The Poor Man's Phantom

Now Playing: The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

Pros: A prime example of Hammer's famous lavish look on a small budget; A Phantom who is both frightening and pitiable
Cons: Wasted dramatic possibilities; A mildly irritating plot "cheat"
R.I.P. Herbert Lom (1917 - 2012)

When I was a kid, I knew one Phantom of the Opera, and his name was Claude Rains. By the time I got to high school, I'd seen Universal's 1943 remake several times, and ol' Claude was for me the definitive Phantom. Of course I'd seen the great, hair-raising stills of Lon Chaney as the Phantom in Famous Monsters magazine and various books, but he was from a dim, dark and very silent era -- practically another universe -- and he'd never shown up on any of the afternoon or late night creature features I loved so much.

It took some maturing ("A silent film, are you kidding me? How could anyone watch something with no dialog?!") and a little discretionary cash before I got my hands on Chaney's original, masterful film version. But by then, the damage was done. I discovered that Rains had made other highly-regarded movies like Casablanca (heard of that one?), and so over the years I kept an eye out for his stuff on TV and in the classics section of the video store. I could appreciate Lon Chaney from a sort of abstract, historical perspective, but for a kid raised on talking monsters from the '30s, '40s and '50s, he could never be the definitive anything. (Similarly, when I visualize the Hunchback of Notre Dame, I see Charles Laughton, not Chaney. I wonder if there's anyone walking around out there who only knows the Hunchback from Disney's wretched animated version -- now that would be a true shame!)

We often speak of generations when referencing pop culture influences, especially when it comes to music -- the Big Band generation, the Rock and Roll generation, the Hip Hop generation, etc. Less so for movies, but the generational influences can't help but be there. For example, I'm a '60s Monster Kid who was glued to the old black and white TV whenever a creature feature reared its ugly head on the air. (Saturday nights were a special treat at central Iowa's Gravesend Manor, one of the many locally-produced shows that featured bizarre hosts introducing Shock Theater package flicks. Manor "residents" Malcolm, Claude and Esmerelda were a hoot, and the movies weren't bad either. Sadly, only a couple of minutes of tape survives from the show-- see it here on YouTube.)

My wife, who is (ahem) a few years younger, grew up in rural northern Illinois. While she is not the monster fan I am, she managed to take in a few creature features here and there, and to this day is a huge fan of Universal's Mummy series. Interestingly, the Phantom she vividly remembers is not dashing Claude Rains, but the creepy Herbert Lom. (She also likes Andrew Lloyd Webber's version, but I try not to hold that against her.) In honor of Herbert, and recalling how creeped out my wife was by his makeup and performance, I checked out The Hammer Horror Series Franchise Collection from the library and gave Hammer's version a spin.

The eye of the Phantom is upon you!

A short pre-title sequence is extraordinarily eerie. The faint strains of organ music sound as a hand-held camera pans around an enormous darkened opera hall. The dirge-like organ music grows louder as the shot dissolves into the dank, dimly lit environs of the Phantom, the camera exploring the bric-a-brac of a madman's Victorian parlor somehow plopped down in a cavernous sewer. We see a dark-clad figure hunched over the organ, and then the camera pans to a dark, strange-looking gnome of a man sitting cross-legged on a dry perch above the running water, listening with rapt attention. Cut to a closeup of bluish, corpse-like hands at the organ keys. The camera quickly sweeps up and freezes on a dark, bloodshot eye staring out of a grotesque, mouth-less mask. Orchestra music swells up and the main titles appear. Wow! Nothing else that follows is quite as effective, but if that doesn't grab you, nothing will!

As you might expect, Hammer's Phantom is a remake of Universal's 1943 version with Rains, but turns what was essentially a lavish romantic melodrama with Gothic overtones into an honest-to-goodness horror film. All the familiar story elements are there: the beautiful but modest chorus singer Christine with the angelic voice; the mysterious accidents that plague the opera house; the haunted opera box that the Phantom has reserved for himself; a falling chandelier (but fortunately in this version the opera goers are spared). I especially like the recycling of the 1943 origin story for the Phantom, wherein a poor humble musician and amateur composer has his music stolen by a greedy, wealthy man who publishes his works as his own. When the aggrieved musician discovers the theft and tries to stop publication of his music under the phony's name, an accident with printer's etching acid creates a monster.

