Небольшое дополнение к информации на сайте, найдено в книге A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer
(Вредители со студии "Хаммер" не взяли в фильм Кристофера Ли! Вы только представьте себе, какой был бы Призрак, учитывая, КАК Кристофер поет! *уходит горько плакать*  :cray: )

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In 1958, Christopher Lee had remarked that his ambition
in horror films was “to star in a remake of The Phantom
of the Opera. This film would give me a chance to prove
that I can sing.” Just such a remake had first been touted
only one year later, and Lee had made his approach. “I
felt I should have played the Phantom,” he said. “I did
speak to Michael about that.” Michael, however, had
long since stopped listening, and now that the time had
finally come, Lee was making ready to leave the country,
with new wife Birgit, for a villa in Vaud and a view over
the northern slopes of Lake Geneva. This time, he intended
it to be on a more permanent basis.
By spring 1962, Lee was domiciled in Switzerland.
The villa overlooking the valley of the Rhone was to be
his base of operations for two years, during which time
he would commence his autobiography, avoid what he
had described as Britain’s “vicious and crippling tax
system,” and pursue his quest for international stardom
by accepting every offer that came his way. “I could
only hope that they would serve some purpose, and that
perhaps a reputation might come in the same way as a coral
formation, which is made up of a deposit of countless
tiny corpses,” he later wrote. Not that his departure
made any difference to the casting of The Phantom of
the Opera. Hammer had in mind a bigger fish from the
very beginning.
The Fall of the House of Usher had ridden to glory on
the back of a major Hollywood star, and the opportunity
had arisen for Hammer to do the same thing with the last
of Universal’s monster classics to remain unfilmed. The
Phantom of the Opera had been mounted in deference to
an approach by—of all people—Cary Grant, who had
expressed interest in appearing in a Hammer film during
his sojourn in England for Stanley Donen’s The Grass Is
Greener (1960). With a star of Grant’s stature knocking
at Bray’s door, Tony Hinds had been instructed to write
the film especially for him. Hinds was unconvinced, but
he went through the motions. “It worked for him because
it was all very lighthearted and humorous,” he said.
But not lighthearted enough, apparently. Grant’s agent
turned it down flat, and the notion of attracting an A-list
star promptly collapsed with it.
In touting The Phantom of the Opera as its major release
for 1962, Hammer was going right back to where Tony
Hinds thought it belonged. In common with most of
the previous “remakes,” The Phantom had sprung from
a literary source. Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel was not
well known, and in the wake of the first film version of
it (starring Lon Chaney Sr.), was all but forgotten. As
a result, the tale is perceived as a product of the Hollywood
machine, and any prospective remake has had to
take this earlier adaptation very much into account. The
Phantom of the Opera had been the silent screen’s most
spectacular horror fantasy.
The original 1925 Universal production had been
remarkably faithful to Leroux, whose “Phantom” was a
criminal lunatic, disfigured from birth, who used his civil
engineering prowess to construct himself a subterranean
home in the depths of the Paris Opera House, slept in a coffin
(“It keeps me reminded of that other dreamless
sleep that cures all ills—forever!”), and was oddly disposed
to litter his strange abode with all manner of booby
traps and devices of torture. In the film, as in the book,
Gounod’s Faust was the opera in question.
The same company’s respectful Technicolor remake
of 1943 removed the serialized melodrama of the original
and simplified the Phantom’s genesis by recasting him as
violinist Erique Claudin, a frustrated (rather than mad)
composer who is disfigured by acid while attempting
to save his concerto from the clutches of a plagiarist.
The relationship between Phantom and singer (not
fully explained in the novel and ignored altogether in
the silent version) now became implicitly paternal, and
Faust was sidestepped for the more popular melodics of
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Flotow’s Martha,
in keeping with the fact that the film had been designed
as a vehicle for Nelson Eddy and Susanna Foster. Universal
had been aware that they could not hope to top
the Chaney Phantom’s unmasking—arguably the single
most frightening scene in the history of horror films—so
the fall of the great chandelier (a minor highlight in the
original) was moved to center stage instead.
Not only had the Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgewick,
and Lon Chaney–directed original benefited from a cast
of thousands, but it had also been the recipient of some
massive sets left over from Chaney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1923), such as the cathedral. And Hammer
was remaking a film that had already been remade in
(exquisite) color, so it could hardly score there, either. In
addition, the story is a starring role for the monster, and
with Cary Grant having been persuaded to withdraw,
Hammer’s monster was now packing his bags for the
Continent. Nevertheless, with the company committed
to the production, James Carreras saw The Phantom of
the Opera as his big opportunity to backpedal on the gore
and move Hammer’s product more substantially into the
mainstream.
Under these circumstances, and with the limited resources
available at Bray, The Phantom of the Opera was
full of pitfalls. Hammer’s success had been built on outdoing
the originals it chose to remake. With the crude
theatrics and dated appeal of Universal’s other horror
properties, that task had been relatively easy, but The
Phantom contained two legendary sequences. The fall
of the chandelier and the unmasking would be included,
but by reducing the remainder of the narrative to the
mandatory half-dozen characters, Hinds (again doing the
screenwriting as “John Elder”) could retain only the bare
bones of the previous films. The Parisian locale devolved
into the more prosaic backwater of London’s Wimbledon
Theatre—a move that raised critical hackles even before
The Phantom was released. To simplify the musical proceedings,
the opera and the stolen composition became one and the same,
so Edwin Astley had to depart from
Gounod and engineer an original music score of his own
for the new version.
In July 1962, the BBFC advised Hinds about the production
on the basis that he would be aiming for the usual
“X” certificate. “The script as it stands has quite a bit of
‘X’ stuff,” said the reader’s report. “Probably they want
this category anyway.” Even so, there had been a proviso
from John Trevelyan. “Criticism of the ‘X’ category
horror films has increased in the last two years. In the
circumstances I must ask you to take special care in the
shooting of all shock sequences.” Hinds duly altered the
film’s first shock shot: In the script, the murdered sceneshifter
in the opening sequence is described as hanging
upside-down. But the rest would be as had been mutually
agreed, and shooting began on November 20, immediately
after the close of production on Captain Clegg.
Hammer’s Phantom was hyped as its most expensive
Gothic to date, at some £ 400,000. “The most costly and
spectacular thriller of its kind ever filmed in Britain,”
said the press book. Since little of this was to be apparent
on-screen, the publicists must have decided to use inflation
to their own advantage—or they simply thought of a number and doubled it.
“We cut the budget down, and
it didn’t quite work,” Hinds understated.

