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The Budapest Opera House's diva commits suicide after the owner ruins her career for having rejected his advances but her conductor-husband, believed killed in a fire, plans his revenge on a... Read allThe Budapest Opera House's diva commits suicide after the owner ruins her career for having rejected his advances but her conductor-husband, believed killed in a fire, plans his revenge on all those he deems responsible for her suicide.The Budapest Opera House's diva commits suicide after the owner ruins her career for having rejected his advances but her conductor-husband, believed killed in a fire, plans his revenge on all those he deems responsible for her suicide.
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Jane Seymour and "Phantom" fans beware!!! This made for T. V. movie has to be the worst adaptation of the famous Gaston Leroux story filmed to date. Ms. Seymour plays two roles: Elena, a suicidal soprano, and Maria, a bitchy soprano. Maria (the Christine Daae character) hasn't one good quality about her, making the viewer wonder what the Phantom is so in love about. Michael York plays the equally irritating director of "Faust", the show that the opera company has been rehearsing for ever. In a nutshell, Ms. Seymour's hair gets bigger with each scene, her costumes look like a third rate community threatre production of "My Fair Lady" (...she usually looks so beautiful in period costumes!) and her lip-synching only works in wideshots. Mr. York's hair gets more and more like Orphan Annie's as the film progesses and his costumes look like Oscar Wilde's cast offs. The one redeeming moment in this film, is when the Phantom's face is finally shown. Stan Winston's make-up is quite good.
I am a fan of both Jane Seymour AND "The Phantom of the Opera". After seeing this film, I just wanted to call her up and ask her why she made this!!!!
I am a fan of both Jane Seymour AND "The Phantom of the Opera". After seeing this film, I just wanted to call her up and ask her why she made this!!!!
There is some singing in this version, but the 1983 The Phantom of the Opera is not a rock musical. The songs are from Faust, the opera being performed on the stage, with a very unbelievable dubbing for Jane Seymour. She may be a beautiful woman, but she is not believable as an opera singer. Another oddity is that Michael York, the opera director, continually insults Faust - so why not pick a different one? Faust happens to be my favorite opera, so I didn't appreciate the little insults.
In contrast with the other versions of Phantom, Jane's character isn't written to be sweet and innocent. She's actually quite the hussy! She admits to using her looks to get ahead while on a dinner date with Michael, and she's pretty quick to relinquish her honor with him as well. Also, there's an interesting backstory as to how the phantom got his disfigured face. Maximilian Schell, the future phantom, is a conductor who believes in his wife's (Jane Seymour in a double role) ability to succeed as a soprano opera singer. However, nerves often get the better of her, and she receives a scathing review for her opening night's performance. She commits suicide, and to get revenge, Maximilian confronts the critic. There's an accident involving fire and acid, and the rest is history.
It had a good cast, and there were some interesting moments, but all in all, it definitely felt like a television attempt. I felt a little sorry for Maximilian Schell, an Academy Award winner, who was probably excited to play such a famous role - until he started watching the dailies.
DLM Warning: If you suffer from vertigo or dizzy spells, like my mom does, this movie might not be your friend. There are some POV camera angles throughout the movie, and that will make you sick. In other words, "Don't Look, Mom!"
In contrast with the other versions of Phantom, Jane's character isn't written to be sweet and innocent. She's actually quite the hussy! She admits to using her looks to get ahead while on a dinner date with Michael, and she's pretty quick to relinquish her honor with him as well. Also, there's an interesting backstory as to how the phantom got his disfigured face. Maximilian Schell, the future phantom, is a conductor who believes in his wife's (Jane Seymour in a double role) ability to succeed as a soprano opera singer. However, nerves often get the better of her, and she receives a scathing review for her opening night's performance. She commits suicide, and to get revenge, Maximilian confronts the critic. There's an accident involving fire and acid, and the rest is history.
It had a good cast, and there were some interesting moments, but all in all, it definitely felt like a television attempt. I felt a little sorry for Maximilian Schell, an Academy Award winner, who was probably excited to play such a famous role - until he started watching the dailies.