The Phantom's original creator, Gaston Leroux, would probably not have recognized this character. Leroux's Erik was deformed from birth, and was so repulsive his own mother refused to touch him; deformation of the mind and a career as a phantom followed. I find the 1943/1962 stories more compelling and poignant. An accident of nature is one thing, but we feel so much more for a man who has been victimized by greed and arrogance, and who has become a monster through his desperate, tragic attempts to reclaim his music and his name.

Hammer's distinctive touches include a London, rather than Paris Opera house setting; a hunchbacked, Igor-like henchman for the Phantom; a variation on the classic chandelier scene that is just as dramatic, but sadder and more humane; and best of all, a masked Phantom who is both chilling and heart-wrenching. With their immaculate, stylish masks, the Claude Rains and Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantoms are dapper and intriguing-looking. Herbert Lom's Phantom looks like he spent several months in the grave before being dug up by some wild animals. His clothes are worn and tattered and his hands are tinged blue like a dead man's. He wears a grimy, lumpy mask that covers his entire face. There is only one eye hole and no mouth. Even masked, he presents a horrible, frightening visage. This is no glamorous lead in a romantic melodrama. You really, really don't want to see what's behind that disturbing mask.

And you don't, except for a very fleeting moment at the end of the film. Compared with Lon Chaney's classically horrific unmasking, Lom's is anticlimactic and pedestrian. It's his creepy masked presence at various moments that lends suspense and atmosphere to Hammer's version. The Phantom was makeup maestro Roy Ashton's biggest disappointment at Hammer (for more on this brilliant craftsman, see Roy Ashton: Monster Maker elsewhere on this blog). As a child, Ashton had been profoundly affected by the original cinematic Phantom of the Opera, and was greatly inspired by Lon Chaney. When he learned of Hammer's remake, he jumped at the opportunity. (Bruce Sachs and Russell Wall, Greasepaint and Gore: The Hammer Monsters of Roy Ashton, Tomahawk Press, 1998.)

In typical fashion, Ashton spent a great deal of time researching Leroux's description of Erik, then exploring the macabre subject of burns and human tissue. After a lot of work and some sleepless nights, the production heads told him they didn't want anything too complicated, as the makeup wasn't going to figure into the film that much. Roy was greatly disappointed, but got a second opportunity to challenge himself when it came time to design a mask. The studio had hired a mask maker, but when his designs didn't pan out, the makeup department was called in. Once again, Roy did a lot of research, but ironically, the end result was due more to happenstance than hard work. Ashton:

"My suggestion was that the Phantom, almost certainly, would have picked up some mask from the theatre properties to conceal his features. Something readily available, because he wouldn't be able to go into any shops or anything like that… I thought about old Japanese masks as they were pictured in a sumptuous publication entitled 'Masks of the World', which I found in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I invited [producer] Tony Hinds to come and have a look, but he told me he couldn't spare the time. So I made a few drawings and showed them to him, but it was not exactly what he hoped for. … Three weeks later we were in the theatre where they had to photograph Herbert Lom with his mask on, and no decision had been taken yet. 'Look,' I said, 'give me five minutes and I will make you one.' I got an old piece of rag, tied it round his face, cut a hole in it, stuck a little bit of mesh over one of the eyes, two bits of string around it, and tried it. 'Great!' they cried out, 'that is just what we want!'" [Ibid.]

For a moment's inspiration, the "rag" mask is very effective and creepy, qualifying Herbert Lom in my book as the scariest masked Phantom. Hammer's Phantom also benefits from the studio's trademark sumptuous look on a limited budget. Director Terence Fisher makes good use of London's New Wimbeldon Theatre for the opera house interiors, and the opera scenes themselves are nicely staged.

"You will sing only for me Christine, only for me..."

