This was De Palma’s film coming off of Sisters, which is nuts to me, given the disturbing tone and narrative of that film compared to this one, which nonetheless has much of the same De Palma style. He’s not known for comedies, and certainly not over-the-top flashy ones despite making a few such films in his early career. Phantom of the Paradise came just a little before Carrie, where his name really took off, and he never made a movie quite like it again -sticking mainly to thrillers thereafter. But then why would he need to, it stands as a pretty distinct mark of his versatility and is the kind of movie that really could not have been made outside of the mid-70s where just about anything could be greenlit with the backing of a major studio -in this case Fox, who would, yes, make Rocky Horror a year later.
The film is set in a bizarre mirror of our own universe where a talented young musician called Winslow Leach (William Finley) plays an original rock opera inspired by the legend of Faust at an elaborate new club called The Paradise run by the vain and treacherous record producer Swan (Paul Williams) -who likes the music enough to steal it from Winslow, appropriate it for his own contract players, and if that wasn’t enough, have Winslow arrested to silence him. Eventually, once the song is a mega-hit, Winslow manages to escape prison, though not without losing his teeth and severely scarring his face and vocal chords. He returns to the Paradise where he haunts the club and forces Swan to produce the song his way -but Swan has a few additional secrets and tricks to give him the upper hand in this new partnership.
Obviously this crazy musical take on Phantom predates Andrew Lloyd Webber’s by over a decade. And yet it has some of that same sympathy towards its’ malformed anti-hero. Even while the circumstances are quite often hilarious, Winslow’s story is supremely tragic and unfair -even if he was something of a pretentious wannabe-beatnik before. Finley plays this part adequately, and with the right amount of satire, but it’s actually once he’s transformed into the Phantom, hidden beneath a goofy spaceman helmet, silver incisors, and an electronic voice box, that his performance becomes more compelling. The look alone certainly has a degree of sadness mixed in with the comic absurdity, but the character is also more strongly defined here, especially with regards to his obsessions and anxieties. And it helps that Finley knows exactly what level to pitch this over-the-top but melodramatic character to, making him a lot of fun to watch.
The other half of this movies’ vital double act though is composer and singer Paul Williams, who appropriately to his character, looks even younger than his thirty-three years as of filming. Prior to this movie, I was not aware of the scope of Williams’ discography, which includes Bugsy Malone, some of the best Carpenters songs, “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie and all the songs from A Muppet Christmas Carol (making him responsible for a decent chunk of most millennials’ holiday playlists), and he even performed the song “Flying Dreams” for one of my favourite overlooked animated movies, The Secret of NIMH! Also, he was the voice of the Penguin on Batman: The Animated Series, which feels like a potential relative to his part in Phantom of the Paradise, his first and only starring role in a movie. Swan is a charismatic, ostentatious asshole who Williams plays with a tangible disdain for a kind of personality he perhaps knew intimately. De Palma doesn’t have a high opinion of record producers it appears, he and Williams illustrating Swan as a manipulative, duplicitous schemer who, in the Faustian parallel, is a direct analogue of the Devil.
He is relentless in his thievery and appropriation of Winslow’s opera, turning it first into a horrible doo-wop throwback for his in-house band, then re-worked as a surfer song for that same group, and then finally as a gaudy glam number performed by a flashy egocentric gay rocker hilariously called Beef (a scene-stealing Gerrit Graham). Each of these is sabotaged by Winslow, the last in the most outrageous fashion that involves Cabinet of Dr. Caligari imagery and a Zeusian lightning bolt. The only singer this Phantom will approve is of course his Christine, a novice called Phoenix played by Suspiria’s Jessica Harper in her debut film role. And she does indeed sing it quite well. But she’s also sleeping with Swan, a revelation that hits like a ton a bricks and you feel genuinely heartbroken on behalf of Winslow. Yet the film remains wild and camp as the plot develops into more insane territory, with a third classic literary source, The Picture of Dorian Gray, joining the fray of this movies’ inspirational model,s and the cast and crew (including a fresh off of Badlands and soon to be star of Carrie Sissy Spacek in the set dressing department alongside her future husband Jack Fisk) continue to have a blast with the material.