DLM Warning: If you suffer from vertigo or dizzy spells, like my mom does, this movie might not be your friend. There are some POV camera angles throughout the movie, and that will make you sick. In other words, "Don't Look, Mom!"
Contrairy to what everyone thinks this is not a bad film. While, true it isn't faithful to Leroux, and the acting can make you feel like your watching a soap opera from the seventies, it is still an interesting take on the story. Maximillion Schell does a wonderful job as the Phantom, Shandor Korvan who after losing his wife to suicide takes revenge on the Baron and his men who drove her to it and in the process of killing the critic has both acid drip on his face and is caught on fire. After being rescued by the city ratchacer, did I mention it takes place in Hungary not France, he slowly recovers all the while scheming, waiting for the chance to destroy the Baron. Then a Italian American girl named Maria, not Christine, who looks almost identical to his wife, comes to sing at the opera. Korvan thinks Maria is his wife returned to him in a different form and he trains her to sing like he wished he could have taught his wife to sing. in the meantime Maria falls in love with the director(played by Micheal York) , our Roul. In the end The phantom steals her, jealous of her love for the director. She unmasks him; the director rescues her, and then we come to where the movie gets bad. I think The Phantom is trying to find Maria but gets side tracked and decided to cut down the chandelier while he is on it, maybe he was committing suicide, but he sees Maria is under him and he yells for her to move as it falls in extreme slow motion. In fact its so slow everyone has time to move out of the way and the only one killed is the Phantom. Everyone is sad and the end. There's a lot of bad things about this film, hey its a TV movie, but the thing that redeems it all is the Unmasking scene. It is fantastic. The makeup effects for the Phantom's disfigurement is wonderful. It seems the one thing that they tried to keep accurate to the book is the Phantoms face. It doesn't even look like a burn; it looks congenital. He hardly has a nose, his skin is a nasty yellow and parchment-like, and he only has a few hanks of dark brown hair on sides of his head and on his forehead. His mask is great too, it is a black hood with a blue green full face mask over the face with a movable jaw. Now, about the unmasking, HE QUOTES LEROUX!!!! Maria even burns his mask like Christine does in the book. Schell performances as Shandor Korvan, the Phantom, is great. As Shandor he seems believable that he is mental unstable and when he becomes The Phantom he is completely insane after the loss of his wife and his body, remember his whole body gets burned. He plays the Phantom for Horror and sympathy, like Lon Chaney, and I think he would of been a great Erik in a Leroux based movie. He has the deep voice for it. What you really have to remember is to not compare it to the book. Like all Phantom movies its its own work of art. Just because it not exactly like the book, or what you think is the book, referring to the last summary.
This was a horrible and disastrous version of Gaston Leroux's love story. There are now completely different characters, which means goodbye Erik Destler, goodbye Christine Daae, and goodbye Roaul de Chagny, and there is also a completely new storyline. Let me make the comparison.
Gaston Leroux's Version of the Story:
A hideously deformed "phantom" known as Erik Destler is born with facial deformity and distortion, which causes him to hide his face away in a mask. When he sets sights on the beautiful Christine Daae, a soprano at the Opera Populaire, he decides that he loves her and therefore teaches her to sing and gives her lessons daily. This is all well and good up until the point where Roaul de Chagny, a man who is also in love with Christine and was childhood sweethearts with her, comes into the picture. Then a love triangle forms and a war begins because of it.
This Version of the Story:
A man loses his wife to suicide after she receives a bad review, and as a result of his anger and frustration, he is burned in a chemical spill. The burn causes his face to appear horrifying and frightening, and he hides it away with a full face mask and returns as The Phantom of the Opera five years later to avenge his wife. He sets sights on a woman who possesses almost identical features of his wife and falls in love with her, but unfortunately, she already has a lover, which results in the final showdown.
This version of the story is distorted and untrue, which brings the value of the movie down by far. It is also incredibly boring and slow-paced, and that's a lot to say coming from an obsessed freak of the story.
