"Obsession, passion, undying love, genius and madness." "Take the titanic themes and emotions of grand opera, fuse them with the trappings of the gothic novel, and what do you get?" "The Phantom of the Opera,  of course, a darkly romantic icon of the gaslight era." "The Opera Ghost has never been so popular as he is today." "The Phantom seems to have a special appeal for modern audiences, beckoning us to leave our brightly lit, digitised world for a shadowy realm of mystery and terror and enchantment." "I've reserved special seats in box five, but I warn you - it's supposed to be haunted." "But at least it's not underneath the chandelier." "Opera is often regarded as the highest combined achievement of the arts." "Music, movement and visual grace all elevated to a nearly superhuman plane." "But within this celestial realm, there dwells a fallen angel." "It's a fairy tale." "There's an angel, and then there's evil." "Who, or what, is the "Phantom of the Opera"?" "What does he want?" "Mademoiselle,  soon his spirit will take form and command your love." "What does he look like?" "I saw him, I tell you." "All-over black,  and his eye staring at me." " His eye?" " Eye!" "One eye in the middle of his forehead." " It has a long nose and a big, red beard." " You make me nervous." "And his nose?" "There is no nose." "He has no nose!" "And how far will he go in pursuit of his passion?" "If one theme recurs in the canon of Universal Studio's horror, it is certainly the timeless legend of Beauty and the Beast." "But nowhere has the classic fairy tale been more masterfully elaborated upon than in Universal's The Phantom of the Opera,  first made in 1925 with Lon Chaney, followed by an Oscar-winning remake in 1943, featuring Claude Rains as the Phantom," "and remade once again in 1962, with Herbert Lom as the disfigured music master, whose story has become one of the most popular narratives of the 20th century." "The thing about The Phantom of the Opera is the romantic quality that it has." "The appeal of The Phantom of the Opera is one of those perennial things where you have a character who also has a tragic element." "It's so intriguing and mysterious." "The mystery of it all, it fascinates people." "I think the thing that sticks in everybody's mind is the removal of the mask." "Take off that ridiculous mask when you speak to me." "Do you hear me?" "Take it off!" "The Opera Ghost was the creation of a Frenchman, Gaston Leroux:" "lawyer, journalist, author of many fantastic novels, but none so enduring as The Phantom of the Opera." "First published in 1910, Phantom became a popular success." "It told the story of Erique, a horribly disfigured musician who dwells in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House, and his unrequited love for a singer named Christine." "When his passion is thwarted, a reign of terror ensues." "A primary inspiration for Leroux's book was an earlier novel," "George Du Maurier's Trilby." "It told the story of Svengali, a maestro of mesmerism, who possesses the soul and voice of a beautiful young singer." "Carl Laemmle, president of Universal Pictures, bought the film rights to Phantom for actor Lon Chaney, to follow Chaney's phenomenal success in The Hunchback of Notre Dame." "It had all of the elements and the ingredients for a rip-roaring melodrama." "And, of course, the main thing is, it was a perfect vehicle for Lon Chaney as a follow-up to The Hunchback." "Lon Chaney was one of the finest character actors, and he was notable mainly because he was such a great artist at make-up." "They called him "The Man of a Thousand Faces"." "His range was incredible, and, of course, he was perfect for silent movies, because he could express, in pantomime, so much without having to speak." "Like Hunchback, Phantom would be a tremendous undertaking for a small company like Universal." "There was a great emphasis on Westerns, on comedies, on things that rural audiences would like." "Laemmle first intended to shoot on location in France, but he finally brought Paris to Hollywood, and the Opera rose up at Universal City in the shadow of Notre Dame." "It was a very elaborate, very expensive production." "The stage was an exact replica of the Paris Opera House." "The set for the opera house was actually newly constructed for the 1925 version, and it was one of the first, if not the first, steel-structure sets built on the Universal lot." "And it was quite a deal at that time." "And because it was such an incredible set, they were able to use it time after time for many productions, including the 1943 production." "The Phantom stage, art directed by EE Sheeley and Sidney Ullman, perfectly duplicated the Paris original, but no one at Universal knew what the backstage and cellars looked like." "Ben Carré, a French artist now in Hollywood, had worked at the Paris Opera, and was called in to help." "His English unintelligible, Carré spoke fluently with charcoal." "A grateful Universal thanked him, and Carré moved on to his next assignment." "Nearly half a century would pass before Carré would actually see the film and learn how carefully his designs had been executed." "Such an exquisitely designed production required a very attractive leading lady." "The coveted role of Christine went to a relatively unknown ingénue, Mary Philbin." "Mary Philbin and I were neighbours in Chicago." "She was six years older than I, but a beautiful, beautiful girl." "Just exquisitely beautiful." "And at the time, Universal was having a beauty contest, and my father urged her to send a picture." "And she did, and she won a contract." "Mary was not of this world, really, not of this age." "She was extremely shy." "She was a lovely, sweet, gentle human being." "Lon Chaney's screen persona was the complete antithesis of Mary's, the Beast to her Beauty." "And although Chaney was unparalleled as a master of grotesque make-up," "Phantom would put even his talent to the test." "The concept of the death mask comes from the book." "So this is Christine describing to Raoul:" ""Suddenly I felt a need to see beneath the mask."" ""I wanted to know the face of the voice."" ""And with a movement which I was utterly unable to control, swiftly my fingers tore away the mask."" ""If I live to be a hundred," "I should always hear the superhuman cry of grief and rage which he uttered when the terrible sight appeared before my eyes."" ""I fell back against the wall, and he came up to me, grinding his teeth."" ""And as I fell upon my knees, he hissed mad incoherent words."" ""Leaning over me, he cried 'Look!" "You want to see?"'" "To create the illusion of a living skull," "Chaney had taken inspiration from a book illustration by Andre Castaigne, which only partially revealed the Phantom's face." "An exaggerated skullcap raised his forehead, and his cheekbones were exaggerated with putty." "Further distortion was made by wadding, inserted into either side of his mouth." "Small prongs attached to a set of decaying teeth created the perpetual grin of a death's-head and held the mouth open." "The make-up's most startling feature, a skeletal nose, was intensified for close-up shots by means of a wire appliance, partially visible in these photos, inserted into his nostrils, then pulled taut and hidden by putty." "According to cameraman Charles Van Enger, the device often caused significant bleeding." "Well, it was pretty ghastly." "And when he was unmasked, so to speak, it was a real shock." "For Carl Laemmle's niece, Carla, who lived with her parents on the back lot, life at Universal was never more exciting than during the production of Phantom." "When I was 16 years old, they were making The Phantom of the Opera,  and I was chosen to be the prima ballerina, which was quite a big thrill to me." "Phantom's director Rupert Julian was also thrilled." "After ten routine years as an actor and director with Universal, the former Percival T Hayes, son of a New Zealand pub owner, had landed in clover." "Having replaced Erich von Stroheim on Merry-Go-Round,  which had also starred Mary Philbin and Phantom leading man Norman Kerry," "Julian was now the studio's star director." "Dignified, sartorial, with an impeccable waxed moustache, he was very, very strict - and also very mediocre." "Almost immediately, Rupert alienated crew and cast alike." "Phantom cameraman Charles Van Enger personally recounted the details to film historian Rudy Behlmer in 1962." "The eyes went heavenward, and he said that Julian and Lon Chaney, after the film had started production, did not get along at all." "And, in fact, it got to a point where" "Mr Van Enger was a kind of go-between, and the two of them didn't speak." "With Van Enger the messenger boy, Chaney sent word to" ""Tell Rupert to go to hell."" "Van Enger cautioned Julian to beware, lest an arc lamp "accidentally" drop from the rafters." "Norman Kerry, on horseback one day, became so angry at Julian that he charged the director's platform, riding down the cameras." "Julian's wife, Elsie Jane Wilson, punctured his pomposity constantly, endearing her to the crew and smoothing production considerably." "If the behind-the-scenes battles were colourful, so was the film itself." "The new two-colour Technicolor process was used for scenes of spectacle." "With over $500,000 spent and the New York opening set for February 1925, a January preview was a disaster." "Laemmle fired his general manager." "Rupert Julian walked out." "Director Edward Sedgwick, a Western specialist, reshot 60 per cent of the film." "Action and comedy would save the day." "Kerry now had Ward Crane as a Russian count to duel with for Philbin's affections, and comedian Chester Conklin to duel wits with." "In April, San Francisco got an eyeful." "Gales of laughter greeted the movie." ""The story drags to the point of nausea," said one critic." "The picture was pulled." "Laemmle fired the new general manager, and entrusted Phantom's salvation to a woman, director Lois Weber." "She supervised the cut-and-paste of all Phantom footage." "In the preview version, Erique's soul had been redeemed by Christine's kiss, and he died literally of a broken heart." "Western director Sedgwick had preferred frontier justice." "Lois Weber cut to the chase." "The Phantom of the Opera finally opened in September, final cost $632,000." "It was a sensation, grossing more than $2 million." "It was one of the last hurrahs of the silent cinema." "Then, in 1927, everything changed:" "movies had found their voice." "Universal was so delighted with the reception of The Phantom,  that naturally, when sound came in, one of the thoughts was "Let's do it again with sound."" "The "Return of the Phantom" was announced, all-talking, all-singing, all-Technicolor, but no Chaney." "The Man of a Thousand Faces resisted becoming The Man of a Thousand Voices." "When Lon Chaney did speak, it would be for Louis B Mayer, not Carl Laemmle." "Universal's talking Phantom required some technical sleight of hand." "Universal retrofit the original Phantom in sound." "Prohibited by contract from dubbing Chaney's voice," "Universal wrote his dialogue in the third person, as if delivered by an emissary, and looped it only over shots of his shadow, avoiding mouth synchronisation." "Don't be afraid." "No harm shall come to you, Christine." "The Master is waiting." "Walk to the mirror." "Have no fear." "40 per cent of the film was reshot in synchronous sound." "Trade papers called the result "breathtalking"." "But the microphone rang down the curtain on the careers of both Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry." "You know, I wonder what prompted them to give you this chance." "Why, my voice, naturally." "The new opera inserts were staged by director Ernst Laemmle, filmed by locked-off cameras." "She is singing to bring down the chandelier!" "The Technicolor sequence made a return engagement." "And so did Lon Chaney, even if his lips were contractually sealed." "Remade and reborn at an additional cost of $113,000, the new Phantom of the Opera grossed $419,000 worldwide, welcome money indeed for Universal in the first year of the Great Depression." "The Phantom of the Opera,  in sound, opened January 4, 1930." "Three weeks later, Lon Chaney signed with MGM for his first and only talkie, The Unholy Three." "But six months later, The Man of a Thousand Faces was dead." "The silent cinema died with him." "Universal soon made itself Hollywood's leading house of talking horror." "I am Dracula." "At the height of the horror boom in 1935," "Universal announced a remake of The Phantom of the Opera,  to be produced on a grand scale." "But overextended financially, the Laemmles lost the studio." "The new Universal management forged ahead, promising its own ambitious Phantom." "Mártha Eggerth, a Hungarian nightingale, was announced as Christine, and Cesar Romero as Raoul." "Psychologically wounded in World War I, the new Phantom was a shell-shocked music master in contemporary Paris, whose mental derangement made him imagine his disfigurement." "Would he be played by Karloff the Uncanny, or the great opera star Fyodor Chaliapin?" "1936 economy measures at the new Universal, coupled with the British embargo on horror films, banished this Phantom." "Twentieth Century Fox seized the moment, and cast Boris Karloff as a masked Mephisto in Charlie Chan at the Opera." "But like all good Universal monsters, the Phantom was only resting, waiting for new life to come." "By 1939, a son was born to the House of Frankenstein, along with a daughter, teenage songbird Deanna Durbin, whose box-office appeal was also of monstrous proportions." "She was the star of the studio." "The studio had recovered from going down financially because of Deanna's first picture, Three Smart Girls." "In 1941, the Phantom was to be reborn, remade, rejuvenated once again, even if he must play second fiddle to Deanna." "Charles Laughton, acclaimed for his portrayal of Quasimodo in the 1939 remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame,  had just played Durbin's surrogate father in It Started with Eve,  for director Henry Koster." ""Why not", thought Koster, "reunite them, and make Erique and Christine father and daughter?"" "Koster told the press that his Technicolor movie would present the backstage opera in tones of grey and brown, and then the splash of bright red blood." "Durbin saw red, too, and rejected the script." "As 1941 ended, Universal's family included the immensely popular comedy team of Abbott and Costello." "Their director, Arthur Lubin, moved to the A roster." "No stranger to horror, Lubin could scare up a phantom on time and on budget." "His producer, George Waggner, knew something about horror, having produced The Wolf Man and other chillers." "Mr Waggner was a complex man." "He was a cowboy, basically." "Big, you know, impressive person, with steely blue-grey eyes, and with a lot of music and things inside him." "And it was a great opportunity for him to do Phantom." "He loved music." "Like most of the..." "Most of the producers at Universal had something to do with music." "Either it was their hobby, or it had been their profession, or it still was their profession." "Waggner also knew about the "Son of a Thousand Faces", Lon Chaney Jnr, who lobbied to reprise his father's greatest role." "Chaney was never seriously considered, but the equally unlikely contract player Broderick Crawford was." "Suggestions that "budget bobbysoxer" Grace MacDonald portray Christine were quickly gagged." "Phantom was now a million-dollar movie, needing a million-dollar star." "Universal's Invisible Man, Claude Rains, was between contracts at Warner Brothers." "In Hollywood, Rains always projected urbane sophistication, but it was an image hard earned." "I am always in awe of how terribly elegant he was." "He was one of 12 children." "All but two died from poverty-related illnesses in London." "This was not an elegant upbringing." "He had a very strong cockney accent, which I couldn't understand when he spoke with it." "He also had a couple of speech impediments." "He couldn't say Rs." "His name was William Rains, so he called himself Willy Wains." "He really transformed himself over a long period of time into somebody else." "And that was the person that I knew." "Rains accepted the role of the Phantom, with one special provision." "He refused to wear an elaborate make-up." "He dreaded being typecast in fright films, and had previously turned down the Basil Rathbone part in Son of Frankenstein." "The opera, of course, always has its prima donna." "When it came to Universal monsters, there was only one contender for the title." "The great Jack Pierce, the dictator of all dictators." "Nobody was ever late at Jack Pierce's office." "You never dared to be five minutes late." "When he said be there at 7.30, or sometimes 5.30 in the morning, you had to be there." "I was late once at Jack Pierce's office." "The first and the last time." "I never did it again." "Pierce's authority was never challenged for a simple reason:" "Jack Pierce was a marvellous make-up man, and the best in the business." "Pierce had to keep simplifying the Phantom's face of fire until it met with Rains' approval." "Sensitivity to returning combat veterans, many of them disfigured, also caused the producers to tread carefully." "As late as December 1942," "Universal's junior songbird Gloria Jean seemed to have the part." "But when prerecording started before Christmas, the role of Christine was being played by Susanna Foster, a 17-year-old singing prodigy from the Midwest." "Susanna had grown up in awe of Hollywood singer Jeanette MacDonald." "She rivalled her idol in beauty and star presence." "Christine, you're going to be a great and famous singer." "The kind of a star Susie Foster is, is somebody that you feel is absolutely sincere in what she does." "She also had a voice of crystal clarity and incredible range." "I could not stand these Cs above the high Cs." "It was a pain in the ear for me, but it was a great piece of art." "It made her famous, and she was the only one who could do it." "Five years in Hollywood without a starring role, it was a dream come true when she was selected to play Christine opposite Jeanette MacDonald's co-star, baritone Nelson Eddy." "Nelson was thrilled about the prospect, until Arthur Lubin told him he would have to die his blond hair." "He accepted the role only when Jack Pierce developed a special black hair dye that would wash out each night." "Think we can get through this crowd?" "Certainly." "After all, who'd pay any attention to a baritone and a detective?" "He saw what Arthur Lubin could do, and in this very dramatic picture, he combined a comedy interest between the two leading men, between Nelson Eddy and Edgar Barrier." "And those little scenes that he did, where he was injecting comedy, made a great deal of this picture." " After you, monsieur." " After you, monsieur." "Lubin had the challenge of his first Technicolor production." "The Technicolor process as it was, the three-strip process in those days, involved a special camera which had three strips of film in register, two in bipack and one at right angles, and a beam splitter," "so you were recording each of the primary colours." "But you used a tremendous amount of light to be able to really get a good exposure on this, on these three films that ran through