The year is 1900, and the first night of a new
opera by Lord Ambrose D’Arcy at the Albany
Theatre ends with the death of a stagehand. The
prima donna refuses to go on, and producer Harry
Hunter auditions for a singer to replace her. He
sees a promising alternative in Christine and, at
her lodgings, discovers evidence that the opera
was stolen from a Professor Petrie, who had been
killed in a fire. They subsequently learn that Petrie
survived the blaze but was disfigured by acid. Back
in her room, Christine is confronted by a hideous
dwarf and carried off to an underground lair
below the Opera House, where a figure plays at
the organ—the “Phantom” intends to train her to
be a great singer. Hunter finds the lair and exposes
the Phantom as Petrie. The Phantom explains how
D’Arcy stole his music and begs Hunter to let him
finish the task in hand. Hunter agrees, and the opera
is staged with Christine singing the lead. During the
performance, the dwarf is spotted in the eaves and
chased; he jumps to a chandelier, but his weight snaps
the rope. The Phantom spots the danger and leaps
onto the stage, throwing Christine aside—but he is
too late to save himself: the chandelier falls, crushing
him to death.

With Cary Grant out of the picture, Tony Hinds thought
to salvage the project with Herbert Lom. Lom hailed
originally from Prague and had made a career out of playing
sleazy gangsters of mid-European or Mediterranean
origin. In 1959, he had been a pimp in Alvin Rakoff’s
Passport to Shame. Lom was also intent on changing his
image. In Mysterious Island, he had played Nemo, and he
was soon to become the memorable Inspector Dreyfus in
A Shot in the Dark (1964). Lom was known to Hinds as
an actor of repute, but in director Terence Fisher’s hands,
Lom’s Phantom becomes an ineffectual absentminded
professor inhabiting a grotesquely unreal Eastmancolor
grotto filled with idiosyncratic delights, not to mention
a music-loving dwarf! So insipid is he that his selfsacrificing
leap onto the stage at the climax seems more
like a last act in a life of accident-proneness than the
grande geste it is intended to be.
In addition, the script is dramatically unstable and
morally confused. In line with the notion that a star like
Grant would not have played the part unless an element of audience
empathy existed, Lord D’Arcy is nominated
to be the actual villain of the piece, with the sympathetic
Phantom subordinated to a supporting role. But D’Arcy
does not get his comeuppance (unless you count being
unexpectedly confronted by a sight that may have caused
a measure of hysteria in Mary Philbin in 1925, but barely
produced a shudder in Susanna Foster in 1943), yet the
dwarf and Petrie do—a case of two wrongs, clearly.
Elder’s dialogue is more rounded than in The Curse
of the Werewolf, but there are still longeurs, and much
of it simply directs and dictates the action. Fisher is
obliging in this and has people walk aimlessly around
to fill in the blanks. “I think there is something evil in
this theater, Christine,” says Harry, at which point an
innocent rat catcher is stabbed in the eye by the operaloving
dwarf in a last-minute attempt to spice up the
proceedings. That scene was not enough to save an illconceived
production, and it was to end up among the
BBFC’s outtakes, anyway.
Like The Curse of the Werewolf, The Phantom has its
advocates, but no amount of apology can alter the fact
that the story is puerile, the staging crass, the production
overlit, the drama bogus, and the poverty of ideas apparent.
Against that, The Phantom of the Opera is beautiful to
look at, Heather Sears (whose singing voice was supplied
by soprano Patricia Clark) and Edward de Souza as heroine
and hero are both excellent, Astley’s opera is particularly
fine (especially at the climax), and one or two of the
supporting players—such as Thorley Walters—are worth
the price of a ticket by themselves. But after a rousing
opening reel, it is downhill all the way.

