#WTW: Phantom of the Paradise

(#WhatThomWatched spooky-scary #23)

Phantom of the Paradise

(1974, Brian De Palma; Shout! Factory disk)

By rights, Brian De Palma’s horror/comedy/musical should be at least as famous as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was gestating at the same time, but Phantom of the Paradise was plagued by horrible luck when it opened in 1974. As detailed in the 2006 French documentary Paradise Regained (included on the recent Scream Factory release), the film was hit with no fewer than four lawsuits in the days just after post-production wrapped, seriously hampering its release: Universal called the film an infringement on the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera from 1925; King Features sued as the owners of the comic book character “The Phantom”; the manager of a rock frontman who had been tragically electrocuted onstage in a manner uncomfortably close to a comic death in the film sued for defamation (not named in the docu, but most likely Peter Grant, manager of Stone the Crows guitarist Les Harvey, killed in 1972); and, most damaging to to De Palma’s intricately crafted production design, Led Zeppelin. Their record label had just been registered as “Swan Song Records,” and their manager (Peter Grant again) didn’t like the use of “Swan Song Enterprises” as the name of the fictional company in the movie, run by the evil impresario played by Paul Williams. The filmmakers were forced to use very obvious optical mattes to cover up names and logos throughout the movie, ruining many scenes; other shots had to be cut entirely. The title had to be changed (from the original’s simple Phantom) and all the artwork and promotional materials redesigned. And then the premiere was an unexpected disaster — the audience just didn’t get it. (Except, oddly, in Winnipeg, which is still the center for Phantom phandom worldwide.)*

Phantom’s ambitious story combines several classic psychological horror plots: in addition to the Gaston Leroux serial from 1909-1910 in which a deformed and frustrated artist haunts the venue where he was ruined, lusting after the pure woman who is his last connection to humanity, the movie also loops in the Faust story and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Williams makes for a singularly seductive Mephistopheles, from his purring voice to his affected dress; he’s smartly cast to set his diminutive size and seeming harmlessness against his all-powerful, all-seeing evil; his henchman played by George Memmoli is huge in contrast to Williams. William Finley as (first) the hapless and goofy songwriter taken advantage of by Williams, and (later) as the mangled and tortured monster again bested by Williams, is beautiful to watch, with so much of his performance in his carriage and the one visible eye through his mask; in one nicely underplayed gag, all of the door frames in both Williams’s mansion and studio are 5” 6’ to accommodate him, forcing Finley to grotesquely contort his body to get through them. The ingenue and Finley’s obsession is played by Jessica Harper, who projects wholesomeness and likability even as she proves to be just as ambitious as both Finley and Williams. Finally, four key musical frontmen play the contract employees of Williams’s conglomerate who are tasked with delivering his music to the masses, packaged and repackaged to fit the latest trend: Archie Hahn, Jeffery Comanor, and Peter Elbling front doo-wop band The Juicy Fruits, surfer band The Beach Bums, and shock-rockers The Undeads in turn, with Gerrit Graham added to the final band as the lead singer intended to carry the Faust role written by Finley (and which he’d intended for Harper). The changing bands, cynically sold as the next hot thing, are a powerful conceit, explicitly accusing mass media and mass entertainment in the grinding down of art and artists, while implicitly criticizing the (teenage?) audience that drives the evil empire with their undiscerning consumption. (There’s some suspicion in the documentary material on this disk that this theme wasn’t understood by the distribution people at Fox, who tried to sell the movie to the same teens that were being satirized, with mixed results.)

The De Palma hallmarks are all there — fully developed, in a surprisingly early entry in his oeuvre. It has his Hitchcock homage, an attack in a shower a la Psycho. It has his split-screen, here serving a truly tense scene: two angles on the same band rehearsal allow unsuspecting dancers and musicians to run into a time bomb that’s been planted in a rolling prop car, with the cameras following each as the car comes closer and closer together and eventually (after several minutes, during which the bomb’s ticking is heard throughout) reaches them just at the moment of mayhem. Another De Palma specialty is shown off in the long final scene, the Williams-Harper wedding sequence. Using the experience he’d gained with documentary-style continuous shooting for Dionysus in ’69, De Palma put all of the cameramen in costume as members of William’s ubiquitous press photographers. De Palma’s choreographers-cum-crowd-wranglers were tasked with organizing the scene’s overall action: the primary actors had lines, blocking, and marks to hit; other actors had specific bits of business they had to fit in; the remaining extras mostly had to stay out of the way. Then the entire sequence was filmed in one go, with everything taking place in real time pretty much as it does in the final film. De Palma had to trust that he would have enough varied footage to cut together to tell his story; the end result (reportedly from only two takes) feels “real” in a sort of hyped-up, media-exaggerated way — furthering the overall theme of corporations manufacturing and selling packaged, inartistic experiences.