The acting is uniformly good, or at least interesting. Heather Sears is cute, engaging and vulnerable as the decidedly un-diva-ish Christine, the chorus girl elevated to opera stardom. Edward de Souza does a nice job as a sort of "Prince Charming" producer who recognizes Christine's extraordinary talent, and does battle with the smug, smarmy Lord Ambrose d'Arcy (Michael Gough) and the deranged Phantom to save the sweet girl. Once again, Gough plays his patented scoundrel and lecher with aplomb. He's a guilty pleasure to watch as he screws Prof. Petrie (Lom) out of his life's work, and tries to literally screw the female singers. Sharp-eyed Dr. Who fans will also get a kick out of the appearance of the "grumpy Doctor," Patrick Troughton as the opera house rat catcher. Troughton, almost unrecognizable with his grubby outfit and brown, rotting teeth, provides a bit of comic relief as he licks his chops while describing to Christine and Harry all the fat, juicy rats he's caught in the opera house (moments later, he gets a knife in the eye -- ouch! -- for his troubles).

Lom is alternately pitiful and scary as the humble music teacher, Prof. Petrie, driven to madness by Lord d'Arcy's thievery. Years after Phantom's release, producer/screenwriter Tony (Anthony) Hinds told an interviewer that Hammer had offered Cary Grant (?!!) the Petrie/Phantom role, and even came up with a device to sweeten the deal: a loyal, mute and violent hunchback to take the blame for all the murder and violence plaguing the opera house, making the Phantom that much more sympathetic. Grant ended up declining, and supposedly Lom was recruited at the last minute. Later, Hinds recanted that Grant was ever considered. (Greasepaint and Gore.) Regardless, the hunchback "cheat" seems forced and unnecessary, and serves to dissipate some of the film's dramatic energy at the climax, when the Phantom clumsily pins the murders on the poor wretch.

The smarmy Lord Ambrose d'Arcy (Michael Gough) appears to be
interested in more than just Christine's (Heather Sears) singing talent.

Still, as the Halloween season ramps up, this is a pretty good, pretty scary Phantom to add to your viewing list. Not a romantic melodrama Phantom, or a treacly musical Phantom, but a good, solid working man's Phantom. Luckily, this Phantom is part of the Hammer Horror Series Franchise Collection, which includes some other similarly good and relatively unheralded Hammer Horrors like Brides of Dracula (1960), Kiss of the Vampire (1963), and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964).

"In the shadows lurks a monstrous evil!"

King Kitsch

Now Playing: Konga (1961)

Pros: An ultra-hammy, ultra-mad scientist; Ripe, unintentionally (?) hilarious dialog; A smorgasbord of sci-fi cliches; Cheap effects, including a laughable gorilla suit
Cons: All of the above if you're not in the right frame of mind
Added Bonus: See She Blogged by Night for other entries in the Camp & Cult Blogathon!

I doubt that Merian C. Cooper fully appreciated what he was starting when he created King Kong.  In the decades following the big ape's appearance, the movie-going public's taste for all things colossal grew, slowly at first, then in the 1950s soared to the box office skies fueled by atom age fears. Atomic testing unleashed The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (1954) on an unsuspecting world. Then the always inventive Japanese squared the circle by pitting the old against the new in King Kong Vs. Godzilla (1962). The rest, as they say, is movie history writ LARGE.

And then there's Konga. Now mind you, Konga was not the first Anglo-American co-production featuring a giant beast loose in the streets -- The Giant Behemoth rampaged through London in 1959, thanks in part to Eugene Lourie, the man who introduced us to The Beast from all those watery fathoms. (Coincidentally, Lourie added yet another giant beast, Gorgo, to UK film lore the same year that Konga debuted.)

But where the Beast, the original Godzilla, the Behemoth and Gorgo played the giant monster subgenre pretty straight, Konga charted its own wild and wacky course. In fact, Konga is damned difficult to classify. Yes, it features a gigantic ape menacing panicked city dwellers, but it also features a floridly mad scientist; wacky scientific theories; bizarre, man-eating plants; groovin', hip college kids; a busty blonde damsel in distress; and even finds a couple minutes to show us a travelogue of central Africa. Konga plays like the result of a bet made over a bunch of drinks in a Hollywood or London bar: "-- I'll betcha you can't stuff all these B movie cliches in there and still make a watchable movie!  --Oh yeah, well, I'll see you at the premiere!"

