Phantom of the Opera: 1983 Hungarian-style! With screencaps!
For years, I considered the 1983 Hungarian tv-movie of Phantom of the Opera to be unavailable. I hadn’t exhausted every avenue, perhaps, but it had proven much more difficult to find than any of the others. This is for two reasons. One, that it is only available on DVD in PAL format.
Two, that it is very, very bad. Not even the good kind of bad; and it’s marred even further by the inclusion of some actual dialogue from Gaston Leroux, shoehorned into a completely unlike plot and character.
This Phantom is Sandor Korvin, conductor for the Budapest Opera and newlywed to Elena, also known as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. He’s that guy from Judgment at Nuremberg, which I’ve never seen. Anyway. Elena is about to make her debut in Faust, but she’s not very good. Korvin doesn’t seem to mind, and there’s some sappy nonsense about reforming old bachelors. It seems, however, that it’s not her bad singing that gets Elena panned--it’s the face she won’t sleep with the Opera’s chief patron, Baron something, who I recognized as Grimesby Roylott in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes story, “The Speckled Band.” (That’s the one where he comes over to 221B and bends a poker to show how manly he is. That was funny.) He arranges for her to get booed and badly reviewed, so she responds by helpfully throwing herself in the Danube.
Korvin goes nuts, kills some guy he’d paid to applaud Elena (which just goes to show where his moral compass was to begin with), steals his cat, and kills the reviewer, who reveals that it was that Baron guy. During the course of their fight, they manage to both start an inexplicably quick-burning fire and knock over a bottle of acid onto Korvin’s face. I haven no idea why this guy has acid lying around in his office. This is the first of many convenient contrivances the movie offers, presumably to avoid having to solve the problems of the script. Oh, and if you ever get acid flung in your face, don’t put your hands on it. That’s what I’ve learned from this film.
Years pass. And here we are, still in Budapest, because apparently Paris just isn’t that important. There’s a new girl in the chorus, and you guessed it: she looks just like Elena! Only with bigger hair! Jane Seymour seems to dig the big hair thing. Every movie I see her in, it gets poofier. Her hair gets her noticed by not just the now-deformed Korvin but the brash young British director they’ve brought in, Michael York, who spends the rest of the film lamenting the fact that he’s the only actor in it. Dr. Quinn is saucy, ambitious and slightly less temperamental than the reigning diva, so she gets to enjoy the attentions of not one but two men who love her for her many, er, talents. Korvin installs Dr. Quinn in “a little place by the opera,” where she is instructed by him. Her nights, as he says, are her own. And the hussy uses them to sleep with Logan. Until, that is, he’s nearly choked to death at the public bath, into which he wears a towel.
So. Dr. Quinn is out, and the other diva’s back in, presumably because she’ll sleep with the Baron guy and Logan hasn’t been approached while semi-nude and told to stay away from her. It still doesn’t really explain why he broke up with her by yelling at her about her singing in front of everyone. That was kind of uncalled for, even under the circumstances. In this case, Raoul really is a dick. Bad!fic authors rejoice!
In her misery, Dr. Quinn decides to go to the requisite masked ball. Characteristic of people in movies forced to go in fancy dress, she wears a rather uninspired outfit with a feathery mask she hardly ever has on. This, presumably, is to make sure the audience knows it‘s her. She dances with random people and then, in an extended slow-motion sequence of utter uselessness, meets up with her Phantom. He’s wearing a mask that makes him look “like anybody else”; if “anybody else” is taken to mean frowny and shiny. But it’s good enough. He says her name a lot and spins her around. This upsets her stomach, so she runs out of the ball and into the Baron guy’s car. Which is very silly of her, as she knows she doesn’t want what the Baron’s offering, whereas maybe the Phantom just wants to take her to dinner or something. She doesn’t know!
However, the car’s been hijacked by the Phantom’s random servant guy, who seems to adore him and follow him around everywhere. The reason is never explained. So instead of going to the Baron guy’s pad, they end up at Korvin’s. Then a bunch of boring stuff happens, including attack crows and the diva finding Baron guy’s body hanging from a Faust prison set piece. Dr. Quinn wakes up in the Phantom’s lair. Like all the other films, this place is a mess. Leroux’s Erik was desperate about appearing middle-class; you can bet his place wasn’t strewn with straw and broken stonework and slime. He’s supposed to be good at this stuff, you know? It’s supposed to take someone who’s followed him around for decades to find him.