the camera." "The lighting, it was very hot on the set, and we had to wear heavy make-up." "You have a Technicolor adviser." "You have the technicolour Natalie Kalmus, who came with the package." "She was advising on colour, lighting, on fabrics, on sets, and she was generally regarded as a bit of a pain." "Natalie Kalmus was the head of the company, and was always..." "Every day, she was on the set." "The directors of photography were W Howard Greene of Technicolor, and Oscar winner Hal Mohr, familiar with the Phantom stage since the silent days." "Working with Hal Mohr was an experience because he was with you when he was behind the camera." "He was one of the great..." "Maybe the greatest cameraman at that time." "The incredibly mobile Broadway crane, which Mohr had codeveloped, provided remarkable views of the auditorium." "The colour was so beautiful, the actors were good, and the wonderful camera work, and the Golitzen designs, a great painter." "Art director Alexander Golitzen re-dressed the opera house for Technicolor." "Wartime restrictions on studio construction required ingenious use of existing sets." "1925 movie audiences had relied on their local theatre's music director to supply the sounds of silence." "1943 audiences were treated to a musical score composed and adapted by Edward Ward." "And the music's important." "It was important in his book." "The music's very important." "Eddy was such a simple man." "He was an alcoholic." "He had a bag of music, a bag of melodies, that he carried with him, something for every occasion." "Eddy's hands would shake when he'd conduct but, by God, the music was there." "Because of World War Il, it was very difficult to get copyright and performing rights clearances on the great operatic works." "So they decided, with the exception of Martha by Von Flotow, they decided to create operas out of symphonic works that were in public domain." "That's why we have Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony as one of the operas, an adaptation by Edward Ward, the musical director." "In the story, the Phantom's masterwork has been composed around a French lullaby that seems curiously more Gaelic than Gallic." "It's a beautiful tune, but I always think of The Kerry Dance,  that traditional Irish tune." "But if you took out the Irish lilt and played it in a simple melodic line..." "Ward wrote an unforgettable Romantic concerto for piano and orchestra." "My concerto!" "Sing, Christine." "Sing!" "In its spectacle, colour, thrills, music and dramatic intensity," "Phantom of the Opera was a popular entertainment for wartime audiences, the equivalent of any legitimate opera of the gaslight era." "An echo from the past, the original Raoul - Norman Kerry-visited the set." "He seemed pleased to meet his modern counterpart, but it is likely that he had not forgotten the bitter agonies of 1925." "Free of the anxieties that had accompanied the silent film, this Phantom was a model of efficient production." "All these people at Universal at that time, it was a family." "We knew each other when we came to the set, as if we spent the night together, as if we had lived together in the same house." "There was one family tie that retained a slight kink." "The relationship between Christine DuBois and Erique Claudin." "This Phantom is a tragic violinist, crippled by arthritis and dismissed from the orchestra." "It's no use, Maestro." "Something has happened to the fingers of my left hand." "He lives in poverty, pouring all his savings into providing lessons for a young singer, who knows nothing of her benefactor." "Why does he do this?" "Isn't it obvious?" "Claudin probably fell in love with her." "It wasn't obvious in the shooting script." "Claudin was her father, a poor violinist who had abandoned his wife and child in pursuit of his muse." "Mama Claudin died of grief, and the infant Christine was reared by her aunt." "The theme originates in the book with Christine's affection for her dead father." "She believes that Erique's voice is the angel of music, which her father had promised to send from heaven." "Unaware of their bond," "Christine is polite but puzzled by this oddly solicitous older man." "Uh, Christine!" "I'm sorry." "The front office at Universal thought they smelt a whiff of incest and severed the family ties." "They were in conflict about whether she was the daughter, or whether he was in love with her." "Out went Aunt Madeleine's telling of the family secret, which Raoul has sworn never to reveal." "To secure money for Christine's lessons," "Claudin takes his concerto for publication." "Pleyel will publish this, I promise." "A tragic misunderstanding occurs." "That's my music." "I thought I told you to get out." "You've stolen my music." "Thief!" "You've stolen my music!" "The sewers of Paris lead to refuge in catacombs beneath the Opera." "The reign of terror begins." "Christine DuBois will sing tomorrow night." "Madame Biancarolli and her maid have been murdered." "Murdered?" "!" " You're not one of the police." " I'll watch over you." "I've always watched over you." "Come." "The fallen angel makes a heaven of his hell." "You'll love it here,  when you get used to the dark." "And you'll love the dark too." "It's friendly." "The music comes down and the darkness distils it." "And life here is like a resurrection." "A ritual is re-enacted." "And the finale was guaranteed to bring down the house." "A sneak preview went badly." "Then, the first-night audience in Chicago howled with laughter." "Had the Phantom jinx struck again?" "Universal management prayed." "Their prayers were answered, just as Carl Laemmle's had been in 1925." "Phantom of the Opera was an immediate smash, breaking records around the country." "Box-office receipts poured in." "The most they'd made." "Even any Durbin film never made the money it made." "Phantom went on to win two Academy Awards, for colour cinematography and art direction." "For audiences who didn't see it in theatres," "Basil Rathbone played the Phantom, with Susanna Foster and Nelson Eddy, in a "ghost to ghost" broadcast on the Lux Radio Theater." "Take off the mask!" "Go on, take it off!" "Why did you do it?" "Now you've seen my face." "The only real story that I have about The Phantom of the Opera is that when I was about six or seven, one Hallowe'en, he called Universal and he borrowed the cape and the hat." "And two of my friends and I dressed as goblins and hid under this cape." "He would knock on the door, and there he was, standing there doing this insane Hallowe'en poem." "And then he would open up his cape, and we would jump out and say" ""Trick or treat?" "Trick or treat?"" "Four days after Phantom's opening, Universal announced The Climax,  a direct sequel, reuniting cast and creative team." "Nelson Eddy was enthusiastic about the sequel, but when production neared, he was not available." "Claude Rains had forsworn the mask and signed a contract with Warner Brothers." "Finally reworked as a follow-up rather than a sequel," "The Climax starred Boris Karloff as a demented theatre physician, worshipping the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, while menacing Susanna Foster," "whose voice bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the deceased diva." "Tonight you give your voice and your will to me." "I'm in control." "The Climax originally was an old show from New York from the '20s, that had one horrible song in it." "Not horrible." "The songs in the movie The Climax were more operetta than opera." "It had all the ingredients for success, including a solid cast." "In The Climax,  I played a young Viennese boy called Franz, who was a musician in love with Susie Foster, who realises what an evil influence the Boris Karloff character had on this girl." "By 1944, Boris Karloff had become such an indelible horror icon that his simple presence in a film signified shudders." "Boris Karloff, the classic horror actor." "He did very little with his voice." "He did very little with his face." "He just let it be there." "And the eyes are so expressive." "I don't know whether you remember the close-ups of Boris Karloff in The Climax." "They were masterpieces." "I think it was the first time that Boris had a chance to play an elegant man." "And when he came dressed in his tails and his wonderful hat, he was beautiful." "Once again, audiences were treated to the Phantom stage and Hal Mohr's Technicolor camera work." "But Universal's hope to repeat Phantom's success went up in flames." "The Climax didn't have the name "Phantom of the Opera"." "With that name alone you were safe." "The Climax proved more of an anticlimax at the box office." "Following World War Il, the Phantom lurked quietly at Universal, unmasked again for a cameo in William Castle's 1951 Hollywood Story." "In 1955, another Phantom script was prepared, again set in the gaslight era." "But the new face of fear at Universal was the Creature from the Black Lagoon and other modern horrors of the fabulous Fifties." "Lon Chaney now was the stuff of old-fashioned melodrama, which the film story of his life became." "Damn you!" "Damn you!" "Damn you!" "Man of a Thousand Faces was a sanitised retelling of Chaney's Hollywood story." "They love him, don't they?" "The authorised version of a very private life, which some felt dropped the curtain on the true backstage drama." "The son of deaf-mutes, Lon Chaney was sensitively portrayed by James Cagney." "The film explained Chaney's craft and fame, but weak facsimiles of Chaney's triumphs failed to convey his power of accomplishment." "Even Erique's organ requiem sounded contrived, having been ad-libbed by staff composer Herman Stein, asked to strike some chords for what he was told was only a sound check." "Chaney's soul remained a private mystery." "Do you have to pray like that?" "I wouldn't know how to mean it any other way." "Cut!" "Even a bargain-basement unmasking generated excitement, and inspired a new Phantom." "The never-produced 1957 script confronted the ghosts of World War Il, the Phantom a dancer named Carlo Volpurno, scarred by Mussolini's Fascists." "The spirit of Lon Chaney lived on at Universal." "There's a great new joke going around school." "Don't step on that spider- it might be Lon Chaney." "Very funny." "In the 1950s, you couldn't step on that spider-it stepped on you." "It seemed as if The Phantom would never be remade." "And then..." "They're going to reopen the Opera." "At last we will sing..." "You are wrong, monsieur." "I'm sorry, Christine." "They are going to reopen the Opera,  but without you." "But box five remained a problem." "Why is that box empty over there?" "There are have been complaints." " Complaints?" " Voices." "People do not like to sit there." "Are you trying to tell me it's haunted?" "Director Terence Fisher, fresh from Hammer Films' triumphs" "The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula,  was at the helm." "Like most films that he directed, he didn't have any say in choosing the subject." "The studio had the idea to make the film." "They said "Would you like to direct this?" And he would say "Sure"." "But it was a subject that appealed to him." "It also appealed to Cary Grant." "The legend of masculine charisma approached Hammer, wanting to make a horror film." "Under the pen name John Elder, producer Anthony Hinds tailored his script to the star's romantic persona, only to have Grant's agent refuse his client's wish to play against type." "I'm the rat-catcher." "Cary Grant could not go and stab the rat-catcher in the eye." "Hammer's script takes most of the menace away from the Phantom." "It shifts murders from him to other people." "Traditional dirty tricks performed with relish by earlier Phantoms were now delegated to a malevolent imp." "Topsy-turvy, the Phantom unmasks himself, and is a victim of his character's own traditions." "Czech-born, trained at London's Old Vic," "Herbert Lom inherited the mask of a kinder, gentler Phantom." "Lom gave a masterful performance, blending the tortured pantomime of Lon Chaney with the voice of the fallen angel pioneered by Claude Rains." "You're going to be a great and famous singer." "I'll help you." " Who are you?" " Be quiet and listen." "You sang well, but you will sing better." "I shall teach you." "When you sing, it will be only for me." "You are dining with Ambrose d'Arcy tonight." "Be warned, he is a vile and vicious man." "The true villain of the story is Lord Ambrose d'Arcy, played by Michael Gough, who runs the opera house." "You're a delicious little thing." "Like Erique Claudin, Professor Petrie is an impoverished musician." "This time, the theft is not imagined." "You thief!" "Scoundrel!" "Penniless composers are invariably drawn to their publishers, where only tragedies are printed." "The spiritual subtext of Gaston Leroux's tale was never more boldly enunciated, as this composer of divine music finds hell, not heaven, on earth." "What the devil...?" "Good evening, Lord Ambrose." "As death approaches, the fallen angel aspires to the firmament." "I'm dying already." "But before I go," "I implore you,  allow me to finish one thing." "Let me teach you." "Let me teach you to use that wonderful voice that God has given you." "Professor Petrie's masterwork chronicles the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, persecuted by Church authorities because she claims to hear" ""the voice of God"." "Renounce these voices you hear." "Declare yourself a heretic." "No, I will not." "Christine also hears a voice, that warns her of evil." "There are forces of evil at large in the Opera tonight." "Leave the girl and go while you may." "A voice whose only desire is to present her a divine gift." "Sing!" "Use that wonderful gift that God has given you!" "A voice that knows that martyrdom must precede sainthood." "Do you think you can become a great singer without suffering?" "Heather Sears' performance was enhanced by Pat Clark's fine dubbing." "No, no!" "No, no." "Good." "Now the melody." "You begin very quietly." "I heard your voice inside..." "Divinely inspired, Christine acknowledges her angel of music." "She hears his voice." "I hear your voice." "The Phantom of the Opera was one of Terence Fisher's most polished films." "Films and Filming pronounced it the best thing Hammer had yet produced." "But it was not well-received at the box office." "He did a good job, but it wasn't a job that the public wanted." "In the years following Lon Chaney's original Phantom," "Universal monsters frequently spent a night at the opera." "The Phantom stage has been in active use for the last 75 years." "And few audiences realise how many other famous scenes have been shot in the very shadow of the chandelier..." "You should have seen the blood." "...how many thoroughly modern Phantoms have held a season pass to box five." "Raspberries." "My God, it's Muzzy!" "But audiences give few raspberries to the Phantom." "And this timeless fable of the fallen angel, told so many times, will continue to be retold." "Through Beauty's compassion, the Beast will always be redeemed." "Somehow I always felt drawn to him,  with a kind of pity, understanding." "In addition to the three films released by Universal," "The Phantom of the Opera has inspired many other dramatisations." "The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is the most celebrated, not to mention the most successful stage attraction in theatre history." "Given the story's incomparable track record, there will no doubt be more films and plays and musicals to come." "No matter how you look at it, there's a phantom in your future." "For more information on The Phantom,  join me for a feature-length commentary, which you can access from the main menu." "On behalf of the Opera Ghost, this is Scott MacQueen." "(# "Martha" composed by Friedrich von Flotow)" "(applause)" "(# sings in French)" "(# singing in French)" " Good evening, Vercheres." " Sh!" "Oh, good evening, Inspector." "You have missed half of the opera, as usual." " I didn't come to see the opera." " As usual." "(applause)" " Raoul!" " Christine." "I just got back from Rouen." "No, I must talk to you for a moment." "But I..." "Raoul, I shouldn't have left." "Christine, dear, I hurried over to tell you something." " What?" " That I love you." " Again?" " Still." " What a wonderful audience tonight." " And you were marvellous, Biancarolli." "We're having supper tonight at the Café de L'Opéra." " I'm sorry, Raoul, but I can't tonight." " Why not?" "Chris?" "Christine!" " I'm coming, Jenny." " If you've another engagement, break it." "You've had your fling at this for two years." "But I don't want to give up the opera, not until I've had a chance to really sing." "Anatole says he has great faith in my voice, and he's going to help me." "Naturally." "That's what baritones are for(!" ")" " You were in wonderful voice tonight." " Thank you, Marcel." "Christine!" "Why weren't you on the stage for the end of the act?" " You're all right?" " Oh, yes." "Mademoiselle DuBois, come here please." "Don't worry." "Why weren't you onstage for the curtain calls?" " Well, erm, I was ill..." " No, you were not." "You were entertaining a friend." "A friend, mind you!" "For a singer to absent herself from the stage during a performance is a gross breach of..." " Oh." "You wish to talk to me, monsieur?" " With your permission," "I'd like a few words with mile DuBois in my office after the performance." " Yes, she will be there." " Thank you." " Now, you bear in mind what I told you." " Yes, monsieur." "Terrifying fellow, that Vercheres, when he wants to be." "I'm very grateful, monsieur." "I promise you I'll never miss a curtain call again." "It's a promise." "Now, uh, this young man who is more important to you than your career..." "Who is he?" "But he isn't, monsieur." "That is, I am very fond of him." "I mean..." "Oh." "Well, he's Inspector Raoul Daubert of the Sûreté." "Inspector?" "You mean a policeman?" "Oh, but he's not an ordinary policeman." "Even an extraordinary policeman seems a strange sweetheart for a soprano." "Does he sing?" "I'm afraid you don't understand, monsieur." "He's a graduate of the military academy at Saint-Cyr, and he's very intelligent and very clever." "For a man who means nothing to you, he seems to have made quite an impression." "Oh, but I didn't say he meant nothing to me." "What I said was..." "I know." "I know what you mean." "You have promise, Mademoiselle DuBois, but you must choose between an operatic career and what is usually called "a normal life"." "Though why it is so-called is beyond me." "You can't do justice to both." "The artist has a special temperament, and he must live his life exclusively with those who understand it." "I understand, monsieur." "You'll find that music has its compensations, my dear." "Good night." "Good night, and thank you." "Oh, mademoiselle, please tell Mr Claudin to come in." "He's in the anteroom." "Certainly." "Good night." "Good evening." "Monsieur Villeneuve asks that you come in now." "Thank you, mademoiselle." "Mademoiselle, may I speak to you for a minute?" "Certainly." "You weren't on the stage tonight for the third-act curtain calls." "Everyone in the theatre seems to have noticed it." "It's really quite flattering." "Why weren't you there?" "Oh, forgive me, but I've been here so long that you..." "Everybody, everything