If you ever encounter passionate intensity like this,
run for your life!

Konga starts out innocently enough with the return to London of botanist Charles Decker (Michael Gough), who had spent a year in a remote Ugandan village after his plane crashed. He's brought back a cute young chimpanzee whom he's named Konga, and knowledge of the unique properties of certain species of insectivorous plants courtesy of the village witchdoctor. At the airport, he tells a group of reporters that he's discovered a new, revolutionary link between plants and animals that could cause "a lot of textbooks to be torn up." The next thing we see, he's tearing up plants from his own greenhouse/laboratory to make room for the new African carnivorous plants, much to the consternation of his long-suffering housekeeper and assistant Margaret (Margo Johns).

Her consternation turns to horror when Decker calmly fetches a gun and shoots the house cat after it laps up some spilled serum extracted from the exotic plants.

"You fool! You think I want the biggest experiment of my life menaced by a cat? Even those few drops might have made Tabby swell up to huge proportions! We're not ready for a cat the size of a leopard running through the streets!"

Okay, it looks like the good professor has become a tad unhinged… but you ain't seen nothing' yet!  He proves to the wide-eyed Margaret that his plant serum can alter the shape and size of animals by injecting little Konga, who immediately transforms into a large, mature chimpanzee. Oh, and it just so happens that he added some seeds to the serum which, as he learned from the witchdoctor, affect the will and make the subject susceptible to outside commands. (Take notes, as that will be important later.)

After he gets a dressing down from the college Dean (Austin Trevor) for mentioning his wacky theories to the press, Charles decides to take his experiments on Konga to the next level. The next injection turns the chimp into a large (but not yet gigantic) gorilla. (Attentive viewers will have noted that earlier on, Charles had claimed that the serum could alter the size and shape of animals, so the screenplay covers itself on this supposed discrepancy.) The demented scientist decides to also test the serum's hypnotic properties by commanding the formerly meek chimp to kill Dean Foster in the dead of night. All in the name of science of course!

Professor Decker has a captive audience.

At this point the movie morphs from a sort of African travelogue to an updated Murders in the Rue Morgue, as the police inspectors puzzle over a neck snapped by impossibly strong hands and black animal hairs found at the scene. Next in line for Decker's "experiments" is a rival Indian botanist, Prof. Tagore, who tells Decker a little too much about his work in -- you guessed it -- the use of exotic plant serum to genetically alter animal cells. What a coincidence! (Tagore is played by George Pastell, a Cypriot character actor who popped up frequently in British movies and TV whenever vaguely menacing Indians or Middle Easterners were called for. He worked quite a bit for Hammer, appearing in The Mummy, 1959; The Stranglers of Bombay, 1959; Maniac, 1963; The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, 1965; and She, 1965; among others.)

Margaret quickly catches onto what Decker is doing, but instead of turning him into the police, she tries to blackmail him into marrying her. Margaret's character is another in a long line of B movie female assistants secretly pining for the obsessed scientist who barely notices her. But Margaret takes the cliche even further by being so coldly calculating and selfish. She's more than willing to sacrifice a life or two to snatch her man and become a respectable professor's wife. But even she has her limits. As she reads about Decker's/Konga's latest murder in the morning paper, she finally explodes in exasperation at her husband-to-be with one of the film's most surreal, unintentionally hilarious lines:  "What are you having with your poached egg? Murder?"

Doubly unfortunate for Margaret, Decker is not only a murderer, but an unapologetic lech as well. He spends much of the movie trying to entice one of his more shapely students (Sandra, played by Claire Gordon) into helping him out with some "extracurricular" work. When Decker makes an extracurricular pass at Sandra in the greenhouse, Margaret finally decides she's had enough and injects Konga yet again with the serum so that he can help her deal with the incorrigible professor. Big, bad things happen as a result, and the movie morphs again into the giant-monster-loose-on-the-city-streets subgenre that we all know and love.

