The cutting of the gold chandelier decorated with dozens of candles is the film’s most exquisite set-piece.
#Phantom of the opera movie 1943 series
The underground system of tunnels is a fabulous series of (studio-bound) lakes and crumbling stone caverns.
The opera house is a marvellously gilted coliseum of multi-storey boxes (which was actually rebuilt using the set from the 1925 film) filled with audiences in the hundreds. Claude Rains as Enrique Claudin, The Phantom of the Opera
It was shot in Technicolor at a time when the bulk of films made in the US studios were still in black-in-white so the lushness would have been even more amazing if you consider the film through the eyes of the audience of its time. A huge budget was thrown at the film and Phantom of the Opera 1943 is a production that cannot help but impress with its sumptuously colourful sets and costumery. Unfortunately, in remaking The Phantom of the Opera in sound and colour, all that Universal ended up doing was embalming it. (See bottom of the page for the other versions of The Phantom of the Opera). In the mid-1940s, Universal were enjoying a good deal of success with their Frankenstein and Dracula sequels and so, rather than create any kind of sequel to the Chaney film, which was really the first of their classic monster movies, they decided to remake it with the addition of colour and sound. The 1925 film is an absolute classic due to Chaney’s memorably mad and contorted performance and a superbly Gothic climax venturing down into the cellars of the Paris Opera House. This was the second screen version of Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera (1909), following the still definitive silent version The Phantom of the Opera (1925) starring Lon Chaney.