connected with the Opera is so much a part of my life." "Of course..." "But Mr Villeneuve is waiting." "Yes." "You weren't ill, were you?" "You're not in any trouble?" "It's impertinent of me, I know, but, uh..." "You're very kind." "Good night." "Uh, Christine!" "I'm sorry." "I'm sorry." "Good night." "Good night." " (knocking) - (Villeneuve) Come in, please." "You know why I sent for you, Claudin?" "I think so, Maestro." "For some time now I have sensed discord in the violin section." "It was not until tonight that I definitely located the source of the trouble." "Let me hear you play, if you please, Claudin." "Yes, Maestro." "(# mournful tune)" " What was that, Claudin?" " A little song." "A lullaby, from Provence, where I was born." "You played it very well." "Perhaps I was wrong." "No, it was you." "What's the matter?" "You're an accomplished musician." "Come, come, now." "Let me hear you play the opening movement in the third act of Martha." "It's no use, Maestro." "Something has happened to the fingers of my left hand." " But you played that lullaby perfectly." " It's a simple melody, Maestro." "That's why I played it." "You were trying to fool me, eh, Claudin?" "Well, perhaps it's only temporary." "Perhaps it'll get better." "I hope so, but in the meantime..." "You know, Claudin, the aim of the Paris Opera is perfection." "I'm sorry, old fellow, very sorry." "You've been with us a long time, haven't you?" "20 years." "What am I to do, Maestro?" "I know it's hard, Claudin." "No doubt you've saved a tidy little fortune to retire on." " Yes, of course." " In appreciation of your long service," "I shall arrange with the directors to have a season ticket issued to you." "Thank you, Maestro." "(knock at door)" "(door opens)" "Why don't you eat before the opera, instead of keeping me up all hours?" "You're rich enough." "Same soup, night after night, week after week." " Please don't disturb yourself, Marie." " You're a fine one to say that!" "Why wouldn't I be disturbed?" "I'll come right to the point." "What you do with your money is not my business." "If you want to hoard it and starve, it's your affair." "But you haven't paid me for six weeks, and that's as long as I'm going to wait." "I haven't any money." "If you'll be patient, just a little longer..." "You haven't any money?" "After working for the Paris Opera all these years?" "What will you do with your money?" "Bury it with you?" "If you do, they'll dig you up and steal it." "If you think you can add a few francs to your fortune at my expense, you're very much mistaken." "Marie, you've been very kind, you've been very patient." "You'll be paid, I promise you." "Now please leave me alone." "It makes me sick to think of all that money doing nobody any good." "Either I get my money or out you go." "That's my last word, Claudin." "(# sings ascending scale)" "(bell tinkles)" "You're late, Mr Claudin." "The lesson is almost over." "I didn't come about that today, mademoiselle." " She's not in voice." " I'll tell Signor Ferretti." " Please don't interrupt the lesson." " Of course not." "I understand." "But I must announce the time to Signor Ferretti, or he'll keep students for hours." " It's 11 o'clock, Signor Ferretti." " Thank you." "Mademoiselle, you disappoint me." "I'm sorry." "I'm a little upset." "If a man is upsetting you, pitch him out of your life." "Music is first." " Music is everything." " I understand." "You don't understand." "Women never understand." "But they are docile." "Perhaps you're not getting enough sleep." "Come later tomorrow, say midday." "Thank you, monsieur." "Remember you have responsibilities to others as well as yourself." "I know." "I can never repay you for what you've done for me." " Good day, monsieur." " Good day." "Would you come this way, monsieur?" "Monsieur Claudin is here, Signor Ferretti." "Come in, Claudin, come in." " Won't you sit down a moment?" " Thank you." "I suppose you noticed your protégée was disappointing today?" "Well, an off day now and then." "You've done a lot for her, Signor." "Nevertheless, she is making definite progress, eh?" "I was dismissed from the orchestra last night." "Oh." "Then you will have to withdraw your support for Mademoiselle DuBois?" "Only for a little while, just until I can secure another position." "I had hoped that you would continue to instruct her." "Claudin, if you don't mind me saying so, you are a fool." "A man of your age might win a girl like Christine DuBois if he happened to be the director of an opera company, but a poor violinist..." "We agreed never to discuss my motives." "Please, won't you continue to work with her?" "Why should I assume your burden, after you spent all your money on her?" "She means nothing to me." "But her career means more to me than anything else." "I would never let you lose anything on her account." "I'm sorry, Claudin, really sorry." "If I had time..." "But my expenses are great." "And you must remember there are many who can pay waiting to study with me." "I'll let her come a few times, and then I will tell her she no longer needs me." "But that isn't true." "As a matter of fact, if you had the money, she might be launched on a career soon." "I assume that mile DuBois has not the means to pay for her own instructions?" "A month's salary wouldn't be enough to pay for one of your lessons." "But..." "I have written a concerto." "Will you trust me if I can arrange to have it published?" "Every violinist has written a concerto!" "Come, come, my dear Claudin." "But I have faith in this one, as much faith as I had in mile DuBois when I came three years ago." "Now, I was right about her, Signor, and I'm right about this." "Pleyel and Desjardins will publish it, and they'll give me a substantial advance." "You'll see!" "(man) It's a shame." "Pleyel's in there with his etchings." "Why don't they tell the poor devil he won't see anyone, instead of torturing him?" "Claudin?" "He'll see me?" "No." "He is too busy today." " Has he seen my manuscript?" " Manuscript?" "What manuscript?" " My concerto." " I know nothing about it." " But you took the portfolio into him." " If I did, you will receive it in due time." "Now, my dear, the acid." "Be careful, or you'll burn yourself horribly." " Monsieur Pleyel?" " What are you doing here?" " I've been waiting since this morning." " Weren't you told I couldn't see anyone?" "Yes, but my manuscript." "I must find out about my manuscript." "Give this fellow his manuscript, Georgette." "You'll find it on the desk, if it's anywhere." " What is your name?" " Uh, Claudin." "Erique Claudin." "Claudin..." "No, it wouldn't be there." "It's a large manuscript in a portfolio." "It's a concerto." " I'm sorry, but I don't know where it is." " But it must be here." "Well, if it is, it will turn up." "You might call again in a few days." "You don't understand." "It's my only copy." "It represents two years' work." " You heard what the lady said." " But it was brought in." "It must be here." "It must be found." "Did we ask you to bring your music to us, Claudin?" "I've seen samples of your compositions before." "Perhaps some employee has thrown it into the wastebasket, where it belongs." "Good night!" "(# piano playing)" " Do you think I was right, Monsieur Liszt?" " It's magnificent." "Tell me his name again." " Erique Claudin." " Claudin?" "I've tried for years to persuade Pleyel to publish his work, but you know Pleyel and unknown composers." "Pleyel will publish this, I promise." "(continues playing piano)" "That's my music." "I thought I told you to get out." "Thief!" "You've stolen my music." " Thief!" " (Georgette) Maurice!" " You're choking him!" " You've stolen my music!" "Thief!" "Thief!" " (Pleyel chokes)" " You've stolen my music!" "What happened?" " Stop him!" " What's happened?" "Monsieur Pleyel's been murdered by that madman, Claudin!" "Get a doctor, quickly!" "You, get a doctor." "Call the police!" "Get a doctor!" "Call the police!" "Police!" "Police!" " What happened?" " Monsieur Pleyel has been murdered!" " He ran down that way." " Come on, let's go!" "Not here." "Sorry, monsieur." "Move on, and don't come back into this district tonight." "(howls)" "Lecours, how were we ever induced to accept the management of this place?" "It's not an opera house." "It's a madhouse." "And now this:" ""Wanted for murder:" "Erique Claudin, former violinist at Paris Opera House."" ""Age 48 years, height 5ft 8in."" ""The face has recently been disfigured by acid."" "It's an outrage." "After 20 years with the Paris Opera, this miserable Claudin has the insolence to commit a murder." "After 20 years with the Paris Opera," " A man is capable of anything, Amiot." " (knock on door)" "Come in, come in, come in!" "Monsieur, there is a thief in the opera house." "A costume has been stolen, and two masks." "Impossible." "The wardrobe woman must have lost them." " She should have been dismissed." " She's too fat." "That's not all." "The thief has broken into the restaurant." " The restaurant?" " Yes, monsieur." "There is missing a..." "There is missing a bucket of pickled pigs' feet in vinegar, a ham and a pâté." "Call the police." "This must be stopped." "Monsieur, I am afraid the police can't stop that." "It's he." "Who?" "Oh, please don't start that nonsense again, Vercheres." "You ought to know there aren't any ghosts." "Monsieur, you are sceptical, but I don't like ghosts." "I am a busy man." "What's that?" "Our brilliant stage manager insists there's a malicious ghost prowling about." "If anything goes wrong, he thinks this ghost did it." "Oh, monsieur..." " It has a long nose and a big, red beard." " You make me nervous." "It's gone!" "Did you hear that, Lecours?" "My master key is gone." "Do you realise what that means, Lecours?" "With that key in his possession, the thief can open 2500 doors, to say nothing of thousands of closets and cabinets." "Perhaps the pickled pigs' feet will kill him." "Oh, you don't seem to understand." "Why, he can hide everywhere." "The entire police force couldn't find him." "You don't realise the extent of this place." "You've never troubled to find out." "Why should I?" "I have troubles enough." " What are you waiting for?" "Get the police!" " Yes, monsieur." "A pâté, a ham, pickled pigs' feet and 2500 rooms!" "What is the Opera coming to?" "(# angry chords)" "(# "Provence Lullaby")" "(# hums the tune)" "That's lovely." "What is it?" "It's a lullaby of Provence." "I've known it all my life." "# Hear those bells ringing soft and low" "# Bringing peace through the twilight glow" "# According to everyone" "# Night has begun" "# Turn from your weary toil" "# Day's work is done" "# Hear them ring while my love and I" "# Drift and dream to the lullaby" "# Hear those bells ringing soft and low" " (bell) - # Bringing peace" "# Through the twilight glow" "# According to everyone" "# Night has..." " Monsieur Daubert." " Madame." "They call this rehearsing, monsieur." "Well, I'm sorry to intrude, but I must see you, Christine." " Well, you see I'm busy right now..." " Christine!" "Please remember that you are speaking to a gentleman." "Well, uh..." " Come in, Raoul." " Rehearsals!" "Anatole..." "Well, he's been helping me." " Monsieur's very kind." " Not at all, monsieur." "I find it a pleasure." " I'm Anatole Garron of the Opera." " I'm so sorry." "This is Inspector Daubert, of the Sûreté." "I've heard of you, Inspector." "Your work must be very exciting." "Oh, not so exciting as yours, monsieur." "It doesn't lend itself to self-expression." "I didn't recognise that delightful song you were singing." "But as you know, I am no connoisseur of the opera." "It's not from an opera, Raoul." "It's a lullaby." "A lullaby?" "It didn't seem very effective, as a lullaby." "Well, you see, Monsieur Inspector, a song is capable of many interpretations," " By a musician." " By a detective, too." "Though no doubt the detective is usually mistaken." "I must see you alone, Christine." "I'm here on business from the Sûreté." "With me?" "What business could mademoiselle have with the Sûreté?" "What is it, Raoul?" "If you don't mind, I'd rather Anatole stayed." "Very well, Christine." " You know Erique Claudin?" " Why, yes." "How well?" "I knew him only as a violinist in the orchestra." "I encountered him a few times in the foyer or on the stage or outside the Opera, but that's all." "He acted a little strangely, but I assumed he was that way with everybody." " Strangely?" "How do you mean, "strangely"?" "Well..." "I don't know." "He just seemed... eccentric, but harmless." "I thought he was a rather kind old fellow, until I read of the murder." " What is it, Raoul?" " He was a kind and inoffensive man." "Until he thought Pleyel was stealing his life's work." "Then something snapped, and he became a homicidal maniac." "In his state, he may commit other murders." "It's urgent that we capture him as soon as possible." "But what has all this to do with me?" "We found something in his room that connects you with him." "No doubt you can explain." "So that's what became of it!" " Be good enough to explain yourself." " Certainly." "That statuette is mine." " Yours?" " Definitely." "I made it." " I intended to make you a present of it." " How nice of you, Anatole." "It disappeared from my dressing room." "It's an extraordinary likeness." "My compliments on your versatility, monsieur." "You must have posed for this many times." "Every detail is you." "I never posed for it, not once." " You did this from drawings?" " And from memory, Monsieur Inspector." "To see Christine is to carry her image in your heart and mind for ever." " Claudin must have stolen it." " Why?" "Isn't it obvious?" "Well, speaking purely as an inspector of the Sûreté, even the obvious often needs confirmation." "But as a man, Mr Daubert, you can understand that sitting there in the orchestra pit night after night and looking at Christine," "Claudin probably fell in love with her." "You admit that is possible, no?" "Christine, did Claudin ever seek more than a casual acquaintance with you?" "No, never." "Can you imagine so diffident a lover, monsieur?" "Claudin was barely 50." "Well, no doubt he lacked... assurance." "No doubt." " This is yours, Christine." " You're giving it to me?" " Yes." " Well!" "Then I'll accept it as a gift from both of you." "Well, I seem to have got the worst of this bargain." "In the future, Monsieur Inspector, I detect, you model." " In any case, that was a bad clue." " Oh, not so bad as it seems." "It enabled me to recover mademoiselle's statuette." "Thank you, Raoul." "Is that your carriage at the door, monsieur?" "Why, yes." "Would you be good enough to give me a lift?" " Where are you going?" " It doesn't matter." "As inspector of police, I have business all over Paris." "Yes, well, in that case..." " Au revoir,  Christine." " Au revoir." "You've been most helpful, Christine." " I hope you catch him soon." " Thank you." " Ready, monsieur?" " At your service." " After you, monsieur." " After you,  monsieur." "(laughs)" "(orchestra tuning up)" " Madame looks beautiful tonight." " Don't I always, Yvette?" "But especially tonight." "Monsieur Garron, if he has eyes in his head..." " (knocking) - (man) Madame Biancarolli!" "Thank you!" "Madame... (practises vocal exercises)" "Good evening." "Marcel, do you think I lead an enviable life?" " Yes, monsieur." " I do, but not for the reasons you think." "I'm a very happy man because I'm having supper tonight with Mademoiselle DuBois." "(Claudin) Christine?" "You're going to be a great and famous singer." "I'll help you." "(# singing in French)" "Marie, Comtesse de Bretonne." "(# singing in French)" "(Garron) Christine, you're going to be a great and famous singer." "I'll help you." " What's the matter?" " Someone just said the same thing to me" " A moment ago, in my room." " Someone?" "Who?" "I don't know." "It was... just a voice." " I knew you'd hear me sooner or later." " It was you?" "Of course." "I don't mean actually, but I've been saying it ever since I saw you and heard you sing." "At last you heard me." " Your cue, monsieur." " I'll tell you again at supper." "Armand, Duc de Montaigne." "(applause)" "What is it, madame?" "I don't know." "I..." "Help me!" "Monsieur Vercheres!" "Oh, madame!" "You, get a doctor, quickly." "Take her to her dressing room." " What could have happened?" " What?" "Ohh!" "mile DuBois, you must go on at once." "Madame Biancarolli has been taken ill." "Please get changed quickly." "Claire!" "Where is that clumsy wardrobe woman?" "Claire, get mile DuBois changed at once." "There isn't a moment to lose." "She was drugged, there's no doubt." " Who the devil would want to drug her?" " I'm sure she overate." " You're certain she'll recover, Dr Lefours?" " Definitely." "What am I doing here?" "I..." "I should be onstage." "I..." " Doctor!" " Madame..." "She'll be all right now." "Camarades, I'empereur nous appelle." "(# Christine sings)" "Why is she singing?" "What is she doing out there?" " What's happened?" " Madame, control yourself." " I assure you..." " Come to the point, Amiot." "You were seized with a touch of indigestion." "As your understudy, mile DuBois took your place." "A touch of indigestion!" "Why, I was perfectly well when I went on the stage." "Why, I was drugged!" "And you all know by whom." "Anatole Garron did it to make room for that baggage!" " Madame, consider what you're saying," " Madame, please compose yourself." "I demand Garron's arrest." "And hers too." "She had a hand in it." "I demand an investigation!" " Let me go!" " Madame, consider our position." "You were wonderful!" "(cheering)" "I assure you, monsieur." "The property man swears that there was no opportunity for any human being to tamper with the drink." "Monsieur Inspector, what are you waiting for?" "I demand the arrest of Anatole Garron." "You know he did it." "I know nothing of the sort, madame." "I am a police officer, not a psychic." "It is my duty to collect evidence, without prejudice." "Haven't you evidence enough?" "Everyone knows..." "Madame!" "Will you be seated, please?" "Mr Garron, you had the opportunity to put the drug in Madame Biancarolli's glass." "Certainly, Monsieur Inspector." "We all did." " It becomes, then, a question of motive." " The motive is very simple, monsieur." "He wanted to get me out of the way so he could make room for that..." " Are you referring to mile DuBois?" " I am." "You heard, Monsieur Garron." "Madame is in good voice..." "and most explicit." "Have you anything to say, monsieur?" "I deny madame's accusation." "Do you deny, monsieur, that you had any motive in drugging madame?" "I deny that I drugged her." "I don't understand your reluctance to make the arrest, Inspector." " You're not an examining magistrate." " Can you substantiate that Mr Garron had a motive, and that the motive was mile DuBois?" " Anyone with half an eye could tell you..." " Hearsay is not evidence, madame." "I'll go over your head, Monsieur Daubert." "I have influence at the Sûreté." "I was drugged tonight to the point of death." "I insist upon the arrest of the criminal and his accomplice." " And if you don't, I..." " One moment, madame, please." "You have heard Mr Garron deny that he drugged you." "As the inspector says, there is no evidence." " And remember, madame..." " Are you suggesting that I..." "If you insist upon his arrest and fail to obtain a conviction, you