Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Official trailer

Phantom of the Paradise is Brian De Palma’s 1974 American musical horror comedy combining elements from Phantom of the Opera, Faust, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The film depicts record producer Swan stealing the music of composer Winslow Leach for use at his new music venue The Paradise. Leach is framed for drug dealing, imprisoned, disfigured in a record-pressing accident, and returns as a masked phantom haunting the venue. William Finley plays Leach. Paul Williams plays Swan and wrote the score.

Jessica Harper plays singer Phoenix in her film debut. Gerrit Graham plays glam-rock star Beef. De Palma wrote the screenplay. Harbor Productions made the film on a budget of approximately 1.3 million dollars, Twentieth Century Fox distributed it, and it grossed approximately 2 million dollars on initial release. The work flopped commercially but built cult standing through later decades.

The film is the principal early De Palma work and one of the strangest American musicals of the 1970s.

The production combined De Palma’s interest in split-screen technique with a Paul Williams score that included songs De Palma argued were among the strongest pop music of the decade. The cast was largely unknown. The horror, musical, and satirical elements rarely combine well. The film made them combine. The work bombed commercially everywhere except Winnipeg, Canada, where it ran for eighteen weeks.

I adore how strange this film is. It’s loud, gaudy, cynical about the music business and completely sincere about the music, and I find the mix irresistible. My one reservation is Winslow himself. Finley does fine work, but the phantom interests me less than the man who robbed him.

The Genre Combination

Three sources meet in this story: Phantom of the Opera plot mechanics, Faust thematic content and Picture of Dorian Gray supernatural elements. De Palma layered the three classic narratives into a single contemporary story about music industry exploitation. Each source contributes particular elements. Phantom provides the masked disfigured composer and the obsessive love for a singer. Faust provides the soul-selling contract. Dorian Gray provides the magical aging mechanism that preserves Swan’s youth while his sins accumulate on hidden videotape.

The triple-source structure could have produced incoherent material.

De Palma made it coherent by treating all three sources as the same story about artistic theft and the cost of creative success. Leach loses his music, his face, and his sanity. Swan keeps his youth, his industry, and his soul intact only until the final reckoning. The film proves that the music industry is the contemporary equivalent of selling one’s soul to the devil. The argument was unfashionable in 1974 and has aged into prescience.

I think the Swan contract is the smartest idea in the picture. Signing a record deal as literally selling your soul is a joke that stops being funny the longer you think about it, and De Palma plays it straight enough that it stings.

The Williams Score

Paul Williams wrote the songs and starred as Swan. The score combined glam-rock parody, beach-music revival pastiche, and earnest power ballads. The opening Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye depicts a 1950s nostalgia act fronted by the Juicy Fruits. Beef’s Life at Last acts as glam-rock parody. Phoenix’s Old Souls is sincere romantic ballad. The score moves between modes without losing coherence.

Old Souls is the song I’d single out. Harper sings it with no irony at all in a film soaked in irony, and it’s the moment I believe Winslow’s music was worth stealing. The Juicy Fruits parody, meanwhile, makes me laugh out loud.

Williams received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song Score.

He lost to Nelson Riddle for The Great Gatsby. The Phantom of the Paradise score has aged better than the Gatsby score has. Williams continued serious musical work afterward including The Muppet Movie and Bugsy Malone. His Phantom of the Paradise material remains the work he’s best known for among musical specialists despite the film’s commercial failure.

The Winnipeg Phenomenon

In every American market, the film bombed. It ran for one week or two and disappeared. The exception was Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the film opened at the Garrick Theatre and stayed there for eighteen weeks. Local audiences kept returning. Word of mouth kept it running in a way the rest of North America never matched. The Winnipeg cult became part of the film’s legend.

Film distribution historians have studied the Winnipeg success without producing a clear explanation. Some argue the local music scene matched the film’s content. Others credit specific Garrick Theatre programming choices. The film’s eventual cult standing benefited from this anomalous initial reception. By the time home video distribution made the film widely available, the Winnipeg story had become a marketable curiosity that drew attention the conventional release had failed to produce.

It delights me that Winnipeg got it first. There’s something right about a film this odd finding its audience in one theater in one city while the rest of the continent shrugged.

Does Phantom of the Paradise still hold up?

It holds up. The triple-source story makes a real argument about the music industry, Williams’s score is the part I’d save from a fire, and Swan is a villain I enjoy every minute with. It sits at an 8 because the phantom is the least interesting person in his own movie, and a film this bold deserved a hero as vivid as its villain. Anyone curious about De Palma, 1970s oddities, or great flops should see it.

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