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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA Year: 1964 Rating: ***1/2 |
Both Oliver Reed and Herbert Lom have played similar types of villains, with wide dead-eyes and a cold/calculating reserve, and not without exceeding passion... yet neither have all that much to do with their titular monster Hammer features, both directed by Hammer regular Terence Fisher...
In Reed's CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, he shows up after forty-five minutes, with little to do with the most surrealistically nightmarish aspects leading up while in Lom's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, besides being fitfully hidden behind strategically-cut corners of the central opera house, he basically gives his own personal Igor all the rafter-crashing violence...
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| Michael Gough and Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
Putting all of his formidable energy into an expository story-line that's more a cautionary tale for artists losing their copyrights than a horror featuring a young woman being stalked through dark-lit interiors or fog-shrouded London streets... and for Heather Sears, the newly-hired girl-next-door singer of the opera's anticipated opening night, the primary antagonist's the same person that Lom's PHANTOM is dead set against...
Enter Michael Gough, as creepy with his casting-couch seductions as he's a nefarious business tycoon that this entire big-budget production relies on... even taking away from the source material's peripheral love story between Lom and his captured Sears, whom he teaches to sing in his underground sewer lair...
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| Edward de Souza and Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
As if THE THIRD MAN Harry Lime created his very own Victorian netherworld... that conveniently handsome leading man Edward de Souza has almost no problem discovering: once he's finished with his second-act Holmes style investigation — including flashbacks centering on how terribly THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
got swindled...
Taking away from the ominously lurking menace that there
needed much more of: to scare both our somewhat squandered ingenue and
the Hammer audience, expecting more suspenseful horror than costumed
melodrama — yet Fisher provides a nifty page-turning cadence nonetheless.
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears and Ian Wilson in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| From THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Herbert Lom in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Herbert Lom and Michael Gough in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Herbert Lom and Michael Gough in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| From Terence Fisher's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| From Terence Fisher's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Thorley Walters and Michael Gaugh in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Thorley Walters and Michael Gaugh in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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| Heather Sears and Herbert Lom in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA |
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