Been a while since we saw a film in colour, hey? Karloff came back to Universal for this one, which is quite a difference from the films we’ve seen lately; apart from being in colour, it’s a damn sight more expensive and, at 86 minutes, markedly longer than those Columbia B films. But Karloff is still the mad doctor here, albeit of a different kind… This was intended as a sequel to Universal’s 1943 Phantom of the Opera—a story which neither needs nor wants a sequel, really—so they bought the rights to a play that, as far as I know, had nothing to do with Phantom and then changed it about so the final film had nothing to do with the Phantom story nor indeed the original play… On the plus side, it does have the 1943 film’s sets (themselves reused from the 1925 version) and its colour as well, so if nothing else it’s a pretty handsome production. And, alas, I didn’t think it was much else; it generally didn’t seem to know entirely what it was trying to be, ending up kind of negligible as horror/suspense and as a music film too… for a film with so much singing in it, too, I found the music ftankly kind of crap; director George Waggner had been a songwriter before he was a director, and, well, he wasn’t at full capacity in this instance… Alas even more, neither was Karloff, who was running on kind of low wattage here; the Nice Young Couple played by Susanna Foster (star of Phantom ’43) and Turhan Bey do actually outshine him. The story’s attempt to create a mystery over the previous prima donna’s disappearance is immediately undone by showing what happened within the first reel, so it wastes that as well. It’s not bad but it really should’ve been better than it was.
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