"Hey, do you have a permit to shoot that giant gorilla?"

As big as Konga gets in the latter part of the movie (big enough for the army to have to deal with him), he seems puny in comparison to the colossally over-the-top acting of Michael Gough. Konga is unusually talky for a giant monster flick. At every opportunity, the smug, arrogant Decker is expounding on his bizarre theories and explaining his genius to the press, to Margaret, to the Dean, to Dr. Tagore, to his students, and to you, the poor, long-suffering viewer. No one, including Konga, can get a word in edgewise. Konga finally snaps and rampages through London in the movie's closing minutes. Wiser filmmakers might have reserved at least a little more screen time for the major payoff, i.e., the giant monster, but then, Gough/Decker is a giant ego monster in his own right, and commands every bit as much attention as the giant ape. Like Konga, you can't help but be mesmerized by lines like this:

"The poor layman doesn't know what he's missing. The feeling of losing yourself, not only in work, but in discovery -- a wonderful feeling of peeling off layer after layer, like petals from some rare flower… and finally achieving the ultimate secret! I mean, taking a form of life in one stage and changing it into a higher one in a matter of minutes, where nature itself would take millions of years. … You know what I mean, not only change, but the Godlike power of creation!"

Gough is perhaps best known for his relatively small part of Alfred the butler in the Tim Burton Batman movies, which unfortunately obscures a very rich, very lengthy career in theater, movies and television spanning seven (count 'em!) decades (and with a 1979 Tony award thrown in for good measure). In all those decades of work, Gough was perhaps never more hammy or fun to watch than in the string of B movies he made with writer-producer Herman Cohen (the man who created such immortal titles as I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein).

In the late '50s, Cohen was making film deals with the UK's Anglo Amalgamated Films for American International Pictures. In an interview with Tom Weaver (Attack of the Monster Movie Makers: Interviews with 20 Genre Giants, McFarland, 1994), Cohen relates that he first became aware of Gough through his role in Hammer's wildly popular Horror of Dracula (1958); Cohen's London office just happened to be in the same building as Hammer Studios. Cohen convinced Anglo Amalgamated to put up some money for a nasty little picture, Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), featuring a mad crime writer who hypnotizes a young man into committing unspeakable crimes in order to aid him in his research (sound vaguely familiar?).  Horrors is notorious for a gut-wrenching opening scene in which a woman's eyes are gouged out by a pair of binoculars booby-trapped with steel spikes -- supposedly based on a real Scotland Yard case! Gough continued to ham it up outrageously for Cohen's Konga and another cult favorite, Black Zoo (1963). His last two roles for Cohen, in Berserk (1967) and Trog (1970) were tame in comparison (no doubt due to Joan Crawford's starring role in both -- no one, but no one, upstaged Joan!)

In the same interview, Cohen tells an amusing story of almost getting thrown out of England because of Konga. The producer wouldn't take no for an answer when told that there was no way he could get permission to shoot the battle royale with the giant ape in London's Embankment area. He schmoozed with the chief inspector for the neighborhood, and when told that the inspector didn't have a color TV at home, went out and bought him one. Voila, he had his permit:

"The thing that I didn't mention to him was that, at the finale, all hell was going to break loose-- that we were going to shoot sub-machine guns, bazookas, etc., etc. I purposely didn't tell him this! … Well, the [emergency number] got something like three hundred phone calls-- people thought London was being invaded! This was only fifteen years or so after World War II, and they were still worried. I had a lot of apologies to make -- a lot!" [Ibid.]

Well, Herman Cohen may have had to make apologies for Konga, but I won't. It's talky and cheesy and a bizarre mix of B sci-fi cliches, but it's also very entertaining thanks to Michael Gough's generous portion of ham. It's also available on a nice MGM DVD release that makes its lurid colors and cheesy effects pop on your flat screen.

"Not since 'King Kong'...has the screen exploded with such mighty fury and spectacle!"