will find yourself in a very difficult predicament." " Quite right." " And no matter what the outcome, don't forget that your career is bound to the Paris Opera." "Whatever scandal injures us, or any member of the company," " Will injure you as well." " (Lecours) Precisely." "Are you suggesting that I forget the whole affair?" "Yes." "For your own sake, as well as ours, and purely as a matter of business expediency." "That is exactly what we propose, madame." "(Lecours) Exactly." "Very well." "That is, under certain conditions." "I want a new understudy." "Christine DuBois goes back to the chorus and stays there for the two years my contract has to run." "I won't permit such an outrage!" "If any such arrangement is made, I'II..." " Now, madame..." " My dear Anatole, I have not finished." "You suggest I forget I was drugged tonight?" " Madame." " Very well." "I'll go a step further." "I suggest that you forget anything happened afterwards." " For once, madame, I do not understand." " Oh, monsieur, it's so simple." "Nothing happened tonight." "I wasn't drugged and Christine DuBois didn't sing." " But..." " There are always critics in the house." "You'll send word to the papers that no mention of her is to be made." "You'll do nothing of the sort." "It's ridiculous." "Besides, what about the public, madame?" "Shall we send word to the public to forget that mile DuBois was a sensation?" "If you're willing to ruin the Opera for the sake of Christine DuBois, it's your affair." "But you'll either do as I say, or I'll charge both of them with trying to murder me." "Do you understand that?" "Murder me!" " Madame was magnificent tonight." " I was good, wasn't I?" "Monsieur Garron must be biting his nails." "Ah, let him." "He'll come crawling back to me on his hands and knees, confessing the whole thing and begging my forgiveness." "Madame!" "Who are you?" "Christine DuBois will sing tomorrow night." "Leave Paris." "This is your last warning." "Take off that prop-room mask." "(screaming)" " What was that?" " I don't know." " (man) Something must have happened." " Silence, please." " (woman) What happened?" " Sh!" "Monsieur?" "Madame Biancarolli and her maid have been murdered." "Murdered?" "!" " Are you hurt, monsieur?" " What happened?" "What were you doing?" " I was chasing him." " Chasing whom?" "The murderer, of course." "There was someone else up there?" "Certainly." "Everyone must have seen..." "You saw him yourself, didn't you?" "No, monsieur." "I was chasing you." "How long will the Opera remain closed, Inspector?" " Yes, how long?" " I do not know." " Any suspects?" " Yes, whom do you suspect?" " No one." " What is your theory on the motive?" "I am not a theorist." "All I can say is that as long as the opera house remains closed, everyone in Paris, in all France, will think only of the murder, hounding us to make an arrest." "Inspector Daubert." "I came directly I got your message." "What has happened now?" "Listen to this, monsieur." ""Christine DuBois must replace Biancarolli, who ignored my warning."" "I found this mysteriously placed on my desk after we got back from supper." "There is an excellent suggestion in this, monsieur." "You must reopen the Opera." " But your orders..." " Are countermanded." "Reopen." " With mile DuBois, monsieur?" " Of course!" "It should pacify this madman." "If he doesn't harm anybody, his being in the building doesn't matter." " Christine DuBois must not sing." " What?" "And the murderer must not remain in the building." " It is my duty to apprehend him." " I don't understand." "If Christine DuBois sings, that will satisfy the murderer, and he may never appear." "To lure him from his hiding place, someone else must sing." "Are you suggesting we reopen the Opera with a murder as an added attraction?" " Please, Lecours..." " I'll post police throughout the building." "Even with the chorus onstage, with a bodyguard for the singer." " But, monsieur, our reputation..." " I am reluctant to do this, monsieur." "Particularly on mile DuBois' account, but I can see no other way." "And whom do you suggest as "bait", Monsieur Inspector?" "Whomever you decide." "Madame Lorenzi." "She has nerve, that woman." " Too much." " Very well, then." " The Opera will reopen." " Yes, monsieur." "(bell)" " Oh." " (both) Good morning, Christine." " Good morning." " (both) May I come in, Christine?" "Yes, do." " Well?" " (both) Christine, I..." " Yes?" " (both) If I might have a word...?" " Well, what is it?" " After you, monsieur." " (both) Christine, I..." " Well, now, one at a time, please!" "You first, Anatole, as your name begins with an A." "They're going to reopen the Opera." "At last we will sing..." "You are wrong, monsieur." "I'm sorry, Christine." "They are going to reopen the Opera, but without you." "Circumstances connected with the murder demand that someone else sing the leading role." " But Anatole..." " You may like to know, monsieur, that circumstances connected with the murder demand that she does sing." "Really?" "I am aware that your profession requires a certain self-assurance," " But aren't you going too far?" " Not at all." "I have a plan for apprehending the murderer." " So you have turned detective, monsieur?" " I have." "Very well, if it amuses you, but I advise you to confine your hobby to the entertainment of your friends." "Well, let's not waste words, monsieur." "I've been assured by Messrs Amiot and Lecours that as soon as the Opera reopens, mile DuBois will sing." "And I might add that my plan is strictly confidential." "I'm sorry, but in my official capacity" "I ordered Messrs Amiot and Lecours not to permit you to sing." " But Raoul..." " At least, not for the present." "And I am not in the least interested in your plan." "May I have a word with you alone?" "That's what I came for." "May I speak to you alone?" " But..." "I'm going out." " (both) My carriage is outside." "Well, I'm not going right now." "I mean..." "I'm going later." "(both) I'll wait." "Mr Villeneuve suggested you'd perform this service in the cause of justice." "Do you think Claudin would be tempted to leave his hiding place and risk his life merely to hear his own concerto?" "Played by Franz Liszt himself?" "Do you doubt it, Maestro?" "So many crimes have been committed in the name of music." "It seems only fair to use it now to avert one." " I am at your service, monsieur." " Thank you, Maestro." "Thank you." "Most exciting, this detective work, most exciting." "It's more than exciting to me." "I had the honour of being suspected of the crime." "Monsieur Daubert, please." " Listen, monsieur." " Another note." "How this phantom knows everything is beyond me." ""If Madame Lorenzi sings, you are responsible for what happens."" "Our plan is working." "I don't like it, monsieur." "What will become of the Paris Opera?" "Police everywhere!" " How is Madame Lorenzi?" " Oh, she's enjoying it." " Nothing would keep her from singing." " Well, you know how opera singers are." "With your matron in her dressing room and that fellow of yours waiting to escort her to the stage, she feels quite important." "Madame Lorenzi, I trust you are entirely composed?" "Composed?" "What are you talking about?" "Why not?" " Maestro!" " The piano has been tuned, Maestro." " When do we introduce the concerto?" " Probably after the opera." "Inspector Daubert has a plan of his own, and we must give it every chance." "You may enjoy seeing the opera from the orchestra pit." "I'll be quite comfortable here." "I can look through the score." " Excuse me." "The overture." " Thank you again, Maestro." "Remain onstage throughout the performance." "Make yourselves inconspicuous, and be on the alert for anything suspicious." "The only persons backstage are the members of the opera company, all of whom you know." "Now, that is all." "(# overture begins)" "Christine, I'd rather you'd stayed at home." "You understand why I asked them not to let you sing?" "But I couldn't stay away." "We're introducing a new opera" " And Madame Lorenzi's a great artist..." " And Anatole Garron is the baritone!" "I'm sorry, Christine, but I'm concerned about what may happen tonight." "I know." "I am too." "Wait for me, please, in your dressing room." "(# singing in Russian)" "Sorry." "He's here, Gerard." "He murdered one of our men and stole his cape." "He's probably wearing a mask." "Watch everyone closely." "Of course, monsieur." "Sorry." "(# singing in Russian)" "(# sings in Russian)" "(# Madame Lorenzi sings)" "(screams)" "(screaming and shouting)" "What is it?" "Come with me, mademoiselle." "Are you one of the police?" " Where is Inspector Daubert?" " Investigating the accident." "I will look after you." " You're not one of the police." " I'll watch over you." " I've always watched over you." "Come." " (screams)" " (screams)" " Sh!" "Shh." "You'll stay here with me, my child, won't you?" "It's been so lonely without you, but you've come to me at last, haven't you?" "Now you'll sing for me, and I'll play, and we'll be together for ever." "It's beautiful down there." "Beautiful." "Come now, my little one." "Christine!" " Where's Christine?" " I don't know." "Isn't it horrible?" " Hasn't she been here?" " I haven't seen her." "There." "You're not frightened now, are you?" "You know I'll not harm you, don't you?" "How could I harm you?" "I've always helped you, haven't I?" " Yes." " Yes what?" "Yes, you've always helped me." "Of course I have." "Biancarolli knows." "She wouldn't let you sing." "She didn't know how much I love you." "Now she knows." "But it doesn't matter now." "Nothing matters except you and me, Christine." "Now you'll sing all you want..." "but only for me." "You will, won't you, my darling?" "Of course." "There's a piano in the Opera foyer." "Let's go there." "You play and I'll sing for you." "But you don't understand." "We can't go back there... ever." "It was I who made the chandelier fall." "I, for you, Christine." "But I warned them." "I said there'd be death and destruction if they didn't let you sing." "Come." "See?" "Didn't I tell you it was beautiful?" "You didn't know we had a lake all to ourselves, did you?" "They've poisoned your mind against me." "That's why you're afraid." "Look at your lake, Christine." "You'll love it here, when you get used to the dark." "And you'll love the dark too." "It's friendly and peaceful." "It brings rest, and relief from pain." "It's right under the Opera." "The music comes down and the darkness distils it, cleanses it of the suffering that made it, then it's all beauty." "And life here is like a resurrection." "This is more than just a performance of a new concerto." "The future of the Paris Opera may depend upon it." " Garron, have you seen Christine?" " No, she's at home." "She came to the opera house earlier this evening." "Now she's disappeared." "Play, Maestro." "Play." "Christine?" "Christine!" "Christine!" "Christine!" "Christine!" "George, you two search that passageway." "Gerard, go that way." "Be careful." "This madman may do anything now." "Christine!" "Christine!" "(# Claudin's concerto begins)" "My concerto!" "(# plays along with concerto)" "Liszt is playing." "That was a brilliant idea of yours, Garron." "Claudin may be up there now, listening." "That sounds in front of us." "It is in front of us." "The whole place is ready to crumble." "Sing, Christine." "Sing!" "Don't move." " The whole place is caving in." " The shots must have started it." "He called that his concerto, and yet it's written around the melody of my song." " Who was he?" " He came from your district, in Provence." "Everybody there must have known that old folk song." "He was almost a stranger to me, and yet..." "somehow I always felt drawn to him with a kind of pity, understanding." "His suffering and madness will be forgotten." "His music, his concerto, will remain." "I'm glad he heard it, before he..." "Poor Claudin." "Oh, mademoiselle, you were magnificent tonight!" "Thank you, Celeste." "I was good, wasn't I?" "Oh, wonderful!" " (knock on door)" " Celeste!" "Monsieur." "You were magnificent, Christine!" " Incomparable, beautiful-a sensation!" " Is that all?" "I've just begun." "It would take days and years to tell you how superb you were." "We're having supper tonight at the Café de L'Opéra." "Well, I'm terribly sorry, Anatole, but I can't tonight." "Why not?" "Have you another engagement?" " Yes." " With whom?" "With Raoul." " That policeman?" " (knock at door)" " Come in." " Christine!" " Oh." " Oh." "(both) Christine..." " You two know each other, of course." " (both) Of course." "How soon will you be ready?" "The carriage is waiting." " I know Monsieur Garron will excuse us." " Anatole has just asked me to supper too." "No doubt." "You won't be long, will you, Christine?" "I have an idea." "Why can't we three have supper together?" "It's all ordered, isn't it?" "I am not in the habit of taking baritones to supper." "And I do not care to be seen in public with the police." "Christine, you'll have to make up your mind finally between us." "Precisely." "(Vercheres) Don't push, monsieur!" "Oh, no, no." " Excuse..." "Mademoiselle..." " Excuse me." "Don't push, monsieur, please!" "Will you join me for a bit of supper at the Café de L'Opéra?" "With pleasure, monsieur." "Think we can get through this crowd?" "Certainly." "After all, who'd pay any attention to a baritone and a detective?" "Quite right." " After you, monsieur." " After you,  monsieur." "Hello." "This is Scott MacQueen." "If you Universal fans miss the traditional Plexiglas Universal globe here, that's because Universal never reshot it in Technicolor." "None of the colour features made in the 1940s opened with the dazzling globe that Alexander Golitzen designed for the black-and-white studio signature." "Phantom was the second Technicolor film made by Universal, which, at this time, was run by Cliff Work and Nate Blumberg - men from the theatre exhibition side of the business, who cranked out inexpensive B-pictures for middlebrow audiences." "Arabian Nights had been in Technicolor only because producer Walter Wanger had brought his own Technicolor contract with him to the studio." "Phantom's director, Arthur Lubin, was the kind of director who excelled at Universal." "He was smart, efficient, with no ego, no sense of auteurism, a top-notch craftsman who made efficient movies that audiences liked." "In his career, he directed 62 feature films and 600 TV episodes." "He did everything:" "John Wayne westerns, Karloff and Lugosi horror movies," "Abbott and Costello comedies, dramas, dead-end-kid movies, musicals," "Maria Montez movies, Francis the Talking Mule movies, and later, in the 1960s, created Mister Ed." "This was the first A-budget picture for producer George Waggner, who, like Lubin, had toiled at Monogram as a B-movie writer, often under the pen name Joseph West." "Lubin had directed Waggner's script for Midnight Intruder at Universal in 1938, and Waggner got the chance to produce, direct and write" "Lon Chaney Jr's pilot horror quickie, Man Made Monster,  in 1941." "Completed for under $90,000," "Man Made Monster and its co-feature, Horror Island,  put Waggner on the map at the studio, with regard to quality and efficiency on a ridiculously low budget." "Waggner was rewarded with The Wolf Man,  and ultimately broke the big time with Phantom." "Please note, in his filmography the movie The Phantom Stage is a western, and not a dry run for the movie at hand." "Arthur Lubin had no choice in making Phantom." "It was assigned to him-he never knew why-but he loved the film." "Making it was a very happy occasion, and he always felt very lucky that he was assigned to it." "Arthur lived to be 94, and to the end of his life, he was proud of this picture." "His assistant director was Charlie Gould, who was Lubin's regular assistant." "This camera move, coming off the chandelier to reveal Edgar Barrier at the curtains, was Gould's suggestion." "Lubin told me that Gould was related to Ernst Laemmle, and he was a very creative man full of wonderful suggestions, and that he wanted to be a director." ""He would direct me" said Lubin, and he'd whisper to his director "It would be better if you'd go over this way", and suggest an alternate setup for the camera." "Lubin was born in Los Angeles in 1901." "He was four years behind Harold Lloyd at San Diego High School, and Lloyd got the teenage movie-crazy Lubin into a real movie studio," "Famous Players-Lasky, during a summer vacation break." "Lloyd said "If anyone asks, you're my assistant."" ""Lie." "Say you're the nephew of Sigmund Lubin of the Lubin Studio in Philadelphia."" "Lubin watched de Mille direct and observed Lloyd create his Lonesome Luke character for Hal Roach." "Graduating from Carnegie Tech, Lubin produced four plays in New York and became an actor in the theatre." "He had worked for B Iden Payne in a two-character drama, Jealousy,  and Payne called Arthur in to help on a new show, The Red Poppy." "It seemed they engaged their lead from Budapest, and when Mr Bela Lugosi arrived, they found out he couldn't speak any English." "Lubin was assigned to teach Bela English between rehearsals and at night." "I asked Mr Lubin if he taught Lugosi phonetically, and Arthur just smiled silently." "I then asked him "Did you teach him with great difficulty?"" "and Lubin laughed affirmatively." "Bela was grateful, and they became friends, and Lubin was invited to the opening of Dracula at the Fulton Theater in 1927." "Lubin returned to California in the late 1920s and worked as an actor at Universal, including His People,  a melodrama of Jewish life." "He then worked as assistant to William LeBaron at Paramount." "Lubin told me "They'd go on location, I'd go out to the location with the company."" ""LeBaron was so wealthy, he didn't give a shit, and I would report in every hour the progress that was being made."" "At Paramount, he became close with stars like Mae West." "He directed at Monogram and Republic in the early '30s, and was the first director signed by Charles Rogers for Universal in 1936." "A caution to Hollywood hopefuls:" "as you climb the ladder, remember to always be nice to assistants, their wives, their husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends." "Rogers' assistant's wife took a liking to Lubin - not physically or romantically - and her recommendation got him his contract." "Lubin's greatest legacy to the business was his discovery of Clint Eastwood, who he placed under contract and featured in 1957's Escapade in Japan." "We're five minutes into the picture and there has been no dialogue." "But visually, Lubin has set up the main characters and their dynamics." "He may not have been Orson Welles, but Lubin had a talent for storytelling." "We're listening to "Heaven Protect Thee"" "from the third act of von Flotow's 1847 German opera, Martha." "It's the only genuine opera in the film, used because it was in the public domain." "It was the one opera staged by Lubin, who told me that it was within his experience." "Tudor Williams is the bass." "He also sang in How Green Was My Valley, Maytime and Citizen Kane." "Anthony Marlowe is the tenor with the annoying vibrato." "William Tyroler was the choral director." "He had been the operatic consultant on the 1925 Phantom and would also handle the choruses on Phantom's follow-up, The Climax." "He worked for the Chicago Civic