Phantom of the Opera
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1:26:03
By October 1943, trade papers
cited story troubles and blared

1:26:08
"Eddy out, Bey in"
as Turhan Bey signed on to The Climax.

1:26:12
Arthur Lubin was still set to direct, but
Claude Rains' availability was in question.

1:26:17
The day after Phantom wrapped, he
signed a contract with Warner Brothers,

1:26:21
and he was more keen to make
a picture like Passage to Marseille

1:26:25
than Return of the Phantom.
1:26:30
By November, The Hollywood Reporter
said that there would be

1:26:33
"no sequel to Phantom".
1:26:34
The Climax went ahead,
in Technicolor, on the same sets,

1:26:39
under the direction of its producer,
George Waggner,

1:26:41
with Susanna Foster as a diva menaced
by theatre physician, Boris Karloff.

1:26:46
Though similar, The Climax failed
to duplicate Phantom's popularity.

1:26:50
Almost from the beginning,
The Phantom proved rife for rip-offs,

1:26:54
parodies and remakes.
1:26:56
Claude Rains appeared on Fred Allen's
radio show in February 1943,

1:27:00
in a skit titled
The Phantom of Carnegie Hall.

1:27:03
An Argentine TV serial
of the early 1950s starred

1:27:07
Narciso Ibáñez Menta as the phantom.
1:27:10
Now here, Christine has just made her
debut as Marguerite in Gounod's Faust,

1:27:16
an homage to the original Leroux story.
1:27:18
We see her in her "heaven-ascent" dress,
1:27:21
and as the camera pans over,
in red at the back of the shot,

1:27:24
you see her Mephistopheles.
1:27:27
Other television phantoms
have included Charles Dance

1:27:30
as a phantom with a father fixation,
whose face we never see,

1:27:33
and the fixated father
was played by Burt Lancaster.

1:27:36
Maximilian Schell portrayed the phantom
in a Robert Halmi production for TV,

1:27:41
and in 1974 a riff titled
The Phantom of Hollywood

1:27:45
starred Jack Cassidy as an old-time actor
scarred in a studio fire,

1:27:49
running amok in the genuine ruins
of the MGM lot.

1:27:53
Other riffs on Phantom include Brian
De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise,

1:27:59
Phantom of the Ritz,
in which a scarred 1950s drag racer


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