The film starts off promisingly with the opening night of a new opera on the subject of Joan of Arc, due to be sung by a Maria Callas type soprano. A series of discovered acts of sabotage culminate in the film's first shock-horror moment. So far, it looks as if its going to be an enjoyable hour and a half. Michael Gough is great fun as an eminently hissable villain, and Edward de Souza is fairly watchable, too, as the charming if rather conventional hero. But alas, it all goes horribly downhill from the Phantom's first appearance. Poor Herbert Lom is given a pretty duff script (a lot of ineffectual muttering to himself), and a frightfully tacky hideaway replete with tiger rug and a naff red-upholstered throne. The music this alleged genius writes is pretty awful too - a sort of cross between the worst kind of Gilbert and Sullivan and a Broadway show with truly cringe-worthy lyrics. And why exactly does the phantom rip his own mask off just before rescuing the heroine? A huge disappointment all round.
Review of The Phantom of the Opera