Opera, the San Francisco Opera and the Met." "Gaston Leroux's novel and the 1925 Chaney film use Charles Gounod's Faust,  with its diabolic theme of a deal with the devil, to counterpoint the story of Erique as the fallen Lucifer." "Getting real operas that would be suitable for 1943 audiences was a problem because Universal was cheap, and the war in Europe made it virtually impossible to negotiate with publishers and agents." "Later on I'll talk about the difficulties involved with the opera scores." "William von Wymetal, a former stage manager at the Metropolitan Opera, staged the two original operas we see later, just as he had staged Faust for the 1925 Chaney picture." ""He knew nothing about placing the camera" Lubin said." ""All he knew was the musical number as one piece." "I'd break it down into shots."" ""Eddie Ward would work with Wymetal, and we had a full orchestra, about 34 players, in the pit."" "This is Edgar Barrier, a talented radio actor who had returned to Hollywood with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre and been scheduled to appear with Welles in Heart of Darkness." "Barrier had started in summer stock, graduated to the Theatre Guild, and played with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne." "Educated in Switzerland and England, he was fluent in several languages." "Barrier worked in Hollywood in the early sound period, making foreign versions of American talkies, such as Jacques Feyder's Le Spectre vert, "The Green Ghost",  a French version of Lionel Barrymore's 1929 MGM chiller The Unholy Night." "Amazingly, 23-year-old Barrier played the ancient Chinese mystic that Sojin had played in the American film." "Barrier, 37 when he made Phantom,  excelled at character work." "He played the old mask-shop proprietor who was Betty Field's mentor in the "Cinderella" episode of Julien Duvivier's supernatural omnibus Flesh and Fantasy that same year." "Welles finally used Barrier in Journey Into Fear in 1943, and cast him as Banquo's ghost in his eccentric and engaging Macbeth of 1948." "Nelson Eddy was a boy soprano in the church choir in Providence, Rhode Island, who, as a teenager, worked as a shipping clerk, switchboard operator and newspaper reporter before winning a song competition at age 21." "He joined the Philadelphia Civic Opera and by 1924 he made the Met, playing Tonio in Pagliacci,  and in the 1930s was partnered with Jeanette MacDonald for a legendary series of MGM operettas." "The team broke up and MGM dismissed him before the offer for Phantom came." "Susanna Foster says he was one of the most harmonious people she ever knew, and not just musically." "Eddy loved Phantom and hoped it would revive his career-sadly, it did not." "When the picture wrapped, he gave Lubin an autographed photo that read" ""You made me what I am today." "I hope the world is satisfied."" "Eddy kept on working in films, notably the voice of Willie the Operatic Whale in Disney's animated feature Make Mine Music." "But he began doing more club, concert and recording work." "A pro to the end, he collapsed onstage and died of a stroke while touring Australia in 1967." "Dialogue coach on the picture was Joan Hathaway, a great friend of Arthur Lubin's." "She rehearsed the cast and ran their lines." ""She got a little out of hand at times" Lubin told me affectionately." ""She'd say 'Don't listen to Lubin." "That's what I'm here for."'" "Frank Puglia as Monsieur Villeneuve, the maestro." "Puglia's acting career spanned 55 years until his death in 1975." "Born in Sicily, he'd studied music and knew how to conduct." "He had played the orchestra conductor in the MacDonald/Eddy film Maytime,  but Italian head waiters, monks, priests and gangsters - often with names like Luigi, Vito and Giuseppe-were his forte." "But he was a utility ethnic, also versed at playing Greeks, Mexicans," "Syrians, Arabs and Javanese." "Perhaps that's the secret to working steadily for 55 years in Hollywood." "Susanna Foster's father was ruined by the Depression." "Born Susanne Larson in Chicago, she remembers being very poor and her mother making her clothes out of blankets." "Her father played the violin and her mother read her Shakespeare." "Susanne, as she was then called, was a natural talent, but untrained." "Her first idol was Bebe Daniels, then she discovered Jeanette MacDonald." "Susanne remembers, at age five in Minneapolis, seeing The Love Parade over and over." "Her mother was a classic stage mother, and soon she was appearing on local theatre stages displaying her voice." "A recording got to William Goetz at MGM, and a contract followed." "Louis B Mayer wanted Susanne to play the lead in National Velvet in the 1930s." "Ever wilful, she refused." "Claude Rains, too, grew up in extreme poverty, in London." ""Born on the wrong side of the River Thames" he'd tell his daughter, Jessica." "The theatre provided his way out." "The famous actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree paid for young Willy Rains to take speech lessons, giving the lisping cockney boy one year to lose the accent." "He did." "The velvety husk of his voice was inadvertent - a result, Rains claimed, of being gassed in World War I." "That voice was his most notable asset." "Rains is an actor whom one would pay big money to hear recite the Manhattan phone book." "Following The Invisible Man,  Rains became the consummate character actor, making his home at Warner Brothers with work like The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Mr Skeffington and The Sea Hawk." "Note how Claudin commits a faux pas by calling Miss Dubois by her first name." "Rains' playing is wonderfully tender, how he bites his lip and looks contrite." "In the original script, Claudin was Christine's father." "She does not know this." "We'll learn more about this diverted subplot as the picture unfolds." "Rains was much in demand for outside pictures such as Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Notorious." "He had previously acted for George Waggner in The Wolf Man,  which is surprising, in that he had turned down in 1938 an offer from Universal" ""because Rains did not like it as it was a Frankenstein"." "That's a quote from a memo from Roy Obringer to Hal Wallis regarding Rains' contract's allowal of an outside picture." "If Robin Hood's Prince John wouldn't play Wolf Frankenstein," "Robin Hood's Sheriff of Nottingham, Basil Rathbone, would be loaned out as the Son of Frankenstein." "Rathbone, coincidentally, covered for Rains as the phantom when the Lux Radio Theater broadcast a one-hour dramatisation of the film in September 1943, with Susanna Foster and Nelson Eddy reprising their roles." "Miss Foster recalls Rathbone keeping an oxygen tank in his dressing room and charging up before the performance." "Rains completed Casablanca just prior to Phantom." "His contract was up at Warners when he took Phantom as a freelance." "March 15, 1943, the day after shooting wrapped, he signed a new two-year four-picture deal with Warner Brothers." "When Phantom became a money machine for Universal, they wanted a sequel." "But Rains said no." "He much preferred Mr Skeffington and Passage to Marseille than more horror films." "Rains, according to Arthur Lubin, spent one month in preproduction learning to play piano and violin so that he would be technically correct." "Rains loathed the Hollywood life and lived in Pennsylvania farm country, and later New Hampshire." "He endured Hollywood for the time it took to make a picture, then raced home to the farm back East." "His daughter Jessica recalls a childhood milking cows and gathering eggs." "For more insights into Rains, I recommend Rudy Behlmer's commentary on the DVD of The Invisible Man,  available from Universal Studios Home Video." "There were casting difficulties, getting this picture started." "Susanna Foster, 17 years old, was a late addition to the cast." "She turned 18 just as production began." "She attracted attention in Paramount's The Great Victor Herbert in 1940, but they failed to groom her talent and she left." "Her entrée to the Phantom cast was felicitous." "Lubin, hearing Susanna sing at a dinner party at the home of Hollywood reporter-writer Ed Brestray, asked her to audition for his music director, Edward Ward." "Susanna told me "Eddie played the piano for me." "I sang an aria from La Traviata,  and 'Ah!" "Sweet Mystery of Life', the usual stuff."" ""Eddie wanted me for the picture, so Arthur did a screen test."" ""He was ahead of his time." "Instead of having me act, he had contract player David Bruce interview me, so I was just myself, then I sing a couple of songs."" "Principal photography started on January 17." "One of the first scenes filmed was between Raoul and Christine's aunt, where the sleuthing baritone forces her to confess that Claudin is Christine's father." "The scene would wind up on the cutting room floor, as did the entire subplot of Raoul playing detective." "This left Rains' paternal concerns for the girl explicable only by sexual motives." "Most reviewers at the time commented on the muddled relationship." ""They were confused about how to handle it, even while we were filming"" "Susanna Foster told me." "Lubin said "I always felt that he should be her father."" ""Otherwise, it would be a little nasty."" "Lubin did not like this December-May romance that the film now implies between the older man and the young girl." "Universal didn't help by releasing a story that a scene had been made of Claudin, in his madness, hearing Christine as a child singing Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune,  and that they had a childhood recording of Susanne singing the song." "Not true, Susanna says." ""I never sang Clair de Lune in my life."" "Renewing their story option for Phantom of the Opera on September 17, 1941, for the sum of $1, Universal intended to cross-pollinate their two most lucrative genres: horror movies and Deanna Durbin musicals." "Phantom was to be produced by Joe Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster as a showcase for Durbin." "Lon Chaney Jr wanted badly to reprise his father's role." "But the studio wanted Charles Laughton." "His performance as Quasimodo in the recent RKO remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame made him a logical successor as a character actor." "He had also just co-starred with Deanna Durbin, playing her surrogate father in It Started with Eve." "Following story conferences and a reading of Leroux's novel, writer John Jacoby recommended dispensing with the supernatural mood." "He said "The phantom could be played by any well-made-up extra."" "And he lobbied to dispense with his congenital ugliness since" ""physical deformity", he claimed, "inspires disgust, not pity"." "Little is known of Jacoby." "Phantom is one of only four screen credits he received - only top-billed once, for Tarzan and the Amazons." "His surviving treatment shows that he was a very well-educated and well-read man." "With such a pre-sold title, Jacoby knew there were certain expectations to be met." ""The audience" he said "wish to recognise the old picture in the new one."" "He conceded that the unmasking and the fall of the chandelier had to be kept." "The script describes Marie the landlady as "an Amazonian Frenchwoman with the face of a tyrant"." "She's played by Kate Lawson, sometimes billed as Kate Drain Lawson, built like a brick outhouse and best remembered as tactless Mama Delgado, who locks her daughter out in Val Lewton's The Leopard Man." "Kate specialised in big, bullying prison matrons in pictures like City Streets, Remember the Night, Torchy Plays with Dynamite and the ever-popular Girls on Probation." "As originally written, in this scene Claudin brought out not only his concerto but a plaster bust of Christine which he'd place on the piano and then perform to." "The bust appears later in the picture, having been stolen by Claudin." "But the explanation for his having it was lost when this scene was refilmed." "John Jacoby submitted 14 pages of notes the day before Hallowe'en 1941, following production meetings with the creatives, including Henry Koster." "Jacoby professed admiration for the silent movie, but he felt that modern audiences wouldn't buy it any more today." ""What they will insist on above all" he said "is to feel horror."" "Jacoby found MGM's remake of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with Spencer Tracy a useful barometer." "He watched it "three times, in three different theatres, and each time the audience laughed when Dr Jekyll changed into Mr Hyde"." ""But they did not laugh at the old versions of the picture."" ""Today, audiences do not accept the unreal or supernatural, so we must create a new formula for portraying horror."" "Jacoby's pragmatism failed to justify the crux of the production's plot - why a girl would place her faith in a masked killer who whispers promises of artistic glory from behind her dressing-room wall." "Henry Koster reasoned it out in the story conference and suggested that the two principal characters were father and daughter." "We'll talk about Jacoby and the Koster production as our narrative unfolds." "That's Leo Carrillo as the stuffy Italian vocal teacher in Paris." "He's doubly out of place, as he was usually in genial roles in B-pictures." "Leo had previously appeared for Waggner as the comic sidekick in Horror Island." "Modern Angelinos who seek the quiet of a rocky beach north of Los Angeles wonder who the heck this Leo Carrillo is that their state beach is named for." "Ageing baby boomers can snigger, and they wonder why this beach is named for the plump actor they remember as Pancho," "Duncan Renaldo's silly sidekick in the early-'50s TV show The Cisco Kid." "It takes a sense of history to know that the Spanish-Italian Carrillo was the son of the first mayor of Santa Monica, that his great-grandfather Carrillo was the first provisional governor of California, and that his family once owned all of California from Monterey Bay to Mexico." "Universal would boast that this remake of Phantom cost $1,750,000, which is an exaggeration." "Director Lubin told me it was probably $990,000, but definitely not more than 1,250,000 with overhead." "Still, when you remember that Waggner had made Man Made Monster for $90,000 and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was made in Technicolor the following year for $554,000, you see what a risk a million-dollar Phantom was for Universal." "Cliff Work and Nate Blumberg were nervous." "They would send functionaries to the set to rush Lubin along to finish the setups." ""They'd come late in the afternoon" he said." ""'You've got one more setup to do." "Get the hell out of here!"'" "One of the biggest cost savings was Stage 28, where the original opera-house interior had been built for the 1925 film." "As a standing set it had serviced scores of pictures for Universal and as an outside rental over the years." ""All it needed" said Lubin "was painting, new drapes, a new front curtain and a new backstage."" "At the same time that John Jacoby was writing his treatments in the fall of 1941," "Eric Taylor was put to work preparing a new treatment and a first-draft script." "Taylor also uses the idea of Claudin's symphony built on a provincial lullaby - ideas that we have to presume emerged from the Henry Koster story conferences, as they're common to both the Taylor and the Jacoby work." "In Taylor's, Christine's boyfriend, Raoul, was an inventor of phonograph records, supplying the opera with "noises off" via acoustical discs." "Unlike Jacoby, who had Claudin slashed with a knife," "Taylor's Claudin was disfigured when acid is tossed in his face." "Taylor also expanded Koster's idea of a family." "Claudin's pursuit of music would be "like a drug to him", and lead him to abandon his wife and child to starve in a Paris garret, causing the wife to die of a broken heart." "Her sister, having told the child that both parents were dead, raises Christine." "When Raoul learns this, he vows Christine will never learn of the family's secret." "In an odd plot twist," "Claudin plans to flee to America with Christine to further her career." "As the police close in on the catacombs," "Raoul gives Claudin a pistol to commit suicide with." ""He was right about America" Raoul tells Christine." ""For you, there is the New York Opera."" ""And for me, there is a man named Edison I might work for."" "Taylor was a specialist in mysteries, writing scores of Dick Tracy," "Crime Doctor and Ellery Queen pictures." "He wrote several Universal B horrors, including Son of Dracula,  and for Arthur Lubin, Black Friday and The Spider Woman Strikes Back." "He had just written Ghost of Frankenstein in the same period in which he started work on Phantom." "Jacoby's original outline spent its energy immediately by having the phantom cut the chandelier loose in the opening scenes." "In flashbacks, the phantom was revealed to be impoverished composer Claudin, whose only child, Christine, was raised by his dead wife's family as their own." "A chance encounter between Claudin and the girl arouses her musicality, and she embarks on an operatic career over family objections." "Despite encouragement from Franz Liszt, Claudin's mental stability is precarious." "Understandably so, if, as Jacoby insisted, it is 1873 and he is composing in the styles of both Stravinsky and Shostakovich." "In his rented room, he envisions himself receiving the adulation of the multitudes, but he receives mocking laughter from a prostitute watching through a window." "As the mad Claudin throttles the harlot, she slashes his face with a butcher knife." "The Breen Office was on the outlook for sex, and the final shooting script contained a line on page 68 where Jeanne says" ""That was when I told him I didn't care for etchings after nightfall."" "They found this unacceptable as sexually suggestive, and wanted it to be changed or omitted." "Well, that line was, but this setup in Monsieur Pleyel's office where Miles Mander, as the licentious publisher, is flirting after dark with his secretary and his etchings - fool, he's showing her etchings and how they're done " "this remained in." "Pleyel's playmate is Renee Carson, a French-born American girl, raised in a convent and European-educated." "She made a very nice career in France playing American girls." "In 1939, she and her family came to America to escape the war in Europe." "Miles Mander was a reliable character actor in American films of the 1940s." "He had choice roles in two Sherlock Holmes films at Universal:" "The Pearl of Death,  where he played Giles Conover, the keeper of the Creeper, and The Scarlet Claw,  where he played the frightened Judge Brisson." "He also locked wits with Bela Lugosi in Return of the Vampire at Columbia." "Mander had a long and colourful career." "Sometimes known or billed as Lionel Mander or Luther Miles, he had been born in Wolverhampton, England, in 1888, apparently to a very well-to-do family." "That's Shakespearean actor Fritz Leiber playing composer Franz Liszt, powdered wig, warts and all." "Like Claude Rains, Miles Mander had been gassed during World War I." "He had been a New Zealand sheep farmer." "He wrote novels, plays, newspaper articles." "He was a film exhibitor." "He was a globetrotting playboy who ran through a $350,000 