1:02:00
The phantom, a ballet dancer
who had been tortured and scarred
1:02:04
by Mussolini's Fascists. He is hunted
by an American GI toting machine guns.
1:02:09
In the 1990s Wolfgang Petersen,
the director of the acclaimed Das Boot,
1:02:15
began preproduction on an elaborate
but aborted version of Phantom
1:02:19
that would have been set
in Nazi-occupied 1940s France.
1:02:23
Don't be surprised if a future phantom
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comes traipsing off
a Bosnian or Iraqi battlefield.
1:02:38
The presence of the great Romantic
pianist/composer Franz Liszt
1:02:42
clearly places this version of the story
in the early 1880s,
1:02:46
when Liszt was in his old age.
1:03:00
An ersatz Russian opera based on
Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony,
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The Masked Prince of Caucasia,
provided an opportunity
1:03:07
to rekindle audiences' memories
of the original masked ball,
1:03:11
and an opportunity for the phantom
to hide among the cast of the opera,
1:03:15
who were also wearing masks.
1:03:18
This becomes the backdrop for
the climactic fall of the chandelier,
1:03:22
which, like the unmasking scene, is one
of the great set pieces of the Leroux story.
1:03:41
Just starting a contract
at Universal was Hume Cronyn,
1:03:44
in a thankless part as a junior policeman.
1:03:46
He's already given his best line.
1:03:49
That was his other line.
1:03:51
Madame Lorenzi is played
by Nicole "Nicki" Andre,
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a French Czech who had scrubbed streets
in Vienna by Nazi order
1:03:58
before escaping from Europe.
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Nicki did not sing. She was dubbed
in Phantom by Marina Koshetz,