So here’s where things get dicey. There is, suddenly, an insertion of totally accurate Leroux dialogue into a story that is in all other respects totally unlike. So you get some nice stuff about walking on Sundays and whether his real face isn’t just another mask to take off. It’s nice of the writer to have read the book, but this stuff just doesn’t have the heft it would if the characters hadn’t already turned me off so much. Leroux’s protagonists might have been made of cardboard, but at least it was nice, firm cardboard and not cut from the back of a cereal box that had already been in the garbage for a week.
In a stroke of genius, Korvin has saved his dead wife’s body (which opens up a whole ‘nother psychosexual dynamic) and dressed it in Dr. Quinn’s clothes. Since they are played by the same actress, they fit, and the police will never know it’s not really her! Especially since there’s no way to tell whether a corpse has been dead five minutes or five years! Conveniently for Logan, Korvin decides he needs to be the one to dump the body, instead of sending his inexplicably loyal stooge. Stoogy stays behind to watch Dr. Quinn, who has been instructed to sing, but he falls asleep instead. Like everything else in this movie, this convergence of plot point seems to have been developed to allow a character to perform some necessary action. In this case, Logan needs to be able to rescue her by following her voice and not encounter the Phantom
He does this. They go to the police, who are now willing to admit something bad’s going on. Logan devises a cunning plan to catch the Phantom by putting Dr. Quinn in the opera.
What I don’t understand is why in the next scene, she’s not singing at all but diva woman is back on stage. Dr. Quinn spends the opera looking nervously around at nothing. Apparently all she has to do to lure the Phantom from his dark lair is be on the scene. He’s got x-ray vision or something. The policeman, meanwhile, yawns in the orchestra seats, just below the chandelier.
Oh ho, you thought they’d forgotten the chandelier!
Not on your life. Korvin seems to think that his problems will be solved if he drops the chandelier on the guy’s head. Never mind the fact that the police have shown little to no interest in his exploits so far. Now, what happens next is very important. I want you to pay close attention.
The Phantom climbs down the chandelier’s chain and starts sawing away at a point above his head on the chain. Let me say that again: The Phantom cuts the chandelier down while standing on it. I used to draw stupid cartoons of stuff like that happening as a joke. I didn’t think anyone was stupid enough to actually do that. But I overestimated these guys.
While Korvin’s hacking away at the chain, the policeman decides to give up his seat to Dr. Quinn. She accepts, so that she can be under the fixture and so Korvin can see her as the chain starts to give way and feel really bad about it. I don’t know how he was going to get out of this mess even if he hadn’t seen her, but the result is he falls with the chandelier, which lands on him. Meanwhile, since this is all happening in slow-motion again, Logan has been able to get Dr. Q out of the way.
My current working theory is that they filmed the chandelier scene and then when someone looked at it and said, “Hey, isn’t he cutting himself down with the chandelier?” everyone saying “shit! Okay, I guess that’s the end of the movie!” The screen goes red and the credits roll.
It’s more than I can be expected to believe, except I’ve seen it myself. The general attitude towards the making of this film seems to have been “oh shoot, we don’t know how to get out of this corner--I know! We’ll have the reporter keep acid on his mantelpiece!” “Hmm, no nudity? Okay, Logan, wear a towel when you go swimming.” “Wait, he needs to actually rescue the girl? Okay, let’s send the Phantom out on a menial errand and have the girl’s voice lead Logan there.” This is pretty much in keeping with the most inadequate lip syncing I’ve ever seen in my life.
All told, it’s probably the worst version of Phantom of the Opera I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying quite a lot. I do, however, feel privileged to live in a world where I can readily obtain such things, if only for my obsessive edification.
Do not store hazardous chemicals where they're likely to get knocked over in a fight.
Subtlety: you're doing it wrong
Diva!Woman wonders why her understudy's hair is so much bigger than hers...
...while Logan explains what Dr. Quinn's got to look forward to...
...here. The hussy!
She actually checks the mirror to determine whether this photograph looks like her.
Even Phantoms have friends. Who they keep in cages.
Notice the towel.
Apollo's Lyre: You're... oh, you know.
"No one will recognize me!"
"Or me!"
Logan is finally pissed that he's the only person acting.
He quickly bribes someone to make this movie shorter.
Meanwhile, Dr. Quinn has woken up in different clothes! Oh naughty Phantom! However, her hair is magnificent.
Though she finally seems not to feel that way about it.
The Phantom gives her the finger, even though she hasn't pulled off his mask yet.
There she goes! This Phantom claims that this is not a mask beneath a mask. I don't believe him, however. Unless he gained lots of weight on his face since his accident.
