When I was 10 years old, I thought the 1962 Hammer Film Productions version of “The Phantom of the Opera” was one of the greatest movies ever made. Today – far removed from that 10-year-old version of myself – the slavish enthusiasm I once had for this flick has evaporated, but I still have a fondness for the film’s offbeat charms.
As the third version of the popular horror tale, this somewhat cheap-looking production pales in comparison to its extravagant predecessors – it lacks the opulent grandeur of the 1925 original and the 1943 remake, even though it was among the more expensive Hammer works at the time. It also never captures the warped sense of horror that permeated the first cinematic retelling of the Gaston Leroux novel, nor does it compare to the other Hammer horrors that came before it.
The film also strays wildly from the Leroux source material by adapting the 1943 version’s screenplay that turns the Phantom into a tragic figure of a victimized composer whose violent attempt to protect his music results in a hideous disfigurement that changes his life for the worst. Indeed, the 1962 film divorces the Phantom from evildoing by having the film’s homicidal mayhem enacted by a hunchbacked dwarf who serves as the Phantom’s mute manservant. This film’s Phantom is the most sympathetic ever put on the screen.
But in its favor, the film offers a memorably poignant performance by Herbert Lom as the mysterious title character, who mostly appears behind a creepy cloth mask that only exposes one eye of his face. Lom uses his Czech-accented voice to create an outsider who becomes prey to a cold London society (where this film was transplanted, away from Leroux’s Paris) where he cannot be accepted, resulting in his pariah status. Lom’s vocal performance and his physical presence offers a Phantom for whom respect must be paid – and perhaps the most touching aspect of Lom’s performance is the brief shedding of a tear behind his mask during the operatic climax – this displays the humanity of the Phantom that was absent in the earlier Lon Chaney and Claude Rains interpretations, and it is to Lom’s great credit that he can generate such a reaction with an unlikely close-up from within a mask’s eye opening.
The film also gains strength from Michael Gough’s unapologetically venal performance as Lord Ambrose, the cold-hearted aristocrat whose exploitation of Lom’s character creates the harsh drama. Heather Sears as the Phantom’s soprano protégé and Edward de Souza as her love interest are fine and acceptable in what have traditionally been thankless roles.
This go-round of “The Phantom of the Opera” might be the ideal horror for a 10-year-old – after all, there is plenty of time to introduce the young ones to the more grisly and extreme aspects of horror. And, if anything, it offers evidence that it is okay to root for someone who is supposedly a bad guy – the film reminds us that good versus evil is never a clean-cut struggle.