Phantom of the Paradise

"They've really been entertained. They never want the show to end."

1974
91 minutes
Directed by Brian De Palma.
Starring William Finley, Paul Williams, Jessica Harper.

Since the advent of the internet, pretty much every movie that was initially lambasted has been reevaluated to some degree. “Overrated,” “underrated,” “obscure,” “hidden gem”—these terms are quickly becoming archaic, receding into that good night like Walkmen and rotary phones. When someone writes an entire book defending and reappraising “Showgirls,” you know we’ve hit peak revaluation madness.

Brian De Palma, that mad maestro of murder, has seen his films evaluated and reevaluated consistently for 40 years. Long chastised for giving preference to technical bravura over coherent writing and empathetic characters, De Palma is as polarizing a figure in American cinema as any. He has his legion of defenders, of course (yours truly included, to a degree), most notably Pauline Kael, who wrote gushing reviews bordering on orgasmic for The Fury and Blowout. But for every De Palma devotee, there’s another handful of detractors waiting to decry his visual indulgences, his embezzlement of formality, his undiluted love of pretty young women meeting the sharp end of stabbing objects.

Phantom of the Paradise, the sole musical in De Palma’s body of work, is now in the thralls of a cultural resurgence. The 1974 film starring William Finley as a desperate composer-turned-masked menace bombed when it came out, but almost immediately began to accrue a devoted crew of fans (in Winnipeg, Canada). Rocky Horror Picture Show, the proto-cult film, was still a year away from its release; De Palma’s film really had no ancestry, no lineage, and moviegoers didn’t know what to make of the rambling, shambling mess. Since the midnight movie movement wouldn’t be engendered for another year, Phantom of the Paradise’s fanbase didn’t become embroidered into the pop-culture consciousness like Rocky Horror or Pink Flamingos. Rocky Horror lived and thrived in squalid, claustrophobic movie theaters in the grimy parts of New York and Los Angeles; Phantom found a fanbase Winnipeg.

Phantom had never really had the major critical overhaul that De Palma’s other movies received, until recently. You can find some articles defending the film from the mid-aughts, though none do a very convincing job. But now, with a shiny new Blu-ray release and its selection as The Dissolve’s Movie of the Week, Phantom of the Paradise is finally getting its due. Which is unfortunate, since the movie kind of sucks.

The opening scene of Phantom, which features a gimmicky nostalgia band called The Juicy Fruits (though we don’t know they’re a nostalgia band yet), is at once vintage De Palma—manic, stroboscopic— yet oddly restrained. It’s one of two genuinely great scenes in the movie. The camerawork is mostly static and all-encompassing: of course our attention gravitates towards the lead singer, who looks an awful lot like Bill Paxton, as he hops around and sings his ode to Eddie (who killed himself…for love), but De Palma layers the humor with deft subtlety; the two backup singers (one baritone, one falsetto), both of whom could be rejects from a West Side Story revival, start a fight, grope a young women, and just generally act like jerkoffs, but they always manage to scramble back to the microphone just as their parts come up. The attention to detail here is stunning, and the lip-syncing is top-notch. The film’s composer Paul Williams, who also plays the sinister, villainous music mogul who owns the Juicy Fruits, crafts a song that’s simpatico with De Palma’s style: genuine but smarmy, a satirical yet loving wink to the cultural minutiae of the past.

De Palma eschews realism without succumbing to overt fantasy. His characters aren't really people, but they bleed like people; his plots don't involve common sense, but they function on a higher plane, that of pure entertainment. He creates fever dreams, works of artifice, but they're authentic, and they're pervaded by authentic passion. If he were a Batman villain, he could be the Admiral of Artifice. 

