Day 12 - Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Having enjoyed Paul Williams' songs so much yesterday, I couldn't resist seeing more of him today. The first and only film that sprang to mind was Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, a loose re-working of Gaston Leroux' novel, The Phantom of the Opera. As has probably been noted already, I have a real soft spot for fantasy musicals, so honestly, any excuse.

Williams plays Swan, a shadowy record producer and Svengali figure who runs Death Records, and, it is implied, controls the charts in the way that Stock, Aitken and Waterman or Simon Cowell might have thought they did in their respective glory days. Swan's ambition is to open the Paradise, a sort of glam-rock version of the Moulin Rouge, but before he can do this he has to find the perfect song and the perfect performer to sing it.

The former shows up soon enough in the shape of Winslow Leach (William Finley, with Williams providing the singing voice), a nerdy pianist whose magnum opus is a cantata based on the story of Faust. Swan hears him and has his right-hand man hire him immediately, promptly stealing his material and then banning him from the Death Records HQ. Leach takes this justifiably hard, and sets about taking back what rightfully belongs to him.

It was never going to end well, was it?

The good

It's by Brian De Palma, so visually speaking, it was never going to disappoint. Phantom of the Paradise is packed with split-screen segments, tracking shots and other assorted bells and whistles. They look great, although I couldn't in all honesty say that they lent anything to the narrative. Probably the greatest effect of all is the Paradise itself, a combined theatre, nightclub and labyrinth whose layout seems to shift with nightmarish queasiness.

Performances are variable, but as Phoenix, the heroine, Jessica Harper is a consistently likeable presence. True, she isn't given much to do beyond sing a few numbers and be alternately compassionate and brave as the story demands, but her voice is glorious and she imbues the songs with genuine emotion. 

Huge credit also has to be given to Archie Hahn, Jeffrey Comanor and Harold Oblong, who provide a sort of Greek chorus as Swan's chameleonic boy band. They open the film in rockabilly garb as the Juicy Fruits, parodying the death disc trend of the early 1960s, before spending some time as Beach Boys clones the Beach Bums and then finally settling down as the Undeads, Kiss clones for those lucky souls who'd never heard a Kiss song in their lives. Their verve and enthusiasm is charming, and frankly better than the material they've been given to work with here.

The bad

Looking at the IMDB, it seems a lot of people really love this one. As a lover of film in general and this genre in particular who still only heard of it a few years ago, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest both the reviewers and the people doing the rating are a self-selecting sample - this was 40 years ago, after all, so few contemporary reviews are likely to have made it as far as the internet. The people thinking and writing about Phantom of the Paradise will primarily be the people who love it, and from what I've seen, their praise for it seems to be more or less universal.

Interestingly, looking at the list of critics and commenters, I haven't seen a single name that I'd definitively associate with somebody who wasn't a white male.

I'm not going to go off on a diatribe here about overprivileged white guys because it's not the time or place, but there's no denying there's a lot here to appeal to a certain sort of nerd; they're the sort of person I spent my teens and twenties learning I shouldn't date, because beneath the romance and the shyness and the self-deprecation there lurks a truly vile streak of self-pitying rage and you really don't want to be there when it bubbles to the surface.

So we have Leach, the hero/antihero who'll throw a person through a wall for even suggesting somebody else sing his material. Let's get this straight: ignore the coke-bottle glasses and wonky teeth, the man has a dangerous temper long before he has any genuine reason to seek revenge on the world. He's disturbing for all the wrong reasons, and as a domestic violence survivor I found myself constantly on edge and waiting for the next explosion.

And then there's Phoenix, consistently kind to Leach when all others treat him with laughter and derision. She wears schoolgirl-style hairclips and is the only female in the movie who doesn't wear revealing costumes. Do I really need to spell this out?

The whole mess is compounded by a truly nasty streak of homophobia; Swan, the film's embodiment of evil, is sexually ambiguous; when he seeks to offend Leach by giving his music to somebody utterly unsuitable he picks openly queer glam-rocker Beef. Played by Gerrit Graham, it's a fun performance, but it was overshadowed for me by the underlying sentiments the filmmakers chose to express.

The verdict

Sometimes it's fun to switch off your brain and watch a movie. Sometimes, however, it's all too easy to use this as an excuse for switching off your critical faculties and even basic decency. Sure, Phantom of the Paradise looks pretty - sounds it, even, on and off - but beneath the shiny mask, the fundamental ugliness of it is much more than merely skin deep.