In a fit of comic irrelevance, this boy (who we never see again) eats all his papa's dessert.
He did not think this out properly.
Let's see that again:
Two, that it is very, very bad. Not even the good kind of bad; and it’s marred even further by the inclusion of some actual dialogue from Gaston Leroux, shoehorned into a completely unlike plot and character.
This Phantom is Sandor Korvin, conductor for the Budapest Opera and newlywed to Elena, also known as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. He’s that guy from Judgment at Nuremberg, which I’ve never seen. Anyway. Elena is about to make her debut in Faust, but she’s not very good. Korvin doesn’t seem to mind, and there’s some sappy nonsense about reforming old bachelors. It seems, however, that it’s not her bad singing that gets Elena panned--it’s the face she won’t sleep with the Opera’s chief patron, Baron something, who I recognized as Grimesby Roylott in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes story, “The Speckled Band.” (That’s the one where he comes over to 221B and bends a poker to show how manly he is. That was funny.) He arranges for her to get booed and badly reviewed, so she responds by helpfully throwing herself in the Danube.
Korvin goes nuts, kills some guy he’d paid to applaud Elena (which just goes to show where his moral compass was to begin with), steals his cat, and kills the reviewer, who reveals that it was that Baron guy. During the course of their fight, they manage to both start an inexplicably quick-burning fire and knock over a bottle of acid onto Korvin’s face. I haven no idea why this guy has acid lying around in his office. This is the first of many convenient contrivances the movie offers, presumably to avoid having to solve the problems of the script. Oh, and if you ever get acid flung in your face, don’t put your hands on it. That’s what I’ve learned from this film.
Years pass. And here we are, still in Budapest, because apparently Paris just isn’t that important. There’s a new girl in the chorus, and you guessed it: she looks just like Elena! Only with bigger hair! Jane Seymour seems to dig the big hair thing. Every movie I see her in, it gets poofier. Her hair gets her noticed by not just the now-deformed Korvin but the brash young British director they’ve brought in, Michael York, who spends the rest of the film lamenting the fact that he’s the only actor in it. Dr. Quinn is saucy, ambitious and slightly less temperamental than the reigning diva, so she gets to enjoy the attentions of not one but two men who love her for her many, er, talents. Korvin installs Dr. Quinn in “a little place by the opera,” where she is instructed by him. Her nights, as he says, are her own. And the hussy uses them to sleep with Logan. Until, that is, he’s nearly choked to death at the public bath, into which he wears a towel.
So. Dr. Quinn is out, and the other diva’s back in, presumably because she’ll sleep with the Baron guy and Logan hasn’t been approached while semi-nude and told to stay away from her. It still doesn’t really explain why he broke up with her by yelling at her about her singing in front of everyone. That was kind of uncalled for, even under the circumstances. In this case, Raoul really is a dick. Bad!fic authors rejoice!
In her misery, Dr. Quinn decides to go to the requisite masked ball. Characteristic of people in movies forced to go in fancy dress, she wears a rather uninspired outfit with a feathery mask she hardly ever has on. This, presumably, is to make sure the audience knows it‘s her. She dances with random people and then, in an extended slow-motion sequence of utter uselessness, meets up with her Phantom. He’s wearing a mask that makes him look “like anybody else”; if “anybody else” is taken to mean frowny and shiny. But it’s good enough. He says her name a lot and spins her around. This upsets her stomach, so she runs out of the ball and into the Baron guy’s car. Which is very silly of her, as she knows she doesn’t want what the Baron’s offering, whereas maybe the Phantom just wants to take her to dinner or something. She doesn’t know!
However, the car’s been hijacked by the Phantom’s random servant guy, who seems to adore him and follow him around everywhere. The reason is never explained. So instead of going to the Baron guy’s pad, they end up at Korvin’s. Then a bunch of boring stuff happens, including attack crows and the diva finding Baron guy’s body hanging from a Faust prison set piece. Dr. Quinn wakes up in the Phantom’s lair. Like all the other films, this place is a mess. Leroux’s Erik was desperate about appearing middle-class; you can bet his place wasn’t strewn with straw and broken stonework and slime. He’s supposed to be good at this stuff, you know? It’s supposed to take someone who’s followed him around for decades to find him.
So here’s where things get dicey. There is, suddenly, an insertion of totally accurate Leroux dialogue into a story that is in all other respects totally unlike. So you get some nice stuff about walking on Sundays and whether his real face isn’t just another mask to take off. It’s nice of the writer to have read the book, but this stuff just doesn’t have the heft it would if the characters hadn’t already turned me off so much. Leroux’s protagonists might have been made of cardboard, but at least it was nice, firm cardboard and not cut from the back of a cereal box that had already been in the garbage for a week.