But for all their trickery, De Palma's films still have an organic feeling to them--the artifice isn't forced, or coerced. He's like a horticulturalist of plastic trees, manically trimming and shearing and keeping his polyurethane garden in check, but the material seems to blossom and grow under his guidance; De Palma’s virtuoso camera movements, immediately recognizable even to the most casual of moviegoers, work in tandem to cultivate the lurid material and melodramatic tone. In Blowout, a loving paradigm of moviemaking, De Palma is able to harness his prodigious talents to tell a story while still injecting copious amounts of suspense, like slow-acting poison coursing the viewers’ veins. It’s when he loses control of his material, of his actors, that De Palma gets into trouble (see: Bonfire of the Vanities, De Palma’s one undeniable disaster).

De Palma’s films always move rhythmically, and De Palma is as much a conductor as he is a director. This opening scene is some of his most fluid work. It’s the little things, really—the singers all jump, and the camera cuts as their feet hit the stage; the typography flickers on screen on the down beat, Broadway-style font with pulsating dots like so many flashing bulbs. The camera always cuts in tune with the music.

But then we meet our hero, Winslow Leach (William Finley), and the tone abruptly changes. I know Finley has his fair share of supporters (including Bret Easton Ellis, ew), but he’s awful. He seems to be operating on a different frequency than everyone else. The way he throws his head around while playing the piano feels more lampooning than it does loving. Whereas the Juicy Fruits are depicted as tacky but fun, Winslow is so full of himself, and so painfully un-self-aware, it’s hard to like him. You can feel the massive effort exerted on Finley’s part. He’s awkward and borderline creepy; the way he starts singing with the young girl Phoenix (Jessica Harper), and the way she just goes along with him feels disjointed from the world in which De Palma is working.

Normally, I expect wild fluctuations in tone from De Palma. It’s kind of inherent in his style, and it keeps things interesting. But Phantom of the Paradise is maybe the only De Palma film one can accuse of being boring. After that catchy opening number, we get a long POV shot of the evil music mogul (Paul Williams), and then a long, long take of Winslow playing piano unconvincingly. (The Juicy Fruits, trite as they are, appear to be legitimately playing and singing; Winslow looks like a high school thespian pretending to play piano by banging on arbitrary keys.) The timing and rhythm are off. Think of Carrie: after that gorgeous, slow-mo tracking shot of the girls’ locker room, De Palma doesn’t follow up with another slow tracking shot. It would be stupid— the effect of the long shot would be dulled by overuse.

Everyone has been talking about the film’s relevancy to modern music and film studios, those greedy bastards in suits who sap the artists’ energy for the bottom line. That’s great, but who cares if the film isn’t good? (Apparently a lot of people, actually.) De Palma’s brilliance stems from the way he uses his formal craftsmanship with such keen self-awareness, creating movies in love with the movies, and Phantom of the Paradise is rife with nods to older films. I kept from zoning out by looking for allusions to De Palma’s influences, so there’s that.

De Palma has always possessed the uncanny ability to craft great cinematic moments. Think of the prom in Carrie, or the hand reaching through the soil; the spinning shot of John Travolta playing his blank tapes in Blowout, or that wonderful opening POV shot; the elevator murder in Dressed to Kill; John Cassevettes exploding in The Fury. Even in his lesser films: consider the now-iconic scene of Tom Cruise dangling from the ceiling in the otherwise underwhelming Mission: Impossible; or the staircase shootout in The Untouchables. Phantom of the Paradise is no different. Beside the opening number, there’s a spectacular split-screen scene in which we see a bomb get planted in a car while stage performers rehearse, and we watch as the time-bomb car slowly rolls towards the victims, the ticking audible. Too bad the film lacks other moments like this.

But the biggest problem with the film is, oddly, the music. The opening song aside, most of the songs are forgettable, which is unbecoming of a De Palma picture. You don’t get a “Time Warp” or “Sweet Transvestite,” or even a “Dammit Janet.” A musical doesn’t work if the music isn’t memorable, and the cantata that Williams writes for Winslow is kind of lame. Music has always been immensely important in De Palma’s films, and he’s nabbed some of the best composers to pen scores for him (Herrmann, Pino Donaggio, John Williams), so the score here is doubly disappointing.

Phantom of the Paradise gets two pacts with the devil out of five.