Despite its customary surface gloss and token injection of
gore, The Phantom of the Opera turned out to be an oldfashioned
melodrama, ill-constructed and -executed, and
ultimately disappointing on almost every level. But not
all its failings could be laid at the feet of Terence Fisher.
The cardinal sin was a genuine sin of omission: on his
British release, Hammer’s Phantom was not unmasked
at all!
By April 1962, with the final figures on his desk,
James Carreras began to have misgivings about the scale
of Hammer’s investment in The Phantom of the Opera. The film
had come in at a little under £ 171,000, even
with Tony Hinds taking only a nominal £ 200 for providing
the script, and the expected U.K. gross (which went
direct to Hammer) was no longer looking so good in the
more restricted market available to the “X” certificate.
With its catalog of torture, brutality, murder, grave
robbing, and attempted rape, Captain Clegg had been
sold to Universal as Hammer Horror (under a new title
of Night Creatures), which meant pairing it with The
Phantom. Since the reader’s report of the previous July
had offered, “I think the makers should be told that they
could make it in an ‘A’ way if they liked,” Carreras and
Rank decided to ask for The Phantom of the Opera to be
cut to an “A” to match Clegg and increase the appeal
of both. Consequently, the film paid another two visits
to the BBFC in May, each one leaving it more bereft
than the one before. Out went the hanged scene-shifter
swinging into the camera. Out went the stabbing of the
rat catcher from where the dwarf raises the knife. Out
went close-ups of the Phantom with the mask on. But
most critically—in spite of Trevelyan opining, “I do not
think that further cutting will damage the film”—out
went the Phantom tearing the mask off to reveal his
“hideously scarred face.”

On release, one critic—under a headline heralding
a “funny” phantom, commented, “Keep it dark,
but something’s gone sadly wrong with The Phantom of
the Opera.” That something had been the decision to
broaden the acceptability of Gothic horror by diluting its
very essence. Rank had been instrumental in putting the
squeeze on, and Hammer had dutifully obliged. Michael
Carreras was dismissive—“It was a half-speed film.” But
director Fisher sought to justify the farrago in later interviews:
“I’ve never isolated the monster from the world
around, or tried to avoid showing him. The exception
is Phantom; there was no reason to show his face there;
you’d seen the acid go into his face, you knew how pitifully
he was in agony all the time.”
No reason? Hammer Horror was breathing its last
and The Phantom of the Opera was to be its death rattle.
It was certainly not about to compete with the likes of
From Russia with Love and what Sight and Sound would
call “the new brutalism” at the box office. Phantom was
no fairy tale for adults; it was a fable for children, as
the “A” certificate and its superior cofeature seemed to
testify. Hammer had lost its way. The arch-proponent of
screen horror had become respectable, to the disdain of
audiences and the hypocritical ire of the critics.
The August 28 opening of The Phantom of the Opera
had done Hammer no favors, and so evident was
the disappointing reception accorded the film that the
company felt obliged to comment. It would correct its
mistake and “include” an unmasking scene for the U.S.
market, even though American audiences would see
the unmasking, anyway! By the time The Phantom of the
Opera and Captain Clegg went out through Rank during
September, Pirates of Blood River and Mysterious Island
would already have opened on the ABC circuit, backed
by a television campaign that not only helped put them
into the Top Ten for the year, but unwittingly hanged
Fisher’s lame-duck Phantom in the process.

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Отредактировано AvalonTree (2009-09-11 00:10:48)