This includes De Palma, who’s sharp style is one of the movies’ greatest visual pleasures. He once again demonstrates an affinity for split-screen shots and what can be done with them, here utilizing it to show a sequence from two angles simultaneously that give very interesting reads on the process of setting up a rock performance. He makes a lot of strong choices that epitomize the movies’ gonzo tone, from fish-eye lenses to cutaways to fast zooms and smash cuts; and it kinda feels like a director still relatively new to making movies (it was De Palma’s eighth, but he was only thirty-three) just playing around with everything that can be done with the medium. I can’t speak for his earliest work, but certainly it comes across as more experimental than Sisters, and its’ outright flashiness proved a bit of a turn-off for some -Gene Siskel wasn’t a fan. Pauline Kael however loved it, and I echo her sentiments: “Though you may anticipate a plot turn, it's impossible to guess what the next scene will look like or what its rhythm will be. De Palma's timing is sometimes wantonly unpredictable and dampening, but mostly it has a lift to it. You practically get a kinetic charge from the breakneck wit he put into 'Phantom;' it isn't just that the picture has vitality but that one can feel the tremendous kick the director got out of making it.” Nowhere is this better articulated than in the chaotic ending in which so much happens all at once and the camera wildly tracks all of it, that you feel the rush of excitement through the screen. Despite its’ elements of tragedy and horror, themes of exploitation and the violation of artistic integrity, Phantom of the Paradise may well be De Palma’s most joyous movie.
And I haven’t yet mentioned the music, which is awesome. It’s another reason you understand and sympathize with Winslow’s frustration, his “Faust” is really good. It’s very much in the vein of something Leonard Cohen would write –sounds like it too. It’s actually Williams singing the song instead of Finley –Williams, who wrote all the music, making the film arguably as much a product of his creativity as De Palma’s. He sings for the Phantom too, a number dubbed by the soundtrack ‘Beauty and the Beast”. Swan doesn’t get any songs of his own until the end credits with an upbeat rock number called “The Hell of It”. The movie demonstrates his musical versatility quite well though. “Upholstery”, the Beach Bums song, may be too close to a classic Beach Boys sound to be all that remarkable, but the opening number sung by Swan’s Juicy Fruits do-wop group “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye” is very accurate in aesthetic but lyrically rather subversive and unusual. And it’s honestly a fun way to open the show. The songs given over to Beef are in fitting with the trends of 70s glam rock, and then there are the two numbers for Phoenix, which definitely have a rhythm reminiscent of The Carpenters, first in their poppy then soulful stylings. Harper even sounds a touch like Karen Carpenter, especially when she sings the sombre “Old Soul”, one of the best songs of the film. “Special to Me” is great too though, as is her rendition of “Faust”. Most of these numbers are played as in-film musical performances that De Palma stages well, though a part of me wishes he had gone full musical in his reality, which is certainly artificial enough to support it.
Being that it qualifies as a musical regardless, it’s all the more ironic that Phantom of the Paradise is the best film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, vastly outshining the eventual film translation of the official Phantom musical. Its’ satire is delightfully blunt, it’s style immensely flamboyant, its’ visual sensibility off-the-wall, and it apologizes for none of this. A goofy, silly, strange, and spooky product of its’ time, Phantom of the Paradise is, if you’re in the mood for it, a marvellous slice of Halloween cheese!
The film is set in a bizarre mirror of our own universe where a talented young musician called Winslow Leach (William Finley) plays an original rock opera inspired by the legend of Faust at an elaborate new club called The Paradise run by the vain and treacherous record producer Swan (Paul Williams) -who likes the music enough to steal it from Winslow, appropriate it for his own contract players, and if that wasn’t enough, have Winslow arrested to silence him. Eventually, once the song is a mega-hit, Winslow manages to escape prison, though not without losing his teeth and severely scarring his face and vocal chords. He returns to the Paradise where he haunts the club and forces Swan to produce the song his way -but Swan has a few additional secrets and tricks to give him the upper hand in this new partnership.
Obviously this crazy musical take on Phantom predates Andrew Lloyd Webber’s by over a decade. And yet it has some of that same sympathy towards its’ malformed anti-hero. Even while the circumstances are quite often hilarious, Winslow’s story is supremely tragic and unfair -even if he was something of a pretentious wannabe-beatnik before. Finley plays this part adequately, and with the right amount of satire, but it’s actually once he’s transformed into the Phantom, hidden beneath a goofy spaceman helmet, silver incisors, and an electronic voice box, that his performance becomes more compelling. The look alone certainly has a degree of sadness mixed in with the comic absurdity, but the character is also more strongly defined here, especially with regards to his obsessions and anxieties. And it helps that Finley knows exactly what level to pitch this over-the-top but melodramatic character to, making him a lot of fun to watch.
The other half of this movies’ vital double act though is composer and singer Paul Williams, who appropriately to his character, looks even younger than his thirty-three years as of filming. Prior to this movie, I was not aware of the scope of Williams’ discography, which includes Bugsy Malone, some of the best Carpenters songs, “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie and all the songs from A Muppet Christmas Carol (making him responsible for a decent chunk of most millennials’ holiday playlists), and he even performed the song “Flying Dreams” for one of my favourite overlooked animated movies, The Secret of NIMH! Also, he was the voice of the Penguin on Batman: The Animated Series, which feels like a potential relative to his part in Phantom of the Paradise, his first and only starring role in a movie. Swan is a charismatic, ostentatious asshole who Williams plays with a tangible disdain for a kind of personality he perhaps knew intimately. De Palma doesn’t have a high opinion of record producers it appears, he and Williams illustrating Swan as a manipulative, duplicitous schemer who, in the Faustian parallel, is a direct analogue of the Devil.