Reminds me of:

Rocky Horror, obviously . . . . I love The Rocky Horror Picture Show as much as the next seventies kids, but Phantom has far more going on than Richard O’Brien’s goof on RKO B-pictures ever did. Rocky gets its shocks (and, frankly, most of its value) from transgression and its twisted one-to-one cooption of each beat from square, classic horror movies; that’s made clear from its first scene (listing the science fiction and horror films it will cite) to last (where the RKO logo is literally the portal back to the alien world). There’s no real social satire in Rocky beyond its minimal critique of the “straight world” suburbia of Denton contrasted with the freaks and the freak nature that apparently exists in everyone. The joys of Rocky really surface when the movie is beside-the-point, just a canvas for a communal experience where theatergoers yell and dance and throw things at the screen. Phantom, in contrast, actually rewards close watching; like all De Palma films, it’s a beautiful object which opens up to reveal hidden themes and ideas.

Of course both Rocky and Phantom have great music. Williams’s songs and score are just perfect; it’s a bonus that several of the numbers are intended to mimic and poke fun at certain popular rock styles to be sung by the three iterations of Swan Enterprises' house musicians reconstituted as 1950’s greasers, 1960’s surf dudes, and 1970’s shock rockers (like Alice Cooper). Every time Williams composed for the the screen, he turned out exceptional work: The Muppet Movie, the “intentionally bad” songs for the songwriters in Ishtar, Bugsy Malone (which has subsequently been turned into a stage musical), A Star is Born. I wish he’d been given as many chances over the years to score films as the (admittedly also awesome) Randy Newman. (Interestingly, given this movie’s plot point of a composer creating “the first rock version of ‘Faust,’” Newman wrote his own (not very successful) Faust in the mid-1990’s; I have the concept album.)

The sequence of the bomb being placed in a prop car trunk is a clear echo of Welles’s famous opening shot for Touch of Evil, where the camera follows a bomb-laden car through a border crossing in continuous real-time; the double-framing is almost a one-upmanship in terms of technical prowess. It’s not as beautiful as some of his other split-screen work (I’m very partial to images in Blow Out) but it is chillingly functional. I’m sure De Palma put in a zillion more directorial homages beyond Hitchcock and Welles; I’m too dense to find them, but I’ll say (betraying my personal obsessions again) that the ever-present cameras and Williams’s console of spying video screens reminds me of Dr. Mabuse in general and specifically of my favorite, Lang’s The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.

But then — the guilt!

This movie has plenty of recognizable character actors and repeat De Palma performers, but I was particularly bothered by Archie Hahn, one of the three contract musicians and the lead singer of the first number, the Juicy Fruits’ “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye” — he felt so familiar to me, like an old friend you recognize at a party and just can’t place. I looked at his long credits list in IMDb for a while before it came to me: He has that literally-five-seconds-long role in This is Spinal Tap as the hotel employee delivering room service to the band, with the absolutely perfect line delivery: “Thank God! Civilization!!”

Watching Paul Williams’s performance and listening to his songs, and then seeing him on this disk’s extras (in particular a long interview conducted by his friend, director Guillermo Del Toro) reminded me yet again of the apparently superlative 2011 documentary about Williams’s career and fight with drug addiction, Paul Williams Still Alive. It’s on my neverending list of films to see, and now it bumps up a notch or two.

Actor William Finley thinks that the Phantom costume he helped design — full-head mask, black leather body, cape — was ripped off for Darth Vader in Star Wars VI: A New Hope, specifically the blue-and-red light-up pushbuttons on the chest. This is in the BTTG section and not the RMO section because, full admission: I would never have noticed this.

Pitch:

I think that you are either grabbed by the very first moments — the Juicy Fruits singing their 1950’s pastiche — or you aren’t. All of the show’s humor and appeal is right there. Or if you’re more of an old-school horror aficionado, the sequence where Finley is transformed into the monster is perfect — genuinely disturbing yet still funny and a clear connection to the horror films of the past.

* Pencils down for me: Now that I’m done writing this #WTW (and you, theoretically, are done reading it), it’s time to really dig deep into Phantom of the Paradise by exploring every corner of The Swan Archives. This tribute site is one of the best I’ve ever seen on the web — beautifully written and designed — and while it helped me avoid some obvious mistakes here, I promised myself that I wouldn’t indulge in their scene-by-scene visual analysis, their extensive production and release history, or their long list of artifacts and collectibles until after I’d posted my own hastily considered points, lest I outright steal their work. They carried the torch for Phantom for such a long time — becoming the official owners of the film’s outtakes and other cut scenes — that when it came time for Arrow Films and Shout! Factory to create these definitive editions in 2014, it was this site (the “Principal Archivist”) who provided all these extras to the two companies. It’s a master class in how fandom should work. Please go there now!

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#WTW: Thieves Like Us

(#WhatThomWatched six!)