inheritance racing automobiles and promoting prizefights." "He also was a screenwriter, having written the script for the 1932 version of The Lodger." "When Renee Carson arrived in America, she discovered quickly that her accented English was going to stand in her way." "She did conquer it, and for the next four years was a very successful radio actress on the verge of a major film career at this time." "In February 1943, while Phantom was shooting, she fell in love, and married her husband, who was in the air corps." "Their honeymoon lasted three months." "She followed him from camp to camp." "Then in May of 1943 he was shipped overseas." "Six months later he was killed when his plane was shot down." "Two weeks late another tragedy overtook Renee when she broke her back, putting her in the hospital for a year." "After securing a small part in The Picture of Dorian Gray at MGM, she landed a contract at 20th Century Fox, who put her in pictures like Shock and The House on 92nd Street." "Her last appearance in a film was in 1946, in Hitchcock's Notorious,  with Claude Rains, where she plays the drunken dancing girl at Ingrid Bergman's bungalow party in reel one." "Renee died in England in 1996." "Arthur Lubin was adamant that Universal wanted Claude Rains to do a full-face disfigured horror make-up." "The way in which Claudin receives a full faceful of acid suggests that they wanted a much more elaborate disfigurement." "Now here's the famous Universal European street." "All purpose, it could be Germany, it could be Romania." "In this case, it is Paris in the 1880s." "The script for Phantom originally provided a scene, which is likely not to have been filmed, where a brutish teamster sees Claudin escaping and snares him with a buggy whip." "Claudin is standing on a wall, trying to escape over, and the whip wraps around Claudin's neck like a noose." "The teamster begins enjoying the cruelty of this, and he's holding him splay-legged, calling for help, when a gentle-Iooking little man with an umbrella comes by." "He sees the teamster's pleasure in this torture." "Quietly he takes his umbrella, thrusts it between the teamster's legs, gives him more than a wedgie, allowing Claudin to escape in the confusion." "Thankfully, this was broomed." "Let's return to the Jacoby script." "Following his injury, Claudin takes refuge in the opera in this 1941 adaptation, concealing his injury beneath a hideous painted mask." "And he promotes Christine's rise with a reign of terror." "During the annual masked ball he abducts her and reveals their relationship." "But a performance of his symphony lures him back to the stage, where he's gunned down by the police." "In a nihilistic and wholly extraneous finale," "Christine's debut in the world premiere of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann ends badly when a coal fire in Claudin's catacomb ignites the building." "Christine, her foster parents, and her boyfriend Raoul are the only survivors as the building burns to the ground." "The final image is a manuscript, Claudin's modernist symphony, blackening and curling in the flames." "Jacoby's time line was skewed." "Les Contes d'Hoffmann premiered at the Opéra Comique in 1881, months after Offenbach's death, not in 1873." "And while the Opéra Comique didn't burn, there was a historical basis for Jacoby's conflagration." "On December 8, 1881 in Vienna, at the second performance at the Ringtheater, the theatre did burn with a tremendous loss of life, beginning Tales of Hoffmann's reputation as a jinxed opera." "Time magazine's reviewer called Phantom's sewer" ""the best since Les Misérables"." "In the 1880s, where antibiotics are unknown, one has to wonder at Claudin's frolic in the sewage" "and the effect of bacterial infection on his festering wounds." "The directors of the opera are played by comic supporting actor Fritz Feld and the rather bulky character actor J Edward Bromberg." "Bromberg was born in Hungary and came to America as a boy." "He first appeared on stage in 1926 at the Provincetown Theatre, and from 1927 to 1930 he played opposite Eva LeGallienne at the New York City Repertory." "In Hollywood he made a career playing villains in pictures like Charlie Chan on Broadway and Mr Moto Takes a Chance." "At Universal, he made a memorable Dr Lazlo, a Van Helsing-type vampire hunter, in Son of Dracula." "His best role at Universal was in Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady,  where he played the relentless, hounding police inspector." "Bromberg, a leftist, was called before HUAC to testify in the early '50s, and was so rattled by the stress that he died in December 1951 of heart failure." "Stage 28, which houses the Phantom stage, has seen service in the last 75 years in scores of pictures." "Some of the highlights include" "Paul Leni's 1929 haunted-theatre mystery comedy, The Last Warning,  and its 1939 remake, The House of Fear." "Also in 1925, PáI Fejös made The Last Performance,  starring Mary Philbin and Conrad Veidt." "Bela Lugosi attended the ballet in The Raven." "David Bruce as The Mad Ghoul attempted to throttle Turhan Bey, while Evelyn Ankers sang her heart out on the Phantom stage." "In A Double Life Ronald Colman played a mad actor in a legitimate New York theatre, which was doubled by the Phantom stage." "John Barrymore, in Svengali,  again brought madness to the forefront." "The interior of the theatre had supporting columns to give it variety, and in Svengali the grand staircase foyer was also featured." "More mundane, normal presentations include the 1926 Universal film The Midnight Sun,  where it doubled as the Russian ballet," "Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain,  where it was an East German opera house," "Thoroughly Modern Millie,  and a burlesque house in the Paul Newman/Robert Redford The Sting." "By January 5, 1943 Samuel Hoffenstein had reworked the script with Eric Taylor, switching the part of Raoul from inventor to operatic baritone, after Nelson Eddy, whose MGM contract had expired, was signed for the picture in December." "Eddy's hair was nearly blond, and Lubin suggested dying it black as "in those days, you always thought of a Frenchman with dark hair"." "Eddy protested that he'd rather give up the part, until Lubin explained to the reluctant baritone that they would find a hair dye that would wash out." "So he put a black hairdressing on him and he was thrilled." "Samuel Hoffenstein was a Russian whose best work was done with the Armenian director Rouben Mamoulian at Paramount in the early '30s:" "Love Me Tonight with Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald," "Song of Songs with Marlene Dietrich, and the original Fredric March talking version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde." "Hoffenstein's script for the 1931 Paramount film was the backbone of the 1941 Spencer Tracy remake." "MGM actually bought the film outright in perpetuity." "Hoffenstein also worked with Julien Duvivier on Tales of Manhattan, Lydia and Flesh and Fantasy." "He also would write Laura for Otto Preminger." "An early credit of his was the Paramount version of An American Tragedy,  which had been started by Sergei Eisenstein but finally made by Josef von Sternberg." "The 1940s saw a vogue in gaslight horrors." "All through World War Il, this recherché period provided a nice escape valve for wartime audiences." "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde seemed to start the cycle in 1941, followed by Phantom, The Lodger,  The Man in Half Moon Street," "The Picture of Dorian Gray,  Hangover Square,  two versions of Gaslight - British and American." "Even the poverty row studios followed suit with The Catman of Paris and Bluebeard." "There was also a vogue, started in the mid" " To late-'30s, for operas on film." "There was Metropolitan with Lawrence Tibbett," "I Dream Too Much with Lily Pons." "Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy were a team in one hit after another:" "Sweethearts, Naughty Marietta, Maytime." "There were also popular-culture concerns mixed into Phantom." "During the war there was a vogue for pop songs derived from classical music of the Romantic era, with Tchaikovsky being particularly mined for pop songs "Tonight We Love"" "and "Full Moon And Empty Arms", drawn from his symphonic works." "In movies, the British picture Dangerous Moonlight created a vogue for piano concertos." "Its "Warsaw Concerto" became very popular, and soon it was followed by "Cornish Rhapsody" in the British film Love Story from producer Leslie Arliss." "Arliss also produced a horror thriller with James Mason, The Night Has Eyes,  in which James Mason's shell-shocked pianist has also written a piano concerto." "The vogue continued in American films such as The Uninvited,  where Ray Milland is a musician who plays a Victor Young-written piano work" "which found popularity as the hit tune "Stella by Starlight"." "The vogue peaked in 1945 in Spellbound and The Enchanted Cottage." "Both featured full-blown piano concertos that achieved great popular currency." "1945 also saw A Song to Remember hit the box-office charts." "For reasons unknown, the concerto for piano and orchestra in Phantom never received any commercial popularity." "The song "Lullaby of the Bells" didn't have any commercial recordings." "It wasn't until 1948, when the picture was reissued, that Mantovani and his orchestra recorded a two-sided 78 record, for London Records, of the concerto, with a studio orchestra and piano." "January 20th script changes on Phantom included a scene that would have followed this exchange, where Aunt Madeline encouraged Christine to keep company with a nice policeman like Raoul." "And then she would rail against Anatole, that worthless musician." ""Music's poison!" Madeline would yell." ""It destroys people."" ""Give it up before it destroys you."" "This is because, again, Madeline is the aunt who has raised her after salvaging the baby from her dead sister, after that ridiculous Claudin had left them all to starve." "And this after Madeline's father offered him a cushy job in the provincial mill." "Revisions continued up to the first day of shooting on January 21, and through shooting-with more blue pages dated February 4." "With 149 pages, the shooting script would have yielded a two-and-a-half-hour movie." "Pages and pages of the Claudin/Christine family plot, thankfully, were deleted." "Shooting in Technicolor, Universal signed a contract with Hal Mohr." "Phantom would be his first picture for them under this contract." "Lubin said that "Mohr was one of the great cameramen of our time."" ""He did many pictures for me, and all the directors wanted him."" "Mohr's credits include The Jazz Singer," "Outward Bound, The Lost Moment," "Destry Rides Again,  Captain Blood, The Wild One." "He won an Academy Award for A Midsummer Night's Dream." "He shot King of Jazz,  the Universal Technicolor musical, in 1930, and one of their early talkie horror films, The Cat Creeps,  the same year." "He had shot The Last Warning for director PáI Fejös on the Phantom stage in 1929." "He'd actually photographed Lon Chaney in The Monster in 1925." "For Fejös's picture Broadway in 1929 he had helped develop an incredible camera crane that could turn 360 degrees, boom up, boom down - the most remarkable piece of equipment ever seen of its type." "Technicolor supplied their own cameraman, W Howard Greene, nicknamed "Duke"." "He was required by Technicolor's contract to work with Mohr." "Greene had a problem." "He was an alcoholic and he was frequently drunk." "The crew covered for him as best they could, and Mohr effectively had to carry the show all on his own." "Mohr was a very gallant-if aloof-man, and Susanna Foster remembered his behaviour." "One day she returned late from a lunch hour and she was loudly tongue-lashed by producer George Waggner in front of the crew." "Mohr went to her rescue just as loudly and shouted down his producer for the outburst-a very risky thing to do." "By contract, Natalie Kalmus of Technicolor was there to supervise all of the colour design." "Mohr loathed Mrs Kalmus." "When Arthur Lubin started colour tests of Eddy and Foster, he too found her presence to be "a pain in the ass"." ""We had to test everything for her."" ""There was a great deal of interference from Technicolor."" ""They'd say 'You're putting too much red in' or 'You need more green'."" ""She and Duke made the final decisions."" ""You'd listen to Technicolor if they had the final say on the printing of the thing."" "Lubin said Technicolor was very difficult, tending to come out red all the time." "Not a pleasing process to work with, and a difficult experience." "Art director Alex Golitzen recalls Hal Mohr as a rather aloof and unsociable man but a very skilled technician." "If he were going to use an amber gel in a scene," "Golitzen was very careful to see the effect of the gel on the flats and then alter the hues of his paints to accommodate the colour design." "Prerecording of the musical numbers to a click track started in December 1942." ""They'd put a little click in to give you your breath" Susanna says." ""Nelson had trouble with synchronisation, despite all the years he'd done it."" ""I never had a problem." Her only concern was an allergy attack during the sessions which she felt compromised her singing." "In her opinion, her voice was superior in a Lux radio broadcast on September 13, with Rathbone as the opera ghost." "Jane Farrar is said to have been found by Waggner in the Universal commissary." "She is also said to have been a niece of opera great Geraldine Farrar." "Waggner put her in The Climax in 1944, following Phantom." "She only made two other films before retiring." "She was married to the owner of the Brock Candy Company." "She was not a singer and was dubbed in Phantom and The Climax by Francia White." "Susanna's vocal character was a dramatic coloratura." "Nelson Eddy went on a concert tour following Phantom and invited Susanna to join him, but she was too scared." "Another offer was sent to her through singer Lee Sweetman." "The Metropolitan Opera wanted her to play Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier." "The offer was circuitous because the Met wouldn't be caught dead soliciting movie people." "Stubborn then as now, Susanna rejected the hint, which might have been the springboard to a great career." "This set, looking like the grand staircase mezzanine in Grand Central station, was previously built, believe it or not, as the hallway in the home of Manhattan millionaire Charles Laughton in Durbin's 1941 musical It Started With Eve." "The ersatz opera we're watching is titled Amour et Gloire,  "Love and Glory", with a French Empire-era setting." "It reminded English critic James Agate of the quartet in Rigoletto in its setting and design." "Dancers for this and the Russian opera were choreographed by Lester Horton." "Hedda Hopper reported in the Los Angeles Times that Lubin had ordered 24 people who could do the polonaise but got 24 Polynesians, including two expectant mothers." "I've looked, but I can't find them here." "The music is based on themes of Chopin:" "his "Polonaise in A-flat", which is heard here, and Susanna's great aria to come is based on the nocturne, "Opus 9, Number 2"." "The picture was in production for two months and finished in mid-March." "Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code or the MPPDA, reviewed the completed film on March 21 and communicated displeasure to Morris Pavar, head of editorial at Universal." "Vera West had designed some revealing risqué dresses and gowns for Susanna, and because of this peekaboo wardrobe Breen refused to approve the film" ""in its present form, as it contains a number of unacceptable breast shots"." "Breen obviously watched the picture with Pavar, as he would say" ""I endeavoured to point out to you as many of these as we could catch as the picture moved along."" "Film editor Russ Schoengarth went back through the coverage, struggling to find long shots that would not offend." "Where the footage didn't exist to distance Miss Foster's breasts, out went the shot, including an entire cadenza of her solo during this number." ""I don't know why they were worried," Susanna says. "I was a little bitty thing, but we had to go back and reshoot some of my scenes because of cleavage, including the cadenza in the French opera."" "Shots of Susanna in the unmasking also required changes for Mr Breen." "The script had been submitted to the Production Code office for approval, and passed with specific instruction that the strangling of prima donna Biancarolli, played here by Jane Farrar, not be shown in detail." "The crashing of the chandelier later in the film also caused concern." ""We suggest you consult your distribution department."" ""It might be well to consider cutting the episode down to avoid an adverse effect on audiences viewing the picture in a theatre."" "Phantom's music was composed and arranged by Edward Ward." "Susanna Foster says that Ward was an Italian war orphan, born at sea." "ASCAP records state that he was born in St Louis, Missouri, on April 2 or 3, 1896." "He was educated at the Beethoven School of Music in St Louis, and he was a songwriter whose opus includes" ""Who Takes Care of the Caretaker's Daughter?"" "and, in a possible attempt to outgun Irving Berlin," "Ward wrote "Always and Always"." "Ward worked in musical theatre in New York and was an alcoholic." "Miss Foster says he ghost-wrote for well-known names who she would rather not mention, often giving them a tune for the price of a drink." "His first Hollywood credit is for a song in 1928's The Woman Disputed." "He appeared on camera in the 1929 vaudeville review The Show of Shows,  and wrote incidental music for Warner Brothers operettas like Song of the Flame." "He worked around smaller studios, primarily Universal, where he wrote a wonderful score for The Mystery of Edwin Drood and conducted Heinz Roemheld's score for Dracula's Daughter." "He provided uncredited cues to Mark of the Vampire and The Devil-Doll,  spending the late '30s shuttling between MGM and Universal." "Susanna says he had worked with George Waggner in musical theatre in New York." "Ward provided music for all of Waggner's Universal pictures after Phantom." "Ward's last work, uncredited, was on Man of a Thousand Faces." "He died in 1971, having racked up nearly 200 feature-film credits." "Ward used melodies from the opera sequences as motifs for the characters." ""Porter Song" from Martha was used for the scenes between the rival boyfriends," ""Heaven Protect Thee" from Martha for scenes with Christine and her beaus, and the Chopin nocturne as a tentative theme for Christine." ""Lullaby of the Bells", Christine's song and the basis for the phantom's concerto, was employed as Claudin's motif." "The song had lyrics written by producer Waggner." "It was issued as sheet music, but there were no commercial recordings made." "The concerto, capitalising on the wartime vogue for piano concertos in movies, also remained unrecorded until the time of Phantom's reissue in 1948, when Mantovani prepared a performance about seven minutes long, covering two sides of a 78rpm disc for London Records." "In 1997 Santiago Rodriguez and the Fairfax Virginia Symphony made a new digital recording for CD." "Rodriguez