated this a little higher, but as it is I would give Richardson's version a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
[Postscript: Of the dramatic versions of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA I have seen, I would list them best to worst as: the Webber play (which is surprisingly faithful to the book), the Lon Chaney film (1925), the Claude Rains film (1943), the animated cable version (1987) (lackluster but very faithful to the book), the made-for-television Maximillian Schell version (1983), the Herbert Lom film (1962), the made-for-television Charles Dance film (1990), and then there is a very long gap down to Richard Englund's putrescent version (1989). I do not count films only inspired by the story, such as PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, THE PHANTOM OF HOLLYWOOD, and PHANTOM OF THE OPERETTA.]
[Post-postscript: For someone with a better command of French than my own: the name of the novel as "The Phantom of the Opera" but in the novel he refers to himself less dramatically as "The Opera Ghost." Isn't that distinction purely on the part of the translator? Don't both translate to the same words in French?]
Mark R. Leeper
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