Review – The Phantom of the Opera (1943)

It must have been really hard in the middle of World War Two to concoct a horror movie villain that could even vaguely compete with the real-life monsters on the other sides of the oceans. Still, they might have at least given it the old college try. Seriously, the old silent version is much scarier than this highly Hollywood-ized retelling of Gaston Leroux’s classic. This time around Eric the Phantom (played half-heartedly by Claude Rains) is a sorry excuse for a force of evil; he’s a down-on-his-luck violinist for the Paris Opera who ends up fired, scorned by the love interest, burned with acid, and just generally not having a nice day. Further, the screenwriter manages to preserve all the tedious, 19th-century romance without capturing a jot of the source novel’s sense of style and menace. The result is a fluffy tale of an opera singer beloved by a policeman, a baritone and a neurotic nitwit. And in the end being relieved of the third also allows our heroine to successfully discharge the first two as well, leading to one of the most unintentionally (?) homosexual moments of 1940s cinema. Mildly amusing