:18:04
The Phantom of the Opera,
in sound, opened January 4, 1930.
:18:09
Three weeks later,
Lon Chaney signed with MGM
:18:12
for his first and only talkie,
The Unholy Three.
:18:16
But six months later,
The Man of a Thousand Faces was dead.
:18:20
The silent cinema died with him.
:18:29
Universal soon made itself Hollywood's
leading house of talking horror.
:18:34
I am Dracula.
:18:38
At the height of the horror boom in 1935,
:18:42
Universal announced a remake
of The Phantom of the Opera,
:18:44
to be produced on a grand scale.
:18:47
But overextended financially,
the Laemmles lost the studio.
:18:52
The new Universal management
forged ahead,
:18:54
promising its own ambitious Phantom.
:18:57
Mártha Eggerth, a Hungarian nightingale,
was announced as Christine,
:19:01
and Cesar Romero as Raoul.
:19:04
Psychologically wounded in World War l,
:19:07
the new Phantom was a shell-shocked
music master in contemporary Paris,
:19:12
whose mental derangement
made him imagine his disfigurement.
:19:16
Would he be played
by Karloff the Uncanny,
:19:19
or the great opera star Fyodor Chaliapin?
:19:23
1936 economy measures
at the new Universal,
:19:26
coupled with the British embargo
on horror films, banished this Phantom.
:19:31
Twentieth Century Fox
seized the moment,
:19:33
and cast Boris Karloff as a masked
Mephisto in Charlie Chan at the Opera.
:19:39
But like all good Universal monsters,
:19:42
the Phantom was only resting,
waiting for new life to come.
:19:46
By 1939, a son was born
to the House of Frankenstein,
:19:50
along with a daughter,
teenage songbird Deanna Durbin,
:19:54
whose box-office appeal
was also of monstrous proportions.
:19:59
She was the star of the studio.