Random Phantom of the Opera Stuff

Phantom of the Opera (1943) Film Review

 This is another movie of The Phantom of the Opera that I recently watched, and I decided to write a short review about it here. 

 This movie was made in the 1940s and was a remake of the 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney. It is considered part of the Universal Classic Monsters lineup, and it starred Claude Rains (who previously starred in the Universal Monsters films The Invisible Man and The Wolf Man) as The Phantom and Susanna Foster as Christine. 

 The first thing you should know is that this movie has pretty much nothing to do with the book. In this movie, The Phantom's name is Erique Claudin, and the first part of the movie is about how he became The Phantom of the Opera in a story completely different from the novel. He then begins to haunt the opera house he was once a violinist for, and he is already in love with Christine DuBois, a young soprano. And Christine also has two other love interests: there is Inspector Raoul Dubert, a policeman who wants Christine to quit the opera and marry him; and the other is Anatole Garron, a baritone at the Paris Opera House who is fond of Christine and helps her with her career. The two men eventually end up working together to save Christine from The Phantom. 

 I think the main problem with this movie was the pacing. The film is only 93 minutes long, and it took about half an hour for Erique Claudin to actually became The Phantom of the Opera when it probably could have been done in a shorter time. The whole movie drags on a lot, and I think it might have been to the lengthy performances from the scenes at the Paris Opera House. Yes, the opera music was nice to listen to, but these segments were way too long and kept on stalling the rest of the story. The ending of the film was also somewhat anticlimactic, and I was really expecting something more. 

 I personally didn't like this movie. I've seen some of the Universal Classic Monster films, and I think this is probably one of the worst ones I've seen so far. I wouldn't say don't watch it, because other people might like it, but I would certainly recommend watching the 1925 silent film instead. 

 It is possible that Universal might do another remake of The Phantom of the Opera. The did have a shared movie universe planned for the Universal Monsters that I think The Phantom would have been part of at some point, but that whole thing fell apart very quickly and they went back to standalone films. A remake of The Invisible Man was just released last month, and there are plans for reboots of Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula and a few other random things. So, there's a chance a Phantom reboot could come in the future.