He is relentless in his thievery and appropriation of Winslow’s opera, turning it first into a horrible doo-wop throwback for his in-house band, then re-worked as a surfer song for that same group, and then finally as a gaudy glam number performed by a flashy egocentric gay rocker hilariously called Beef (a scene-stealing Gerrit Graham). Each of these is sabotaged by Winslow, the last in the most outrageous fashion that involves Cabinet of Dr. Caligari imagery and a Zeusian lightning bolt. The only singer this Phantom will approve is of course his Christine, a novice called Phoenix played by Suspiria’s Jessica Harper in her debut film role. And she does indeed sing it quite well. But she’s also sleeping with Swan, a revelation that hits like a ton a bricks and you feel genuinely heartbroken on behalf of Winslow. Yet the film remains wild and camp as the plot develops into more insane territory, with a third classic literary source, The Picture of Dorian Gray, joining the fray of this movies’ inspirational model,s and the cast and crew (including a fresh off of Badlands and soon to be star of Carrie Sissy Spacek in the set dressing department alongside her future husband Jack Fisk) continue to have a blast with the material.
This includes De Palma, who’s sharp style is one of the movies’ greatest visual pleasures. He once again demonstrates an affinity for split-screen shots and what can be done with them, here utilizing it to show a sequence from two angles simultaneously that give very interesting reads on the process of setting up a rock performance. He makes a lot of strong choices that epitomize the movies’ gonzo tone, from fish-eye lenses to cutaways to fast zooms and smash cuts; and it kinda feels like a director still relatively new to making movies (it was De Palma’s eighth, but he was only thirty-three) just playing around with everything that can be done with the medium. I can’t speak for his earliest work, but certainly it comes across as more experimental than Sisters, and its’ outright flashiness proved a bit of a turn-off for some -Gene Siskel wasn’t a fan. Pauline Kael however loved it, and I echo her sentiments: “Though you may anticipate a plot turn, it's impossible to guess what the next scene will look like or what its rhythm will be. De Palma's timing is sometimes wantonly unpredictable and dampening, but mostly it has a lift to it. You practically get a kinetic charge from the breakneck wit he put into 'Phantom;' it isn't just that the picture has vitality but that one can feel the tremendous kick the director got out of making it.” Nowhere is this better articulated than in the chaotic ending in which so much happens all at once and the camera wildly tracks all of it, that you feel the rush of excitement through the screen. Despite its’ elements of tragedy and horror, themes of exploitation and the violation of artistic integrity, Phantom of the Paradise may well be De Palma’s most joyous movie.
And I haven’t yet mentioned the music, which is awesome. It’s another reason you understand and sympathize with Winslow’s frustration, his “Faust” is really good. It’s very much in the vein of something Leonard Cohen would write –sounds like it too. It’s actually Williams singing the song instead of Finley –Williams, who wrote all the music, making the film arguably as much a product of his creativity as De Palma’s. He sings for the Phantom too, a number dubbed by the soundtrack ‘Beauty and the Beast”. Swan doesn’t get any songs of his own until the end credits with an upbeat rock number called “The Hell of It”. The movie demonstrates his musical versatility quite well though. “Upholstery”, the Beach Bums song, may be too close to a classic Beach Boys sound to be all that remarkable, but the opening number sung by Swan’s Juicy Fruits do-wop group “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye” is very accurate in aesthetic but lyrically rather subversive and unusual. And it’s honestly a fun way to open the show. The songs given over to Beef are in fitting with the trends of 70s glam rock, and then there are the two numbers for Phoenix, which definitely have a rhythm reminiscent of The Carpenters, first in their poppy then soulful stylings. Harper even sounds a touch like Karen Carpenter, especially when she sings the sombre “Old Soul”, one of the best songs of the film. “Special to Me” is great too though, as is her rendition of “Faust”. Most of these numbers are played as in-film musical performances that De Palma stages well, though a part of me wishes he had gone full musical in his reality, which is certainly artificial enough to support it.
Being that it qualifies as a musical regardless, it’s all the more ironic that Phantom of the Paradise is the best film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, vastly outshining the eventual film translation of the official Phantom musical. Its’ satire is delightfully blunt, it’s style immensely flamboyant, its’ visual sensibility off-the-wall, and it apologizes for none of this. A goofy, silly, strange, and spooky product of its’ time, Phantom of the Paradise is, if you’re in the mood for it, a marvellous slice of Halloween cheese!
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