The Phantom of the Opera, 1962

I first saw this version of "Phantom of the Opera" back, I'd guess, "about" 1967 or 1968, as it first aired on American television on NBC, either on Saturday Night At The Movies, or on their other movie night, which varied over the years between Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, if I'm not mistaken. The film was a Hammer Films Production, the British production company famous for many horror films, often starring Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee. I've read over the years that this Phantom script was written to star none other than English/American actor Cary Grant (he became an American citizen during World War Two). The thing is, the writings mentioning Grant do not specify if he was to play the Phantom or the other main male character. Whatever the case, the film went to production without Grant. Prior to this film, there had been one famous silent picture version, starring Lon Chaney, in the mid 1920s, followed in the early 1940s by an American produced version, in color, with a musical edge to it, starring singer/actor Nelson Eddy and Susanna Foster, with a favorite of mine, Claude Rains, as the Phantom. Like Cary Grant, Rains was born in England, but later became an American citizen (around the time of the outbreak of World War Two). For the article on the Claude Rains film version, here is the link: https://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2017/08/phantom-of-opera-1943.html

In this 1962 Hammer Production version, the film is set in London, not Paris, and the Phantom, played by Herbert Lom, is not a killer. * Instead, the script had "a dwarf," ** so listed in the cast, played by Ian Wilson, who is the killer in this movie. The film begins with a new opera about to open in London about Joan of Arc, and listed as written by Lord Ambrose D'Arcy (played by Michael Gough***). As the lead female singer prepares her voice in her dressing room, a voice speaks to her and she sees a figure. Her screams bring the producer/director, Harry Hunter, played by Edward De Souza, running to her room. He calms the singer and essentially tells her, "the show must go on," but he realizes the woman did see and hear something. During the singer's performance, one of the stagehands comes through the stage scenery swinging by the neck from a rope. The singer quits the show, but you can't say the production was left hanging by a thread. Ah, anyway....

Mr. Hunter finds a new singer, Christine Charles, played by Heather Sears.**** When she is in the dressing room, she too hears a voice speaking to her, telling her that she will be a great singer. Unfortunately for Christine, Lord Ambrose, who is unbearably haughty and conniving, takes a fancy to her, but not for her singing abilities, and he invites her to dinner at an upscale restaurant, only to try to get her to his apartment for a late night "singing lesson." She is "saved" when Harry Hunter enters the restaurant, and Christine asks him to also accompany them to the "singing lesson." Lord Ambrose leaves the establishment quite angry, but Hunter and Christine go back to the opera house, where, in a bit of comic relief, the two meet the poor, but sassy, cleaning women for the opera house. Hunter takes Christine back to the dressing room where she heard the voice speak to her. Suddenly the voice comes through again, but this time Hunter is present, and the voice warns Mr. Hunter not to meddle in things with the singer. Screams from the cleaning women interrupt, and Hunter and Christine go to see what is the matter. A large shadow is shown moving toward them, but it turns out to be a rat catcher, played by Patrick Troughton, who has been prowling the opera house that night for his catch, and he tells them, "the place is loaded with them" (you may never go to an opera house after this). In another lighthearted moment, the rat catcher wants to show Hunter and Christine his catch, telling them, "They make a lovely pie, you know," only to have Mr. Hunter say, "We're.... vegetarians." Moments later, the rat catcher is murdered by the dwarf, who stabs him with what appears to be a screwdriver, right in the eye. Well, you can't say he didn't see it coming. When Hunter goes to investigate, he leaves Christine unattended and a man in black and with a mask showing only one eye appears at the top of the steps near Christine. Her screams bring Hunter back to her, and the masked character quickly disappears.