wrote his own conjectural ending for the concerto, as it is abruptly terminated in the movie by the cave-in of the catacombs." "Phantom's source music posed problems." "Legitimate operas that would appeal to middlebrow audiences were desired." "Universal did not want to pay for them." "Existing operas considered were Borodin's Prince Igor,  then, as late as December 23, La Traviata,  still with Gloria Jean in mind." "By December 29 the lead actors still were not set in stone." "The terms for La Traviata came in at $2,250, but publishing clearances were needed for occupied France and Belgium, where the rights were controlled by Loew's." "Waggner may have steered the production towards creating new operas so that he could receive ASCAP royalties." "In mid-December the hunt encompassed" "Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet Overture", songs by Edvard Grieg, songs by George Frederick Handel, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade,  all to be hammered into original operatic form." "Handel was determined public domain." "Grieg was still in copyright in all foreign countries, as was Tchaikovsky, as was Rimsky-Korsakov." "Worldwide clearance was critical." ""This is important in foreign countries."" ""If they get a motion-picture company in court there, the damages run into real dollars."" "By early January, with filming already begun, a panic was on." "César Franck's Symphony in D Minor was on the table, along with Ippolitov-Ivanov's Caucasian Sketches,  as basis for a Russian opera." "Franck's publisher was in Paris and could not be contacted due to the occupation." "Glazunov's Concerto in A Minor was suggested, but it too was still in European copyright." "We know by this point that Claudin's music was supposed to be forward-Iooking and modern, but nothing can explain the craziest music note of all:" ""Urgently await word on 'The Caissons Go Rolling Along'."" "By mid-January a decision had to be made." "Martha was public domain." "Chopin melodies out of copyright were chosen, and a deal was made to close rights for Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony - public domain in America, but as the Russian opera was already designed," "European rights were bought for the Éditions Salabert." "The art direction for Phantom was by Alexander Golitzen, a White Russian, the son of a doctor, who as a boy escaped the Russian Revolution with his mother." "Trained as an architect, he got a job at MGM in the 1930s, then assisted art director Richard Day at Goldwyn on pictures like The Hurricane." "At Goldwyn, he met his wife Francis, who worked in the story department." "Alex, known as Sacha, then went under contract to producer Walter Wanger, for whom he did Stagecoach and Foreign Correspondent,  among others." "An independent producer, Wanger made a turnkey deal at Universal in the 1940s, which led to Golitzen first working on the lot on Eagle Squadron in 1942 for director Arthur Lubin." "Arabian Nights followed." "Due to the draft, Universal was losing John Goodman from the art department, and began negotiations to obtain Alex to head the department." "As always, they tried to get him cheap, but they got him." "Universal would be Alex's home until his retirement in the 1970s following Slaughterhouse-Five." "He won two Oscars, one for Phantom and again for Spartacus." "One of his most amazing achievements, in the 1950s, were the oversized sets for The Incredible Shrinking Man." ""Alex was a godsend" said Lubin." ""Brilliant in everything he did."" ""By far superior to any of the other art directors I worked with."" ""He didn't follow trends, and he tried to make each one of his sets interesting, attractive and within cost."" "Alex's Phantom Oscar caused consternation." "John Goodman, as the department head, should have been nominated for the award." "Goodman merely approved budgets and doled out assignments to art directors." "Now, here comes Susanna's world-famous G over high C." "And we'll rest the Alex Golitzen story until she delivers her note." "I always love the way that Nelson Eddy steps back, as though he's going to be shattered by that note." "We were talking about Alex Golitzen and his Oscar for Phantom." "Through some oversight, Golitzen alone was nominated." "And Golitzen alone, for the art department, won, causing a great deal of consternation with Goodman and the Universal management." "An attempt was made to lobby the Academy to get Goodman an Oscar too." "It was too late, said the Academy." "Nothing they could do, after the fact, about it." "The award was shared - by Russell Gausman and Ira Webb for their set decoration." "The Climax, Phantom's follow-up, was in production at the time of the Academy Awards." "The nominated Phantom personnel were released from shooting to attend." "Phantom won for art direction and colour cinematography, awarded to Mohr and Greene." "It was also nominated for sound recording and musical score." "In fact, both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter remarked on the extraordinary quality of Phantom's sound and suggested that there would be a nomination awaiting it." "Phantom utilised the Western Electric Variable Density sound system." "In this process, the sound recording was made on 35mm black-and-white film - optical sound, where a photoelectric cell exposed, through a slit, the modulations carried from the microphone." "The other major system in Hollywood was variable area." "The variable-area system was a high-contrast white-on-black line which would modulate either left or right depending on the application of the process." "In density, you actually have a photographic image that is gradients of grey to black, with the modulations being darker or lighter." "One of the problems with the system is that in passages of no sound there is a very audible noise floor that can be heard." "In the mid-'40s there was quite a push on in Hollywood sound departments to improve the quality of their optical audio." "And Western Electric came up with a process known as a squeeze track to help noise reduction in this period." "In the final mix, a shutter on either side of the track negative... would open or close in sympathy with the sound modulation." "In this way, there was less of the area of the track negative exposed in areas where there was silence." "So if there was less scanning area, there would be less system noise." "The term "squeeze track" can be explained when you look at the actual soundtrack on the film." "The shutter is narrower or wider, constantly changing, as if it's squeezing the modulations." "The volume of sound heard in the theatre was dependent on how wide the soundtrack area was." "So when you've got shutters masking both sides of the track, you have an overall drop in volume." "As a result, the theatre was required to play the sound back four to six decibels louder than normal." "Not only was Phantom's engineering sophisticated, but its creative use of sound was also far ahead of its time." "The opera numbers were recorded by multiple microphones in the auditorium." "As a result, the sound is in perspective to the ear as the camera is to the eye." "If we're at the back of the hall in a long shot, the sound has a very wet, reverberant sound." "If we cut to a closer angle on the stage, the recording is much drier." "If we're in a tier box or in the orchestra, there's a medium perspective, very, very carefully mixed." "The furnishings for the film, particularly the offices of the opera managers, were bought by Universal from the estate of San Francisco hotelier Mark Hopkins." "One thing that couldn't be bought was the ceiling of the Opéra de Paris." "The original dome above the chandelier contained 19th-century frescos of angels in a heavenscape." "These were painted on the set at Universal by a scenic artist." "They were real, not a matte painting." "The frescos on the ceiling of the Opéra de Paris were painted over in 1962 with a very modernistic design by Marc Chagall." "Make-up man Jack Pierce was born Jack Piccolo in Athens, Greece, in 1889." "He had been a professional baseball player, a movie actor in the teens, an assistant director in the '20s on action films like Buffalo Bill on the UP Trail and Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo." "Very little is known about Pierce." "He could be temperamental, but apparently with people who were so disposed themselves, like Elsa Lanchester, who despised him, and he her." "Boris Karloff and Jack got on famously." "Susanna Foster thought the world of him and remembers him as a warm, funny and down-to-earth man." "She says that he had no trace of a Greek accent, he was thoroughly Americanised." "At the start of Phantom,  he gave her a copy of Fyodor Chaliapin's memoir," "Man and Mask,  which he thought would be an overview of the profession for the 17-year-old beginning actress." "He taught her, for the first time, how to really do her own make-up and to use a lip brush - how to bring out the features that she had naturally." "When he saw that she had done her own make-up-incorrectly, by his lights - he would berate her." ""You didn't do what I told you!"" ""You bring the brush over like this!" "And make the lip line do that!" he'd say." "And of course, says Susanna, he was always right." "Miss Foster remembers that her on-set make-up man for Phantom was Bill Ely." "Jack said that he had worked with Lon Chaney on the side at Universal in the early days, that that was how he got his start in make-up." "Unfortunately, this is a closed door that we will probably never get to look behind." "By 1927 Pierce had done the astonishing monkey-man make-up for Raoul Walsh's Fox circus melodrama The Monkey Talks,  and he had prepared Conrad Veidt's maniacal fixed grin for The Man Who Laughs at Universal, a film intended for Lon Chaney, for which Chaney had already designed a make-up" "before he walked off the production." "The make-up was salvaged for the smiling vampire in MGM's London After Midnight." "Press from the mid-1930s notes that Pierce had been working with Chaney on a "special secret make-up" at the time of Chaney's death in 1930." "The truth may never be known, but Miss Foster says" ""Jack Pierce thought the world of Lon Chaney and learned much from him."" "The phantom's disfigurement in the original story has almost always discomfited writers adapting the tale." "Leroux had Erique born disfigured." "So horrified was his mother that she'd thrown him his first mask and refused to kiss him." "In the earliest script for the Chaney film, scenarist Elliott Clawson wrote a back story set in Persia, where Erique was punished for political crimes by being lashed to an anthill and his face eaten away by the ravenous insects." "Modern writers always seem to need an event to trigger the phantom's tragedy." "In 1936 Phantom was being planned for Boris Karloff, who had had enough of the eight-hour ordeals of Jack Pierce's make-up chair." "WP Lipscomb's modern script posited the phantom as a Parisian music master whose disfigurement was psychological." "William Lipscomb was an English actor, poet and playwright turned screenwriter." "He wrote early talkie Sherlock Holmes films in England, and came to Hollywood to adapt his play Clive of India." "He wrote scripts for A Tale of Two Cities and Garden of Allah for David Selznick," "Les Misérables and Cardinal Richelieu for Zanuck, among many others." "At Universal, he did B-movies with English Empire themes, like The Sun Never Sets." "Lipscomb's script was set in contemporary Paris." "The conductor of the opera is found murdered, and in his hands is left a manuscript, "Thine is the Glory"." "A remark is made by those reading the music that it appears to have been written by a soul in torment." "Soon we meet a mysterious music master." "He wears a mask and tells Christine, a young singer, that it is a terrible scar left by the war, which no one must see." "The war, of course, is World War I." "Christine tells her music master that her family is Swedish, and therefore very superstitious." "Before his death, her father had told her of the "angel of music" that he would send, necessary to her becoming an accomplished singer." "Her voice is fairly mediocre, and the master explains that her voice needs to come from another world." "She's a very modern girl in modern Paris, and of course she has a modern boyfriend, Raoul." "She pursues Raoul through the streets of Paris, losing him in a store, where she mistakenly approaches an underwear-clad male mannequin to ask where her beloved has gone." "If that's not silly enough, she and Raoul have a rendezvous at a Parisian café which has a small café orchestra, where a banter song between the two of them goes back and forth, full of risqué lyrics." "The opera being staged is Gounod's Faust,  and the music master explains to Christine that he had always hoped there would be someone like her, someone to be the Marguerite to his Faust and save him from himself." "The music master explains to her the horrors of the First World War." ""They made a killer of me, the most sensitive creature in the world, the kindest man, who would not even kill an insect!"" ""Yet one day I found myself in battle on the great attack, killing, killing, killing my fellow men!"" ""I remember looking into the face of one man."" ""He was a boy, very young."" ""I fired his lungs and I looked into the face that was no longer human."" ""Something snapped in my brain." "I..." "I!" "I had done this!"" ""I had smashed that face to pulp, and for what?"" ""They did this to me."" "This talk alarms Christine, particularly when the phantom throws her in a car and begins driving through Paris, mowing down the population." "Taking her to his dungeon, the phantom begins pumping out on the organ the melody of his "The Devil Triumphant"." "At this point, of course, Christine has to take off his mask." "And she sees a perfectly normal-Iooking man." ""You shrink from me because I have killed," he says." ""Tell me, where did I learn my killing?" "Where is the scar I told you of?"" ""On my face?" "Ha!" "I have a scar, a frightful wound, but it was not on my body."" ""I got it in the war, and to nearby people who don't do the killing, am I a killer?"" ""There are a million dead." "Two millions!" "They lie in rows and rows."" ""That is real killing."" "Of course, Christine, being the angel of mercy, picks up the manuscript of the countermelody, "The Angel Triumphant"." "And she begins to sing it as the music master plays "The Devil Triumphant"." "As the two melodies merge together, the phantom dies, apparently of a broken heart, at his organ." "As Lipscomb noted on his third draft, this was definitely not to be a "horror picture"." ""You must feel that he is a superman, and it's not to be a modern gangster picture."" "This is the first of several unfilmed adaptations that have attempted to process recent world wars and events of violence." "Themes of Frankenstein are melded with themes of All Quiet on the Western Front." "Another script prepared in 1957, written by Franklin Coen, screenwriter of This Island Earth,  had placed the Phantom saga in the ruins of post-World War II Milan, Italy." "The phantom, a ballet dancer who had been tortured and scarred by Mussolini's Fascists." "He is hunted by an American GI toting machine guns." "In the 1990s Wolfgang Petersen, the director of the acclaimed Das Boot,  began preproduction on an elaborate but aborted version of Phantom that would have been set in Nazi-occupied 1940s France." "Don't be surprised if a future phantom comes traipsing off a Bosnian or Iraqi battlefield." "The presence of the great Romantic pianist/composer Franz Liszt clearly places this version of the story in the early 1880s, when Liszt was in his old age." "An ersatz Russian opera based on Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony," "The Masked Prince of Caucasia,  provided an opportunity to rekindle audiences' memories of the original masked ball, and an opportunity for the phantom to hide among the cast of the opera, who were also wearing masks." "This becomes the backdrop for the climactic fall of the chandelier, which, like the unmasking scene, is one of the great set pieces of the Leroux story." "Just starting a contract at Universal was Hume Cronyn, in a thankless part as a junior policeman." "He's already given his best line." "That was his other line." "Madame Lorenzi is played by Nicole "Nicki" Andre, a French Czech who had scrubbed streets in Vienna by Nazi order before escaping from Europe." "Nicki did not sing." "She was dubbed in Phantom by Marina Koshetz, who brought down the chandelier." "Nicki was never seen again after Phantom." "Cronyn was cast in substantial parts by Alfred Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt and Lifeboat,  ending his Universal contract with a breathtaking performance as the sadistic prison boss who achieves ecstasy with whippings and Wagner in Brute Force." "Phantom of the Opera is often criticised for containing too much opera." "Producer George Waggner in 1943 justified his bloodless opera ghost to the Los Angeles Daily News by downsizing the Lon Chaney original:" ""I thought I'd better see the original picture."" ""It was a real surprise" said Waggner." ""There wasn't any plot, only a horrible-Iooking old boy swinging around the chandelier, scaring kiddies."" "At that point the producer confided to the reporter that the new phantom was" ""really the father of the prima donna"." "Arthur Lubin made it a point of honour not to screen the silent film, and he never saw the Lon Chaney picture." "Art director Alex Golitzen did screen the Chaney film several times during preproduction." "While the chandelier at the Paris Opera has never fallen, there was historic precedent for this incident - one which hovered over audiences in the years preceding electrification of public buildings." "One event in the musical world, possibly apocryphal, concerns the premiere of Haydn's Symphony No 96 in London in 1794." "The chandelier is said to have given way, but with the audience seated toward the front of the orchestra, no one was hurt." "Hence the name the "Miracle" Symphony that's attached to the work ever since." "Nearly 100 years later, closer to home for Leroux, was a tragedy at the Paris Opera." "On May 20 1896, the first act of Hellé was ending." "The singer, Madame Caron, was about to perform an encore of her aria when there was a flash of light and a cloud of smoke over the auditorium." "The singers held their places on stage as the audience in the gallery stumbled and bolted, women having to be prevented from jumping from the tiers." "The orchestra and stalls members had no idea that something was amiss." "Only about six people were slightly hurt in the stampede, and all seemed well until a bloodied girl appeared, crying that her mother was buried in wreckage on the fourth tier." "It transpired that an electric cable had caught fire, melting a steel hawser attached to one of the chandelier's counterweights." "The 770-kilo weight - nearly 350 pounds - had dropped directly on the 50-year-old woman, a concierge, instantly killing her and horribly mutilating her body." "Like any good novelist who had been a journalist, Leroux used facts." "He had the chandelier fall on a concierge in his novel, The Phantom of the Opera,  only he made her the