Thieves Like Us

(Robert Altman, 1974; MGM DVD, also available on Blu-Ray)

Everyone understands the idea of product placements in movies and television shows, ranging from subtle (corporate logos in 2001: A Space Odyssey) to obnoxious (the McDonald’s-funded Mac and Me, e.g.; Cracked has this one nailed), to knowing self-parody (twenty-odd years ago, Wayne’s World had Mike Myers declaiming “Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor!” while holding up a Pizza Hut box). But the constant appearance of Coca-Cola in Thieves Like Us doesn’t feel anything like advertising; instead, it’s just the most obvious textural detail in what might be the best representation of the Depression-era American South in all cinema. Coke is everywhere: advertised on round tin signs at every store, of course, but also sponsoring the State Penitentiary; its familiar bottles grasped by many characters (most often by Shelley Duvall’s Keechie), but also, empty, lined up on mantels and porches; and in one scene, hawked from a vendor’s truck in the town square, with seemingly every kid in the county running up with their nickels. Coke represents an affordable luxury (sometimes just barely so); as such it’s also an actual working part of the Southern economy (again, so slightly; at five cents a pop it can’t fix everything). It’s also a still-current symbol for nostalgia that seems to have always been nostalgic.

Equally ubiquitous in the world of Thieves: radio. Characters listen to the radio for important plot points, of course; our lead Bowie (Keith Carradine) wouldn’t know the fate of his fellow bank robbers without a radio in his car. But radio is fundamental to the 1930’s in every way: it’s in the background of many scenes both audibly and visibly; characters often listen to the same programs from different vantage points or sets, and the radio’s content always comments on the primary action. Most boldly, Altman sometimes allows the stream of radio noise to slip away from realism and into direct dialog with the film’s images; for example, as Keechie and Bowie edge into a physical relationship, a radio dramatization of Romeo and Juliet’s love sonnet plays out and loops back and back again to repeat portions of the dialogue and narration verbatim.

Similarly to many of Altman’s best movies, Thieves Like Us depends less on plot and incident and more on character and tone. Its ending might be its weakest point, since the conventions of a crooks-on-the-run yarn demand that the law must eventually catch up. But in contrast with that possibly purposely brief resolution, the center of the film is gloriously stretched out and extended. Carradine’s character went a bad way when he was impossibly young, just a teenager, and he sees himself as an inevitably bad person even as we (and Duvall’s character) can easily see all of his good. He falls in love with Duvall while laid up in hiding in her barn after an injury, and his weeks of recovery away from his partners and safe from discovery allow the two of them to play out a fantasy, a different life of domesticity for them both. As simple as the idea may be, and as quick as it is to sketch out in words, Altman instead chooses to allow these scenes to go on at length while the world outside seems to stand still, and their new life is allowed to get as far as a little house of their own and future plans apart from Carradine’s criminal past. When the wheel begins to turn again, the viewer is crushingly aware of what the couple will lose. That languorous, idyllic center of the movie is quite literally the pause that refreshes. 

(Hmm — clearly Coke is on my mind.)

Reminds me of: 

For all of his brilliance Altman seems to be polarizing and I am firmly in the pro- camp, as future #WTW postings are sure to prove. There are lots of connections between Thieves and his other work but the most obvious to me is his use of sound here (the endless radio broadcasts, encompassing the news, commercials, “Gang Busters” and other famous serials) akin to M.A.S.H. and the camp’s P.A. announcements, or Nashville and Hal Phillip Walker’s megaphone car. In terms of story, Thieves Like Us obviously bears comparison to Bonnie and Clyde; where Penn’s movie chose to focus on the Barrow Gang’s presage of celebrity culture, and the couple’s fascination with fame, Bowie in Thieves desperately wants to be normal, unknown, the opposite of notorious. He and his co-criminals do scour the newspapers and the airwaves for any mention of their adventures, but — at least for Bowie — it seems more a practicality intended to keep them one step ahead of the police. There’s very little celebration among the outlaws, here; crime isn’t a catalyst for sexuality, as in Gun Crazy, or a shared bond, as in The Honeymoon Killers — it's just necessary for survival.

But also — the guilt! 

Among the comparisons I can draw, I can’t compare Altman’s film to the other high-profile movie that was made from the same Edward Anderson source novel, Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night — I’ve never seen it. I also never watch an Altman without feeling guilty that I don’t watch him more often. His films are fine literature in a world that’s increasingly tuning out for the movie equivalent of tweets and listicles. Hopefully #WTW will shame me into rewatching some of the best — California Split, The Player, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 3 Women — and also spur me into hunting down some of the ones I’ve never seen — I hear there’s a new-ish release of Brewster McCloud, for instance.

Pitch: 

Amongst all the intertwining of the criminal life and run-of-the-mill life in 1937 Mississippi, there’s a brilliant scene where Carradine’s partners (played by John Schuck and Bert Remsen) practice for a bank job with Remsen’s girlfriend and her kid brother playing the bank employees, chairs up on a table to represent teller’s cages, literally a grown-up’s game of make believe. When things go sour in the play-acting version, you can sure bet things won’t be any sweeter in real life.

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