| Sep. 18th, 2009 @ 12:14 pm The Phantom Project: The Climax, directed by George Waggner |
|---|
Current Mood:  cold
Current Music: 30 Seconds to Mars - The Kill
Oh, old movies. The longer I work on this project, the more I find that I'm coming to adore you.
This is not, despite appearances, a movie about orgasms.
 The Climax, directed by George Waggner, 1944 Starring Boris Karloff, Susanna Foster, and Turhan Bey Grade: B
When I started this project, I dismissed this film... in fact, I dismissed it multiple times. It kept coming up, since it was filmed as a sequel to the 1943 Lubin/Rains Phantom of the Opera, but because the script had been substantially changed and Rains himself, the very recognizable Phantom that carried the first film, had pulled out of the project, I kept ignoring it anyway. It wasn't until fairly recently that finally, after revisiting some summaries and convincing myself that maybe this wasn't going to be as unrelated as I thought it was, I decided it deserved to be included. Geez, Anne... bitter over the occasional unrelated piece of material you spent money on, or what?
Then, of course, it was only available in rare out-of-print VHS format, or as part of a large DVD collection of Boris Karloff's films. Such is my life.
( But I persevered! And so did Karloff's character in this film. )
Surprisingly, because it's somewhat forgotten in the annals of Universal horror, I thought this was in fact a better film than the one that preceded it (not by a lot, but nevertheless); the time spent on the suspense rather than on gratuitous humor made things much more cohesive and immersive, and Karloff's performance is so strong that I could probably watch him skulk about for days, even if nothing happened. Not the most fantastic of films, but definitely one to enjoy again, and a really interesting look at source material for a lot of later versions,
This was, incidentally, nominally based on several preceding films and a play by Edward Locke, also titled The Climax and also dealing with an opera singer. However, the actual plots of the play and this film bear one another very little resemblance; it's more likely that a few elements were borrowed from Locke's play, but that the majority still comes from the original plan to create a sequel to the Phantom story (and this is, in fact, the very first Western sequel to the story, being predated only by the 1941 Chinese sequel to Ye bang ge sheng).
(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.) |