5/10
Gaston Leroux's Version of the Story:
A hideously deformed "phantom" known as Erik Destler is born with facial deformity and distortion, which causes him to hide his face away in a mask. When he sets sights on the beautiful Christine Daae, a soprano at the Opera Populaire, he decides that he loves her and therefore teaches her to sing and gives her lessons daily. This is all well and good up until the point where Roaul de Chagny, a man who is also in love with Christine and was childhood sweethearts with her, comes into the picture. Then a love triangle forms and a war begins because of it.
This Version of the Story:
A man loses his wife to suicide after she receives a bad review, and as a result of his anger and frustration, he is burned in a chemical spill. The burn causes his face to appear horrifying and frightening, and he hides it away with a full face mask and returns as The Phantom of the Opera five years later to avenge his wife. He sets sights on a woman who possesses almost identical features of his wife and falls in love with her, but unfortunately, she already has a lover, which results in the final showdown.
This version of the story is distorted and untrue, which brings the value of the movie down by far. It is also incredibly boring and slow-paced, and that's a lot to say coming from an obsessed freak of the story.
5/10
It is incomprehensible to me why some "writers" feel the compulsion to totally mess up a classic story by changing everything about the original that made it worthwhile in the first place. I long ago noticed an interesting parallel between 2 classic tragic romances, both set in Paris-- THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Each has been redone multiple times. In the case of HUNCHBACK, each time it seems to have been done with minor revisions, and generally, the results have been excellent. In the case of PHANTOM, each time it gets mutated further and further from the original, and while the results may be intriguing to behold, each version is like an entirely different story! So it was that the 1943 remake used the original merely as a springboard for what was really a Nelson Eddy-Jeannete McDonald musical-comedy, pushing the "real" star almost out of his own picture, and completely changing the back-story (while ironically restoring the original ending from the book-- but almost nothing else). And so it was that the 1963 Hammer version totally ignored the original, and used the famous and popular '43 version (my Dad saw it while in the army and LOVED it) as its springboard, to do the typical "Hammer" thing of "different for the sake of different", crafting a film where every single frame screams "Hammer" (was there ever a studio where the finished product was SO uniquely recognizable?). AND, so it was that this 1983 TV version appears to haphazardly take elements from ALL 3 previous films, and mix them together in a jumble that, while some bits seem nicely-done, others are just HORRIBLE, and the overall product is just a jumbled, at times nearly-incoherent MESS.
Let's take the origin: from '43 we had a composer who was a sad, pathetic man to begin with, who mistakenly believed his compositions were being stolen from him. This led to the accident of his disfigurement. The '63 version changed this to an actual theft and called-for revenge that went terribly wrong. The '83 version changes the hero from composer to conductor-- and its his wife who's "stolen" from him rather than his music, and a critic's office rather than a print shop destroyed by fire.
While there was some mysterious figure lurking in the underworld in the '25 version (and we never found out if he had ANY connection with the Phantom or not-- a wonderfully minor detail), the '63 version had both a rat-catcher and a sewer-living derelict. The derelict wound up causing The Phantom's death in the '63 film-- but, absurdly, in this one, he not only rescues the composer from the fire, he takes him down to the underworld in the first place, gives him the mask, shows him the maps of the catacombs-- in effect, this guy who never utters a single word of dialog CREATES the Phantom! I found this so annoying, and it reminded me of the similar absurdity of Sean Connery "teaching" Kevin Costner the ways of Chicago in Brian DePalma's deliriously misguided UNTOUCHABLES remake.
I'm not sure what to make of Michael York's character in here-- he starts out likable, then turns into a heel, then winds up being the one who investigates and learns the truth about The Phantom, while the police inspector is merely a DOLT. The scene with the inspector's family merely makes all of them annoying, in a lame attempt at a comic interlude. (The inspector in the '25 film was that story's "hero"-- if you discount Erik himself, who despite his murderous antics was admirable right to the end, when justice and a murderous mob caught up with him.) The whole thing completely falls apart in the last half-hour, after The Phantom kidnaps Maria. After going to such lengths to make her the success his wife wasn't able to be, he suddenly changes his mind for no apparent reason and wants to keep her "safe" while the vicious Prima Donna he earlier drove away COMES BACK. Then, after Maria is rescued (with relatively little fanfare), and the conductor and inspector plot to trap The Phantom (HOW?), he decides to cut the chandelier loose (a bit predicted much, much earlier in the film in one of the worst and most awkward bits of foreshadowing I have ever seen). Cutting the chandelier at this point makes no sense-- and he does it so badly (in a horrible exercise of "slow-motion" to boot), that nobody gets killed except himself. This Phantom is not only insane, he's incompetent as well.
