| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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THE PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
Rating: 
USA. 1974.
Director/Screenplay – Brian De Palma, Producer – Edward R. Pressman, Photography – Larry Pizer, Music/Songs – Paul Williams, Additional Music – George Aliceson Tipson, Special Effects – Greg Auer, Makeup – Tom Burman, Production Design – Jack Fisk. Production Company – Pressman Williams/Harbor Productions.
Cast:
William Finley (Winslow Leach), Paul Williams (Swan), Jessica Harper (Phoenix), Gerrit Graham (Beef), George Memmoli (Arnold Philbin), Jeffrey Comanor, Archie Hahn & Harold Oblong (The Juicy Fruits/The Beach Bums/The Undeads)
Plot: Composer Winslow Leach approaches recording company magnate Swan with his score for a rock opera based on ‘Faust’. But instead Swan steals the score and has Leach framed and jailed on heroin dealing charges. Escaping, Leach tries to take revenge against Swan but his face is hideously burned in accident with a record press. As Swan is about to open his new rock palace, The Paradise, with the debut of ‘Faust’, Leach hides in the building, sabotaging Swan’s efforts. Eventually he and Swan agree to a truce but when Swan starts vulgarizing the opera, Leach kills to stop him and to ensure that the beautiful Phoenix sings the lead part.
At the time of The Phantom of the Paradise, director Brian De Palma had emerged with four quirkily eccentric comedies – Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), Hi, Mom (1970) and Get to Know Your Rabbit (1971). However De Palma had not really garnered major attention until the striking psycho-thriller Sisters (1973). This psycho-thriller genre would for the next decade become De Palma’s most fertile directorial ground. (See below for Brian De Palma’s other titles).
The Phantom of the Paradise is one of Brian de Palma’s most enjoyable hour-and-a-halves. It was originally written back in 1969 when De Palma was still in experimental form. De Palma has designed the film as a parody of the oft-filmed The Phantom of the Opera (1925) – all conducted as a hilarious parody of seventies glitter rock. Although not just satisfied with The Phantom of the Opera, De Palma also throws in spoofs of Faust, The Picture of Dorian Grey and the Universal Frankenstein films. Not to mention a really funny parody of the Psycho (1960) shower sequence – the first and funniest of numerous Hitchcock quotes that would turn up in Brian De Palma’s films – with The Phantom wielding a toilet plunger in lieu of a knife. Just as much as the horror genre, De Palma conducts wild and hilarious swings at 70s glam rock – with De Palma and songwriter/star Paul Williams winding in send-ups of every imaginable musical style from The Beach Boys to Alice Cooper to retro-50s rockers like Sha Na Na.
Brian De Palma is a director with a love of flashy directorial style. Here he characteristically shows off – some of his use of anamorphic lenses and split-screen trickery proves a distraction, but the scenes with his camera conducting 360o pans, or animated musical bars and notes winding around William Finley as he composes are highly stylish.
Gnomic 5’2” Paul Williams gives a campy performance that, among the rest of the film’s lunatic exaggerations, seems only to be perfectly in place. He’s clearly having a lot of fun. Williams had a sporadic career as a musician and actor in film and tv – he appeared as an orangutang in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) and in Smokey and the Bandit (1977), had his own very short-lived tv series The Paul Williams Show (1979), voiced The Penguin in the various animated Batman tv series of the 90s, and wrote the theme music for The Love Boat (1977-86) and songs for several of the Muppet movies. But the film’s real scene stealer is Gerrit Graham as Beef, a macho parody that seems to combine David Bowie’s gender bender persona with Gary Glitter to quite hilarious regard. Gerrit Graham had debuted in Brian De Palma’s Greetings, made his first major performance in The Phantom of the Paradise and went on to appear in a lot of B horror movies throughout the 1980s, particularly those produced by Albert and Charles Band. Graham however has never been better than he was here. His attempts to walk in platform heels are guaranteed to have one in hysterics.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) the following year mined fairly much the same territory as The Phantom of the Paradise in its combination of monster movie clichés and parodistic glitter rock. This joyfully mad film is a perfect companion piece for the Rocky Horror set and is indeed a side of himself that Mr De Palma should visit again some time.
De Palma’s other genre films are:– Get to Know Your Rabbit (1971), Sisters/Blood Sisters (1973), Obsession (1976), Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984), Raising Cain (1992), Mission to Mars (2000) and Femme Fatale (2002).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999
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