trey-yancy-572-763547 Review of Phantom of the Opera

Phantom of the Opera (1943)

Public domain opera fare with a boring bad guy on the side

[6/10 · 29 April 2022]

This film is okay but not great. With such a star as Nelson Eddy, costumes by Vera, and an impressively elaborate and expensive production with a huge supporting cast and a massive opera house set, it nevertheless fails. This is because it almost ccompletely ignores its target audience - horror fans, not opera fans. They could have saved a massive amount of money by cutting the opera performance scenes by eighty percent. This would also have saved a large percentage of the audience from repeated bouts of lushly orchestrated boredom; one can easily spot the places in the film when men in the audience are begging the women to allow them to sneak out of the theatre. This is an example of the eternal downside of a steady percentage of Hollywood films to this day, which is that of ignoring the audience and talking backers into ignoring their own common sense. Frankly, this is a noble effort, but without much of a clue.