newly hired keeper of the phantom's Box Five, who was attending the opera for the very first time." "Box Five is traditionally one of the most expensive seating areas at the opera." "In the 19th century, a subscriber would have paid 25,200 francs a year in order to attend and watch from the box three times a week." "Modern visitors report that the plaque on Box Five, if not different every time they return, is often missing-an Easter-egg-hunt souvenir of modern scavengers, inspired by the success of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical." "Leroux drew on his knowledge of the real world, and it is still being debated today whether the tale of the opera ghost is actually based on fact." "Some factions claim it is a legitimate basis." "Certainly, the character of Christine Daae was drawn from a real opera favourite in Paris of the 1870s - the Swedish singer Christine Nilsson." "As a 13-year-old, Nilsson had been brought to the attention of a singing teacher named Madame Valerius, who as Mamma Valerius was created Christine's guardian in Leroux's novel." "Nilsson is a character in Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence,  and is portrayed in Martin Scorsese's recent film, singing Marguerite in Gounod's Faust,  of course." "Gaston Leroux was born in Paris in 1868." "He became a lawyer in middle-class fashion, but soon became a reporter for the newspaper Le Matin,  covering a crime beat." "He witnessed five executions by guillotine, which made him adamantly opposed to capital punishment." "His journalistic beat took him around the world to Russia, Asia, Africa and the Mideast." "He is said to have stood in Mount Vesuvius during an eruption." "In 1901 his first novel was published." "In all he wrote 33 books, of which only Phantom has become a standard today, though The Mystery of the Yellow Room - which introduced his detective hero Joseph Rouletabille in a seminal locked-room murder mystery - still enjoys a firm reputation among armchair detectives." "Rouletabille, sort of a Gallic Sherlock Holmes, appeared in a total of seven novels by Leroux." "Yellow Room has been filmed five times." "Balaoo,  published the year after Phantom in 1911, features Dr Coriolis turning an ape into a semi-human." "Complications ensue when his creature falls in love with his daughter, Madeleine." "Yet another take on the Beauty and the Beast fable." "In a 1913 French motion picture," "Madeleine was portrayed by Madeleine Grandjean, believed to be Leroux's daughter, who was an actress named Madeleine." "In America, Balaoo was the basis for the lost Fox silent horror movie The Wizard,  made in 1927 with Gustav von Seyffertitz, and its 20th Century Fox remake in 1942," "Dr Renault's Secret,  with George Zucco and J Carrol Naish." "Leroux's travels and experiences as a reporter are expressed in his fantastic narratives, often written in journalistic prose." "Leroux's other novels, full of the occult and criminal detection, would make great movie melodrama, particularly The Bleeding Puppet,  where an inventor is wrongly guillotined for the lurid murder of young women." "But he has planned for this event and his brain is transplanted after death into the body of his creation, a humanoid automaton named Gabriel, and so pursues the vampirish nobleman who is the true fiend." "The Phantom of the Opera caused no great stir when first published in an English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos." "A new translation by Lowell Bair appeared in 1990." "Here's the review from The New York Times of the de Mattos translation in 1911:" ""So long as it is a ghost story, it holds the reader as ghost stories do."" ""But when the phantom ceases to be a phantom and things begin to be accounted for, one's interest sensibly weakens."" ""Moreover, do we ever forgive a writer for cheating us into shudders?"" ""If we are introduced to a ghost, let him be a ghost to the end, no less."" ""Despite these faults, however, the book is effective."" ""It is a far cry, however, from the author's thrilling Mystery of the Yellow Room to this elaborately constructed melodrama."" "Leroux was also a playwright, writing his first stage production in 1902." "He founded a motion-picture production company, La Société des Cinéromans, in 1911, with René Navarre, the portrayer of Fantomas, for whom Leroux had already written two scenarios." "Leroux broke the Cinéromans in 1922, the same year he met Carl Laemmle." "Red-bearded, Leroux was a gourmand whose waistline increased with his fame, leading to obesity and severe health problems." "He lived to see the Universal Phantom open in 1925, but underwent surgery in April 1927." "A urinary infection set in and he died on April 15 at age 59." "When Return of the Phantom was announced in 1925," "Universal boasted that Leroux had been so happy with their film that he'd developed a sequel before his death." "In truth, Universal paid off the second Madame Leroux the sum of $3,000." "When art director Alexander Golitzen began planning his chandelier, he looked but could find no trace of the 1925 original." "He built his new chandelier out of practical materials, since plastic was not available, probably due to the war." "The chandelier was a large miniature, scaled three inches to one foot, so that it was actually used as a hanging miniature placed in front of camera, with the angle and camera movement making it appear larger on screen." "Phantom of the Opera is frequently criticised for its lack of over-the-top thrills." ""I wanted the horror" said Arthur Lubin" ""but I think the studio really wanted a musical."" ""They made the decision that if you want Claude Rains, you must do as he wants."" ""Before Claude would sign, he wanted to talk to me."" ""He refused to have his face scarred like Lon Chaney."" ""His argument was that if his public saw him like that, he would never be able to play leading roles again."" "Lubin went on to say "That was our big problem in the beginning."" ""We wanted him to always be seen with the scarred face, but Claude wouldn't allow it."" ""There was a great deal of argument about it and testing of his damn mask."" "The eventual compromise that Jack Pierce would work out with Rains allowed one side of Rains' face to display acid burns." "The phantom would remain masked throughout, his disfigurement glimpsed only for a moment at the picture's end." "The chandelier was duplicated in a Styrofoam-like material for the moment of landing on the stunt players." "But curiously, it does not appear in the film." "Golitzen told me that only one take was made, and that the winch operator mistook the take for a run-through and failed to correctly drop the chandelier." "Alex made a sour face when he told me this." "Possibly it did not work well." "Probably it looked more like the flimsy that it was, or it was too badly damaged to be hoisted for a retake." "The final descent is a combination of three travelling matte shots, very briefly flashed, with editing used to unify and carry the idea." "When we see the full-scale chandelier, it is only after it is settled in the auditorium with a cloud of dust around it." "It's amusing to watch Lon Chaney's phantom untie a single hank of rope to drop the chandelier in 1925." "For the silent film, Rupert Julian and Charles Van Enger, the cameraman, had animated their full-scale chandelier in real time, lowering it on a winch, a bit at a time, and making single-frame exposures." "When run at natural speed, the chandelier would appear to fall." "Claude Rains' "damn mask", as Arthur Lubin calls it, was an enigmatic, serene blue half-face that echoed the plains of Claude's own face." ""It looked exactly like Claude" says Susanna." ""With its almond eyes and the whiskerlike cut above Claude's mouth, it had a certain catlike malevolence."" "Foster believes that the mask was designed by Jack Pierce." "Alex Golitzen's memory is that it was designed by Pierce's assistant, Buddy Westmore." "He was very firm and direct on answering that, when asked." "The design was certainly predetermined in preproduction, and the distinctive look was incorporated in the storyboard continuity sketches prepared for Golitzen and Lubin by Johnny Peacock." ""You've got to be careful about masks," Rains told the Los Angeles Daily News." ""If they're not exactly right, they look funny."" "Rains downplayed to the reporter the nature of his Phantom make-up." ""It's not horrible at all," he said." ""Just a scar on one cheek."" "Lubin said that Pierce designed several elaborate make-ups, tearing them down until the degree of disfigurement was acceptable to Rains." "This shot is a virtual recreation of a similar setup in Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,  made seven years earlier, as the wicked queen descends her staircase, as rats watch in the foreground." "At the bottom of the stairs, the queen enters her alchemical workroom, where she transforms herself into the evil hag." "Similarly, Claudin will go through a transformation here." "In our practical world, attics and basements are the places for the castoffs of our lives." "In Freudian terms, basements evoke all the hidden impulses and sexual secrets of the soul, usually female-specific, with staircase as a male-gender image." "In religious and dramatic terms, the basement is the lower depths, the pit, the abode of Lucifer." "Leroux's original choice of Gounod's opera, Faust,  as the opera to counterpoint his tale, was no accident, with Mephistopheles bursting up to the stage in clouds of smoke from the depths to Marguerite, ascending on wings to her heaven." "In a longer speech-trimmed, in the original shooting script - the phantom tells Christine" ""I came here when my face was on fire and I was racked with pain."" ""I found coolness in that dark water, comfort in the blackness over it."" ""Then I heard you sing." "I thought I had died and you had come to me."" ""Then the others sang and destroyed my heaven."" ""So I destroyed them."" "These are very charged images that the Universal horror film, probably intuitively, adopted for its own." "Frankenstein's laboratory, with its secret dungeons, is one huge, hidden hell." "The lower vaults of Castle Dracula, with their living-dead psychosexual impulses." "And Carfax Abbey cellar, from which the salvaged lovers ascend a staircase into a stream of sunlight at the story's end." "Son of Frankenstein invokes the literal burning pit, with its sulphurous brimstone." "In Son of Dracula,  Count Alucard rises from the black depths of a slimy bog." "In The Black Cat,  a satanic mass is conducted below stairs." "And so on." "The archetypal flow of Leroux's narrative made for the most logical and satisfying deployment of these elements." "Lubin and his writers were smart men who observed the rituals, and fashioned them within conventional narrative." "The same visuals and many of the same icons recur poetically with force in Jean Cocteau's adaptation of Beauty and the Beast." "The mirror, the beast, the dark rooms, the ascent into the beast's lair, the absent father." "As Carlos Clarens observed, "Cocteau knew the value of his symbols, where the director of the 1925 Phantom,  Rupert Julian, did not."" "Lubin, too, and his writers, knew the value of their symbols, but they deployed them in the confines of commercial Hollywood narrative." "It is never explained how a 5'6", 50-year-old musician with bad arthritis is able to lug a concert grand, several large oak chairs and a dining table down five stories on slippery stone staircases around a black lake" "that has about a 3 foot walkway around it." "But then again, it is a fairy tale." "Arthur Schutt, the virtuoso recording pianist at MGM, was brought over to play the piano concerto." "He also orchestrated Edward Ward's score, along with Harold Zweifel." "Built when movies were silent, one problem with stage 28 is its tin roof, which makes sound filming impossible on those days when El Niño kicks up." "The Screen Actors Guild basic agreement has a clause specifically referring to cast calls on "so-called Phantom stages", detailing the producer's legal responsibility to SAG members when shooting is cancelled due to things beyond the producer's control," "like that noisy tin roof." "Frequently, interior sets are built in the auditorium space." "When I visited the stage in 1989 with Mary Philbin, the stage was filled with a full interior of a suburban house for the Bill Cosby comedy Ghost Dad." "The Phantom stage has engendered "sub-urban" legends in Universal City and adjoining North Hollywood and Burbank." "When my eldest daughter was at Burbank Elementary, her teacher regaled the class with the true story of an electrician who had fallen from the catwalk, and his ghost now walked the stage." "The buzz is that the stage is haunted, but I have yet to find any first-hand accounts." "Claude Rains may have been concerned about his future as a leading man, but Lubin was concerned about delivering a horror picture with some horror." "Lubin told me "Whoever heard of a horror picture without horror?"" ""Using an old trick, I hid a second camera with a close-up lens."" ""When the mask was torn off," "I was able to get what Claude was most concerned about not showing, a full-face close-up showing the pain and anguish that only a consummate actor was capable of."" ""This stunning climax and Claude's magnificent characterisation left no doubt that most of his suggestions were right, except for the damn mask."" "Now, as we'll see in a moment, the unmasking shot itself is a complex camera setup, and it's taken with a short prime lens, with focus pulled as the camera dollies in." "There's no way that Rains didn't know they were doing this." "Obviously, he allowed them to do one big reveal shot coming in to a close-up, and with the shallow depth of field, the light and the rack focusing, he passes in and out of focus so quickly" "that you never get a real sharp read on his face." "That may have been all Rains allowed, but with a hidden camera, and a long lens," "Lubin was able to take, simultaneously, other angles of Rains without his mask without the actor being aware of it." "These subsequent shots of Claudin reacting as Raoul and the Inspector arrive are severely underexposed and poorly lit, suggesting that they were not lit to camera, and they appear to be the shots Mr Lubin is referring to, taken by a second camera." "Claudin has killed a number of people, even though he's a sympathetic nice guy, and the Production Code demanded a penalty." "Now, D'Aubert and Raoul can't just walk in and shoot the poor old fella." "They have to believe he's threatening with a sword, and pull a gun..." "And of course Nelson has to then jockey Barrier's arm, so that the shots accidentally make the catacombs come in." "You wonder what's happening in the tier boxes, with the underpinnings giving way." "With this fabulous black lake in the surrounding room, it's unfortunate that the idea of the boat or the gondola crossing the black lake, like a River Styx, was not employed in this film, as it was in the Lon Chaney silent." "Susanna Foster remembers clearly that the day this was shot, both Nelson Eddy and Edgar Barrier were supplied stunt doubles, whereas she, the frail 18-year-old girl, had to run through all the muck and the mire herself." ""They probably wanted the day off" she said." "They also probably had agents who knew how to get them that day off." "At a sneak preview at Riverside, California, the studio heads didn't think Phantom stood a chance." "But the initial reviews were sensational, and the public embraced it, despite The Hollywood Reporter's observation that the opening-day audience in Chicago laughed their heads off." "Following Phantom's world premiere on August 19 at the Palace Theater in Cincinnati, Ohio, the picture became Universal's biggest attraction of the season, grossing $51,000 the first week in Los Angeles, at two theatres." "It was the number one film in New York City, where its opening week gross was $85,000, the best the theatre had done in 12 years." "So encouraging were the returns, that on August 23, four days after the opening," "Universal announced The Climax as a sequel to Phantom,  reuniting the cast and production team." "Claude Rains was to return as the phantom, along with Foster, Eddy, director Arthur Lubin, producer George Waggner." "Excited by the prospect, Eddy clipped the trade announcement for his scrapbook, scribbling "Looking forward" in the margin." "As an aside, you'll notice here the blonde wig the maid is carrying suggests something that has not been hinted at before, and the white gown." "Christine has just debuted as Marguerite in Faust,  and we'll see some more evidence of that later." "The opera maybe could not be cleared, but Lubin knew the value of the image." "By October 1943, trade papers cited story troubles and blared" ""Eddy out, Bey in" as Turhan Bey signed on to The Climax." "Arthur Lubin was still set to direct, but Claude Rains' availability was in question." "The day after Phantom wrapped, he signed a contract with Warner Brothers, and he was more keen to make a picture like Passage to Marseille than Return of the Phantom." "By November, The Hollywood Reporter said that there would be" ""no sequel to Phantom"." "The Climax went ahead, in Technicolor, on the same sets, under the direction of its producer, George Waggner, with Susanna Foster as a diva menaced by theatre physician, Boris Karloff." "Though similar, The Climax failed to duplicate Phantom's popularity." "Almost from the beginning, The Phantom proved rife for rip-offs, parodies and remakes." "Claude Rains appeared on Fred Allen's radio show in February 1943, in a skit titled The Phantom of Carnegie Hall." "An Argentine TV serial of the early 1950s starred" "Narciso Ibáñez Menta as the phantom." "Now here, Christine has just made her debut as Marguerite in Gounod's Faust,  an homage to the original Leroux story." "We see her in her "heaven-ascent" dress, and as the camera pans over, in red at the back of the shot, you see her Mephistopheles." "Other television phantoms have included Charles Dance as a phantom with a father fixation, whose face we never see, and the fixated father was played by Burt Lancaster." "Maximilian Schell portrayed the phantom in a Robert Halmi production for TV, and in 1974 a riff titled The Phantom of Hollywood starred Jack Cassidy as an old-time actor scarred in a studio fire, running amok in the genuine ruins of the MGM lot." "Other riffs on Phantom include Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise," "Phantom of the Ritz,  in which a scarred 1950s drag racer haunts a Florida movie theatre." "There have been no less than four Chinese adaptations, beginning with Ye ban ge sheng or Song at Midnight in 1937, the first time the phantom is created by acid disfigurement." "There was a sequel in 1941, and a remake titled Mid-Nightmare in 1961." "Mostly recently it was remade again as The Phantom Lover in 1995." "The following Phantom fans have provided inestimable help:" "Richard Dayton, Mike Dobbs, Michael Evans," "Susanna Foster, Robert Gitt, Alex and Francis Golitzen," "Chris Horack, Carla Laemmle, John Landis and John Morgan." "Sadly gone ahead, my thanks to Pete Comandini, John Foster," "Arthur Lubin, Bill O'Connell, Mary Philbin and George E Turner." "This is Scott MacQueen."