Le Fantôme de l'Opéra

I love this movie, is very close to the original novel, and the actors, Oscar winner, Maximillian Schell (from DEEP IMPACT)

Jane Seymour (from Judgment AT NUREBERG) and Michael Your (from THE HAUNTING OF HELL HOUSE) are fantastic!

The set was wonderful, and the music is good to! I think, Schell makes the most darkest and original Phantom, this time named Sandor Korvin, a deformed maestro, who lives on the catacombs below the Budapest Opera House.

This is the best phantom, but why do not have it Oscars? This is the only disappointment thing. But this don't stops to make this film, not only the best, but with best actors of all!

I really recommend "The Phantom of the Opera" of 1983 to any, one, I am saying, really any one! And remember this is the best!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Loved it. I grew up watching this and remember being terrified. Brings back fond memories. Wish it was on DVD

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

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.)

I was younger when I saw this, before I saw any other version, maybe, and definitely before I read the book. I remember a scene with a quote that has come back to me powerfully. The phantom comes into the room with the young singer to meet her for the first time after watching her rehearse many times. He says to her, "The mask frightens you? The mask protects you!"