As retaliation for her snub, Ambrose removes Christine from the opera. Not long thereafter, he also removes Hunter, who goes to tell Christine the news of his own dismissal. On his visit to the house where Christine rents a room, Hunter finds some old music. When he plays some of it on a piano there, he finds it is the same music from the opera. The homeowner, an older lady, tells him she got the music from an eccentric musician, Professor Petrie, who once roomed there (I think I've seen some of his "dishes;" oh wait, that's spelled 'petri'). This starts Hunter on a search to learn more about Professor Petrie, whom he suspects is really the composer of the opera, as he knows that Lord Ambrose is no musician. He goes to an old London print shop, where Professor Petrie supposedly died in a fire, according to Christine's landlady. One of the old printers tells him that no one died that night, but that a man had broken in, then must have broken a lamp (oil lamp) and that it started a fire. When the man tried to put the fire out, he threw what he thought was water on the fire, but that it was actually powerful nitric acid, used for etching metal, and that some of it splashed back onto his face, burning him badly, and causing him to run from the print shop. Mr. Hunter and Christine go to the police and talk with the officer who had been on duty near the print shop the night of the fire. He tells them that the man ran out of the shop and jumped into the river. The assumption made by all was that the man drowned, although his body was never found.

When Christine returns home, the dwarf is waiting outside of her window. He carries her off to the Phantom, who lives beneath the opera house, in the subterranean passages of the old London sewer system. He is seen playing an old pipe organ, his acquisition of which is never explained (no Ebay or Amazon back then, either). He tells Christine that he will teach her to sing. Meanwhile, Lord Ambrose is auditioning singers, but since he's so obnoxious, he fires the orchestra conductor, causing the entire orchestra to walk out in protest. The opera house manager tells Lord Ambrose that he can't continue to let him go on like this, and that Lord D'Arcy should apologize and ask Mr. Hunter to return. This infuriates D'Arcy just as Mr. Hunter comes to the door of the room, so Lord Ambrose stomps out, leaving the opera house manager (played by English actor Thorley Walters) trembling from his daring resistance to Lord Ambrose D'Arcy. Mr. Hunter agrees to take over again, but he is immediately told that Christine is missing. He suspects the Phantom and therefore goes to the opera house. All the while, the Phantom has Christine practicing, interspersed with lectures about her needing to sing from her heart, and with occasional outbursts of irrational behavior, including talking to someone not present. The reason for the last will become evident later, but it's clear, Professor Petrie is not playing with all of his musical notes.

Mr. Hunter goes through the opera house, but he can find no hidden panels or passageways. This brings him to return to the place where the man from the printer's shop fire jumped into the river. When he gets very close to the river, he hears the faint sound of the pipe organ, and he sees a sewer opening from the river. He goes into the water and enters the waterway. After some time, the sound of the music grows louder, but the dwarf hears Hunter's disturbance in the water and goes to see who it is. The two men fight and Mr. Hunter drags the dwarf into the main chamber where Christine is resting and the Phantom is playing music. Hunter tells the Phantom that he knows he is Professor Petrie, who then explains what happened when he took his music to Lord D'Arcy years before to get his help in having it published. He had ten years' of music, including the opera about Joan of Arc, but Lord D'Arcy, treacherous, miserly bastard that he is, smugly offered Petrie a mere pittance for all of it, but, after even begging D'Arcy for more, the desperate professor finally agreed. (Petrie's conversation with Lord Ambrose that day is what keeps being played over in Petrie's mind and why he is seen talking to someone not present.) When Petrie leaves D'Arcy's office, Lord Ambrose takes a pen and scratches through Professor Petrie's name on the music and writes his own name on it. Later, Petrie goes to the print shop, only to see the music being printed with Lord D'Arcy's name on it. When he goes to D'Arcy, Petrie tells him the printer is mistakenly printing the music with Lord D'Arcy's name on it. This brings Lord Ambrose to say, "I bought it from you ... MY music with MY name on it. Is that so surprising?" (Buying Mozart's music doesn't make YOU the composer, or my name's not Randy van Beethoven.) Lord Ambrose strikes Professor Petrie with his walking stick, knocking him to the ground, and Lord D'Arcy then rides off in his carriage. This brings Petrie to go to the print shop that night to try to destroy the piles of the already printed music. A sheet of the music falls from the furnace and starts a fire. As the old printer had told Mr. Hunter during their meeting, Petrie mistakenly threw nitric acid on the fire and there was splash back onto the professor, causing intense pain and burning. He ran from the shop, went into the river and floated into the sewer waterway, where the dwarf saved him. Petrie says he doesn't know the man's name, because he cannot speak, but they have lived there under the opera house ever since that night. He asks Mr. Hunter to allow him to teach Christine to sing his opera. After a pause, Petrie begs Mr. Hunter.