In a stroke of genius, Korvin has saved his dead wife’s body (which opens up a whole ‘nother psychosexual dynamic) and dressed it in Dr. Quinn’s clothes. Since they are played by the same actress, they fit, and the police will never know it’s not really her! Especially since there’s no way to tell whether a corpse has been dead five minutes or five years! Conveniently for Logan, Korvin decides he needs to be the one to dump the body, instead of sending his inexplicably loyal stooge. Stoogy stays behind to watch Dr. Quinn, who has been instructed to sing, but he falls asleep instead. Like everything else in this movie, this convergence of plot point seems to have been developed to allow a character to perform some necessary action. In this case, Logan needs to be able to rescue her by following her voice and not encounter the Phantom
He does this. They go to the police, who are now willing to admit something bad’s going on. Logan devises a cunning plan to catch the Phantom by putting Dr. Quinn in the opera.
What I don’t understand is why in the next scene, she’s not singing at all but diva woman is back on stage. Dr. Quinn spends the opera looking nervously around at nothing. Apparently all she has to do to lure the Phantom from his dark lair is be on the scene. He’s got x-ray vision or something. The policeman, meanwhile, yawns in the orchestra seats, just below the chandelier.
Oh ho, you thought they’d forgotten the chandelier!
Not on your life. Korvin seems to think that his problems will be solved if he drops the chandelier on the guy’s head. Never mind the fact that the police have shown little to no interest in his exploits so far. Now, what happens next is very important. I want you to pay close attention.
The Phantom climbs down the chandelier’s chain and starts sawing away at a point above his head on the chain. Let me say that again: The Phantom cuts the chandelier down while standing on it. I used to draw stupid cartoons of stuff like that happening as a joke. I didn’t think anyone was stupid enough to actually do that. But I overestimated these guys.
While Korvin’s hacking away at the chain, the policeman decides to give up his seat to Dr. Quinn. She accepts, so that she can be under the fixture and so Korvin can see her as the chain starts to give way and feel really bad about it. I don’t know how he was going to get out of this mess even if he hadn’t seen her, but the result is he falls with the chandelier, which lands on him. Meanwhile, since this is all happening in slow-motion again, Logan has been able to get Dr. Q out of the way.
My current working theory is that they filmed the chandelier scene and then when someone looked at it and said, “Hey, isn’t he cutting himself down with the chandelier?” everyone saying “shit! Okay, I guess that’s the end of the movie!” The screen goes red and the credits roll.
It’s more than I can be expected to believe, except I’ve seen it myself. The general attitude towards the making of this film seems to have been “oh shoot, we don’t know how to get out of this corner--I know! We’ll have the reporter keep acid on his mantelpiece!” “Hmm, no nudity? Okay, Logan, wear a towel when you go swimming.” “Wait, he needs to actually rescue the girl? Okay, let’s send the Phantom out on a menial errand and have the girl’s voice lead Logan there.” This is pretty much in keeping with the most inadequate lip syncing I’ve ever seen in my life.
All told, it’s probably the worst version of Phantom of the Opera I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying quite a lot. I do, however, feel privileged to live in a world where I can readily obtain such things, if only for my obsessive edification.
Do not store hazardous chemicals where they're likely to get knocked over in a fight.
Subtlety: you're doing it wrong
Diva!Woman wonders why her understudy's hair is so much bigger than hers...
...while Logan explains what Dr. Quinn's got to look forward to...
...here. The hussy!
She actually checks the mirror to determine whether this photograph looks like her.
Even Phantoms have friends. Who they keep in cages.
Notice the towel.
Apollo's Lyre: You're... oh, you know.
"No one will recognize me!"
"Or me!"
Logan is finally pissed that he's the only person acting.
He quickly bribes someone to make this movie shorter.
Meanwhile, Dr. Quinn has woken up in different clothes! Oh naughty Phantom! However, her hair is magnificent.
Though she finally seems not to feel that way about it.
The Phantom gives her the finger, even though she hasn't pulled off his mask yet.
There she goes! This Phantom claims that this is not a mask beneath a mask. I don't believe him, however. Unless he gained lots of weight on his face since his accident.
In a fit of comic irrelevance, this boy (who we never see again) eats all his papa's dessert.
He did not think this out properly.
Let's see that again: