Phantom of the Paradise
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Movie Reviews of Phantom of the Paradise
Movie Review: DePalma's Opera Of The D**ned
Summary: 5 Stars
In 1974, after the release of "Sisters", DePalma wrote and directed his second 'mainstream' film, produced by Edward R. Pressman (the producer of "Sisters"), with songs written by Paul Williams, making this one of the greatest collaborations in film musical history. But, this isn't a musical in the generic conventional sense of the word. Nor is it just a satire, nor just horror, nor just parody, but all of the above. Good psychological sinister fun!
Fusing "Phantom Of The Opera" with "Faust" and "The Picture Of Dorian Gray", music of the period, and countless other great horror film references, DePalma created a classic masterpiece of cinema that not only is still concidered a classic today, but is celebrated every year at 'Phantompalooza' (where the film is performed live, and usually featuring a few of the cast members from the film), to it now (unfornately) being in line for a remake for a newer generation (Yeah, make a new one for Baby Cakes, cause he didn't understand the original, LOL!).
Starring William Finley ("Murder a La Mod", "Sisters", "The Fury", "The Black Dahlia"), Paul Williams, George Memmoli, Gerrit Graham ("Greetings", "Hi, Mom!", and "Home Movies"), and introducing Jessica Harper (who went on to star in cult classics like "Suspiria" and "Shock Treatment"), DePalma tells a story so sad, so funny, so horrific, so tragic, so demented, so deranged, so twisted, and so awesome like only he can.
The film is about a young unknown songwriter/composer named Winslow Leach (Finley), who just composed a rock cantata of "Faust" (about a guy selling his soul to the Devil in turn to be famous - for those that don't know the story of "Faust"). The cantata gets stolen by Swan (Williams), a big name rock producer and owner of the rock club The Paradise Theater. When Winslow tries to retrieve his stolen masterpiece, he is greeted by Swan's thug body guards, mainly Philbin (Memmoli). During this period, Swan meets Phoenix (Harper), and falls in love with her.
Swan sets Winslow up, he is sent to Sing-Sing prison (yes, Sing-Sing! Oh, the irony! Ha-ha), has his teeth removed because of a dental experiment financed by Swan, then escapes, breaks into the record company and tries to destroy the new version of his cantata recorded by Swan's 'band', The Beach Bums, an obvious Beach Boys parody band (the film started with them as The Juicy Fruits, a Sha Na Na parody act, and they end up as The Undeads, an obvious Alice Cooper/KISS/glam rock parody), then gets disfugered by a record press, and drops out of sight, reported dead.
Then, like the Phantom of the Opera, Winslow, wearing a black cape and mask, starts 'haunting' The Paradise Theater, hoping to get Swan to get Pheonix (a Karen Carpenter carbon copy) to sing his songs instead of The Juicy Fruits.
Swan gets Winslow to sign a contract (here's the GREAT irony of Winslow writing a cantata about "Faust"!), and then tricks him by getting The Juicy Fruits, now called The Undeads, with a new 'front' man named Beef (Graham).
Well, from this point on, there are numerous twists and turns, and moments of humor, horror, and tragedy. This film is filled with longing, broken hearts (and body parts), romance, and a "Psycho" shower scene parody to rival Hitchcock's classic. This is a film that should have had the 'midnight madness' celebrations like "Rocky Horror Picture Show", for it is just as great, if not better. And it was a year ahead of RH!
The different elements of music fused with the different elements of film make for such a glorious ride that you won't want it to end. It's one of the most highly acclaimed horror/satire/musical 'phantasies' ever, and rightly so! A spectacular celebration of music, film, and music and film as art. And, it also does a great job parodying the whole 'more famous in Death' aspect of the music/entertainment industry.
It also skewers remakes, rehashing, 'borrowing', plagiarizing, and flat out about anything else. The whole way a paticular set piece is designed (Swan's desk) to look like a large golden record, and when Swan is 'auditioning' singers from that desk, in a 'smorgasboard' kind of way is just too priceless! The musical performance sequences are so awesome and awe-inspiring that, between this and the dance sequence in "Carrie", DePalma was offered BOTH, "Grease" AND "Saturday Night Fever" to direct, but very wisely turned them down (those were great films, just not his style). This is!
HIGHLY recommended! Thank you & Happy Halloween! ;-)
PS: A bit of film trivia...Sissy Spacek served as Set Decorator, her huband Jack Fisk did Set Design (and worked with DePalma again on "Carrie"), and look for a very brief cameo by William Katt in the audience during Beef's performance with The Undeads.
Movie Review: PhanPhriggin'Tastic!
Summary: 5 Stars
I absolutely love this movie and have ever since I was a kid. This is one that definitely fits the phrase, "they don't make them like this anymore". They sure as hell don't! The 70s were a great time for movies coz it seems like major studios were willing to take risks with bizarre material. There's no way this movie would fly today, especially with a PG rating(or PG-13 for that matter! Violence! Cocaine use! Lesbian Orgies! Good times!). Plotwise it's a variation of the Phantom of the Opera, and as reviewers have stated before, with a dash of Faust and The Picture Of Dorian Gray thrown in for good measure. Songwriter Paul Williams plays the record producing tycoon that wants to build his ultimate rock palace, and in doing so screws an unknown composer out of his music. After being put through hell, the composer, Leach, invades Williams' rock palace as The Phantom to wreck havoc and get revenge. And in Phantom of the Opera tradition, he falls in love with a young singer(Jessica Harper, who horror fans will know as the star of Dario Argento's Suspiria), and will stop at nothing to have her as the star performer of his music. Then things get strange and take a turn for the supernatural, and it all comes to a crazy climax. This is a very bizarre movie. It's not bizarre in a David Lynch sense, it's coherent, but very off the wall. Obviously mass amounts of drugs were being used by everyone involved. The film shifts from full out zany and almost Looney Tunes-ish, to serious and in the final act, almost outright horror. What genre does this film belong in? The easy answer is to label it a "cult" film coz it's very hard to describe or define. There are musical numbers scattered throughout, all written by Paul Williams, who wrote many songs for The Carpenters as well as most of the songs for the Muppets(and don't forget Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas!). The songs range from nostalgic 50/60s tunes(done as camp), piano ballads and glam rock. The music and visuals are way ahead of their time. Alice Cooper and David Bowie were just starting to enjoy big time success around this time, and DePalma took full advantage of their theatrics. There is a scene of a performance done in a Frankenstein type laboratory set with the band all in face paint and black clothing with fake mutilation of audience members. Very cool stuff and probably considered quite wild at the time. I believe the soundtrack was nominated for an academy award. Gerrit Graham has a hilarious turn as a flamboyant, druggie Bowie-ish glam rocker. A wonderful character for his brief screen time. Harper makes a decent debut and is cute as a button. She's not a bad singer either. William Finley is great as composer Leach/The Phantom. The look of the Phantom is spectacular and sinister with his birdlike helmet, eye makeup, his black leather suit and cape, metal teeth and electric voicebox. And of course Williams makes a terrific villain regardless of schmuck critics who say he was miscast. Of course this wouldn't have worked out as well as it did without Brian DePalma. This was back in his early(and probably drug induced) days before Scarface, Carrie, The Untouchables, and crapfests like Mission: Impossible and Snake Eyes. The cool Brian DePalma! He makes excellent use of his splitscreen shots and Hitchcock homages(in this case a hilarious spoof of the Psycho shower scene). This is one of my favorite all time movies and gets the highest recommendation if you're looking for something different, brilliant and just downright fun. No, they really do not make them like this anymore.Movie Review: So real and so cult
Summary: 5 Stars
A remake of the Phantom of the Opera in a New York setting, in the days of rock and roll and of show business and of records and rock operas. That must have some kind of filiation or descent from the Rocky Horror Show from London, and it does, but not entirely. I just wonder if it is not also inspired by Anne Rice's Lestat de Lioncourt in his rock star episode of the Queen of the Dead. That sure reveals all the shortcomings and drawbacks of show business and the "mythology" that goes along with it. But it has another dimension that has to do with Brian de Palma too. He had to criticize society and its over-exploitation of artists. But that was easy. So he had to criticize the gullibility of performers of any type, particularly women, and of the audience. They believe anything that comes from the honey sweet mouth of a producer. The audience comes to the show only to experience the impossible or the improbable, and they applaud to the death of a person because that's too much, I mean it is real, really real, perfect, etc. They yell and clap when someone gets cut up and sliced on the stage because that smells like blood and blood is good on a stage, any stage, provided it is fresh and hot and they can get splashed with it. The audience also come because in a show like that they can do what they couldn't do on the sidewalk outside the theater and there Brian de Palma remains very suggestive but no more than suggestive. But what makes that film in a way superb is the fact that Brian de Palma uses his camera and his special effects so well that we really don't have to suspend our disbelief when something odd is happening; it is just normal in the odd situation we have been soaked in for a while. There is no innuendo or half measures or maybe some interrogations about the fact the main singer is gay like in the Rocky Horror Show. He is so gay that he edges onto the caricature without really slipping on the other side. And the language within the producing team about it is just homophobic enough to be believable, but not too much though, just what we can hear on a sound stage or in the wings of a theater in such a situation, though certainly no diplomacy about it, absolutely none. Just plain and simple homophobically gross. So it can end in a total slaughter of everyone available on the last night with knives, daggers, electricity, weapons, machine guns, you name it you have it. And it looks so nice, all those dead bodies floating in blood galore. Apart from that decadent artistic perfection, the film is nothing but a remake of two or three films and nothing else. The electric guitars are not noisier that a couple of cimbaloms.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
Movie Review: Goethe and Leroux in the Xanadu of rock music
Summary: 5 Stars
" Phantom of the Paradise " ( 1974 ), the most inspirated De Palma's movie nowadays, is a very smart and imaginative translation of Gaston Leroux's famous novel into the pop music world with a black comedy treatment: a sardonically kitsch pop opera version of " The phantom of the opera " with elements of Faust myth and " The portrait of Dorian Gray" and influences also of german expresionism and gothic horror movies. Swan ( Paul Williams, who likewise composed the excellent and diverse musical stuff of the film ), a kind of Randolph Hearst of the music industry, is looking for the music that will open the Paradise, his own Xanadu: the ultimate rock music palace. Winslow Leach ( William Finley ), a talented and still unknown composer who is working in a modern cantata about the legendary german magician who sold his soul to the devil has the music he needs and Swan will use all his power to steal it. But none jail can't stop the desperate and furious composer who becomes monstruosly desfigurated while tries to dynamite the department of Swan's discopraphic enterprise where his stolen stuff is being recorded. Hidden behind a bizarre mask now Leach only lives for making justice about his work haunting Swan's rock palace.
" The phantom of the Paradise" is likewise a sharp satire of the hidden interests, foolish ambitions, corruption and decay of the music industry and its prefabricated and delirious creatures. The movie contains already all the ingredients that conform De Palma's cinematographic style: his taste for artificiosity and for the mixture of different genres and aesthetic elements; the emphatic use of the steadycam and wide angle lens and the affectionate and personal recreation ( this is, with a new design and justified into the story ) of film sequences by directors he admires: the "homages" in this case are for the opening sequence of Orson Welles' " Touch of evil"; " Psycho"'s famous shower scene and Buddy Love's first appearance sequence of " The nutty profesor " .
In short, De Palma's best finished work: an electrifyng hybrid of genres and aesthetic streams, classic cultural references and cinematographic winks put into a wild satire of show business.
Widescreen edition.
Movie Review: FAUST MEETS GLAM-ROCK MEETS DE PALMA.....
Summary: 5 Stars
I just re-watched "Phantom of the Paradise" again and it's every bit as entertaining as it was when I saw it in 1974. Only now, of course, it has that bittersweet nostalgic edge to it. It reminds us what a brilliant talent Brian De Palma was when the 70's were hot times. A mix of "Phantom of the Opera" and "Faust", it follows "Phantom" fairly close bringing the Faust legend in as both the stage show Swan (Paul Williams) is trying to get off the ground and as a plot element where Swan has sold his soul to the devil and persuades others to join him. Swan is an evil megalomaniac music producer who wants to open the ultimate rock club---the Paradise. He needs the right music for the opening and finds it in luckless songwriter Winslow Leach (William Finley) from whom he promptly steals it. He has poor Leach sent to prison on a phony heroin charge and opens the Paradise with Leach's updated pop contata "Faust". When Winslow hears the news he breaks out of prison, dons a costume and begins terrorizing the Paradise (getting his face scarred in a record press in the process). Film introduces the lovely Jessica ("Suspiria") Harper as soulful singer Phoenix who captures the heart of Winslow and the greed of Swan. Swan wants to make her a star (and take her soul). Also there's Gerritt Graham as queeny glam-rock idol Beef, who Swan sets to star in "Faust". He practically steals the film hands down with his hilarious performance. "Phantom" works as a satire, musical, horror film---all rolled into one. The performances are good, the music (by Williams) is good, it's fast-paced and very colorful (the costumes are great) and it's an eye-filling extravaganza. Sissy Spacek is even credited as set dresser---her husband Jack Fisk also worked on the film. De Palma even uses split-screen at one point (as he would do in later films). The DVD is very well done. It looks and sounds wonderful. No fancy extras...just the theatrical trailer. For those who want a good look at the real 70's, this is the ticket. For those with fond memories of a gaudier era, here it is. And it's recommended very highly. Enjoy.