The scene shifts to the opening performance of the opera, and a furious Lord Ambrose rushes into the opera house and to the manager's office, where he finds a mysterious man in black, wearing a mask. The man says, "Good evening, Lord Ambrose." The always condescending D'Arcy orders the man, "Take off that ridiculous mask when you speak to me." When the man just stands there, Lord Ambrose tears the man's mask off, only to be terrified by the sight, and D'Arcy turns and runs from the room. The opera is performed and Christine's singing is tremendous, especially the beautiful aria (it will get into your head, I'm warning you; after all, it's my music...ah, I mean, Professor Petrie's). The Phantom/Professor Petrie stands looking on from an upper box. When Christine sings the aria, a tear can be seen coming through the mask hole for Petrie's one good eye. As Christine takes her bows and receives flowers from well wishers, a stagehand begins chasing the dwarf, who has been watching from the scaffolding and cable work high above the stage. He jumps over to the thick rope holding the large chandelier suspended over much of the stage and under which Christine is standing. The chandelier sways, making the audience gasp. Mr. Hunter calls to Christine and heads to the stage from his box. The dwarf grabs another nearby rope as Professor Petrie looks up at the chandelier and sees the fraying rope cannot support the chandelier much longer. He stands on the railing of the box, rips away his mask, exposing a hideously disfigured face (the only time viewers see his unmasked face) and jumps to the stage, pushing Christine out of the way as the chandelier crashes down, killing him.

The dwarf is the murderous villain of the story, since he killed two people that we know of, the one stagehand, early on, and then the rat catcher. Lord Ambrose is despicable, as he has wealth and title, but he treats others as unfit to be in his very presence. The dwarf satisfies his isolation and loneliness by taking care of Professor Petrie, but he is the immediate cause of the cheated, half-mad professor's death. While Professor Petrie is a sympathetic figure, he is not guilt free, as he knows the dwarf is "uncontrollable, at times" (taken from Petrie's words in the movie). Earlier in the film, when the Phantom warns Hunter not to meddle in things, he tells Hunter and Christine, "there are forces of evil at large in the opera house tonight." This is just before the dwarf kills the rat catcher, so Petrie seemingly is aware that someone will be killed by the dwarf that night.                

* "Perhaps" this shows that Cary Grant was to play the Phantom, as the character is toned down and not the actual killer in the film; otherwise, would the public accept Cary Grant as a killer?

** The character certainly doesn't seem to be a dwarf, but rather a stooped and somewhat crippled man, but perhaps, lacking a better term, they used "dwarf?" 

*** Michael Gough is one of those actors whose face is likely to be familiar to many, but whose name is not familiar. He plays the role of Lord D'Arcy to a despicable perfection, and you will likely be hoping the dwarf will be stabbing him in the eye with a screwdriver. Michael Gough played similar characters in other movies, and he died in 2011, age 94! (Special note added 6-22-23: Edward De Souza, who played Harry Hunter in this film, is now 90 years old; Heather Sears, who played Christine, passed away in the mid 1990s; Herbert Lom, who played the Phantom, died at age 95 in 2012; Ian Wilson, who played the 'dwarf,' died at age 86 in 1987.)    

**** Her singing was dubbed by an actual opera singer.   

Photo is from the 2011 Universal Studios Home Entertainment DVD

 WORD HISTORY:
Phantom-This word "seems" to go back to Indo European "bhah," which had the notion, "to shine, to be bright, to appear as bright." This gave transliterated Ancient Greek "phaínein," which meant, "to cause to appear, to bring into the light." This then produced transliterated "phantázein," meaning, "to make visible, to make appear." This produced the noun "phántasma," meaning, "image, apparition, something unreal." Latin borrowed this from Greek as "phantasma" ("apparition"), and this passed into Old French, a Latin-based language, as, "fantosme." English borrowed the word around 1300, at first as, "fantom," but by the mid 1500s the "ph" spelling was applied, seemingly due to the old Greek ancestor.