My recommendation to anyone interested in these films is, START here-- then work your way backward to 1963, then 1943, then 1925. If you do, EACH version you watch GETS BETTER. My admiration for the '25 version-- the ONLY one that even attempts to do the book-- has steadily increased over the years with every viewing. Even more so since I got my hands on the video with the Rick Wakeman score. (Some might find that bordering on blasphemy-- but I've come to love the music so much, and it managed to make what was already my #1 favorite silent film even more enjoyable.)
Let's take the origin: from '43 we had a composer who was a sad, pathetic man to begin with, who mistakenly believed his compositions were being stolen from him. This led to the accident of his disfigurement. The '63 version changed this to an actual theft and called-for revenge that went terribly wrong. The '83 version changes the hero from composer to conductor-- and its his wife who's "stolen" from him rather than his music, and a critic's office rather than a print shop destroyed by fire.
While there was some mysterious figure lurking in the underworld in the '25 version (and we never found out if he had ANY connection with the Phantom or not-- a wonderfully minor detail), the '63 version had both a rat-catcher and a sewer-living derelict. The derelict wound up causing The Phantom's death in the '63 film-- but, absurdly, in this one, he not only rescues the composer from the fire, he takes him down to the underworld in the first place, gives him the mask, shows him the maps of the catacombs-- in effect, this guy who never utters a single word of dialog CREATES the Phantom! I found this so annoying, and it reminded me of the similar absurdity of Sean Connery "teaching" Kevin Costner the ways of Chicago in Brian DePalma's deliriously misguided UNTOUCHABLES remake.
I'm not sure what to make of Michael York's character in here-- he starts out likable, then turns into a heel, then winds up being the one who investigates and learns the truth about The Phantom, while the police inspector is merely a DOLT. The scene with the inspector's family merely makes all of them annoying, in a lame attempt at a comic interlude. (The inspector in the '25 film was that story's "hero"-- if you discount Erik himself, who despite his murderous antics was admirable right to the end, when justice and a murderous mob caught up with him.) The whole thing completely falls apart in the last half-hour, after The Phantom kidnaps Maria. After going to such lengths to make her the success his wife wasn't able to be, he suddenly changes his mind for no apparent reason and wants to keep her "safe" while the vicious Prima Donna he earlier drove away COMES BACK. Then, after Maria is rescued (with relatively little fanfare), and the conductor and inspector plot to trap The Phantom (HOW?), he decides to cut the chandelier loose (a bit predicted much, much earlier in the film in one of the worst and most awkward bits of foreshadowing I have ever seen). Cutting the chandelier at this point makes no sense-- and he does it so badly (in a horrible exercise of "slow-motion" to boot), that nobody gets killed except himself. This Phantom is not only insane, he's incompetent as well.
My recommendation to anyone interested in these films is, START here-- then work your way backward to 1963, then 1943, then 1925. If you do, EACH version you watch GETS BETTER. My admiration for the '25 version-- the ONLY one that even attempts to do the book-- has steadily increased over the years with every viewing. Even more so since I got my hands on the video with the Rick Wakeman score. (Some might find that bordering on blasphemy-- but I've come to love the music so much, and it managed to make what was already my #1 favorite silent film even more enjoyable.)
Did you know
- TriviaShot on location in Budapest, Hungary. The opera house is actually the József Katona Theatre in Kecskemét. The Phantom's lair was shot in storage facilities underneath a brewery.
- ConnectionsReferenced in Behind the Mask: The Story of 'The Phantom of the Opera' (2005)
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