The Rocky Horror Picture Show may have become the preeminent cult movie by turning gothic horror into a campy rock musical in 1975, but just one year earlier Brian De Palma got there first with inarguably the oddest film of his career: The Phantom of the Paradise. Obviously, De Palma’s flick didn’t go on to play midnight screenings in rep theatres for 37 years and counting. It didn’t even play in theatres for more than a few weeks (well, except for in Winnipeg, where it inexplicably became a local cult hit that continues to this day). However, time has been kind to the gonzo/satirical/horror/thriller/rock/musical/comedy/pop culture pastiche (whew!). A cavalcade of ideas, homage, technical trickery, gags, and cultural commentary, the movie is inevitably a hit-and-miss affair, yet no less fascinating for it. There are more ideas here (good and bad) than in several of the director’s later efforts combined; were it not for that little $100 million midnight movie that came out a year later, there would be nothing else quite like it.
Mixing and matching plot elements from The Phantom of the Opera, Faust, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, the film stars the recently deceased William Finely as Winslow Leach, one of those unheralded starving-artist types. Specifically, he’s a musician whose talent and vision are betrayed by his, well, gawky appearance. Winslow is working on his masterpiece, a “rock canata” of Faust, when he’s heard by Swan (Paul Williams), the seedy owner of Death Records. Swan steals one of Winslow’s songs, and when the young writer tries to claim his rights, he’s framed for a crime and imprisoned. Winslow breaks out only to have his face seared by a record press and his voice permanently damaged.
So, he does what any rational person would do in those circumstances. He dons a cape, mask, and leather costume and haunts Swan’s new club, The Paradise, quickly setting off an explosion to murder some untalented “artists” murdering his song. Swan then finds the broken man and inks him to a soul-stealing deal with his company, allowing Winslow to finish his canata for his beloved (Jessica Harper, who would cement her genre legend status a few years later with Suspiria) while Swan secretly beds, drugs, and makes the woman a star. Do you think Winslow will allow this story to end well, given that he is a scarred phantom hungry for revenge?
A bizarre film to be sure, and one that could only be made in the director-driven studio system of the ’70s. Coming into this project, De Palma started his career as an underground New York filmmaker with weird pseudo-Godard film experiments like Murder a la Mode or Hi, Mom (starring a pre-Scorsese Robert De Niro) before breaking into the exploitation movie mainstream with his first Hitchcock homage Sisters. Phantom of the Paradise feels like a project caught somewhere between his experimental days and his future crafting tongue-in-cheek Hollywood thrillers. Horror clichés are gently mocked, honored, and referenced throughout (including possibly the best Psycho shower parody ever filmed), with De Palma mixing together seemingly every element he loves and loathes about the genre.
It can be watched as a deeply self-conscious pastiche or simply as a solid straight genre entry, with the writer/director crafting some technically wondrous scenes like a split-screen bombing. The filmmaker would later dial back the parody elements in his thrillers and horror movies, like Carrie or Blow Out, but De Palma’s film geek wit and the dark comedy on display in Phantom of the Paradise can be found in all of his genre work if you look/laugh hard enough.
De Palma’s take on the music industry is even more merciless than his treatment of horror, presenting it as a business controlled by record executives who know today’s hit is tomorrow’s wash-out and the next day’s nostalgia. He hilariously has Swan’s house band the Juicy Fruits transform from a greasy-haired doo-wop group to a surfer party band and finally into gothic schlock rockers a la Kiss (who didn’t exist before the film…hmm…) over the course of the film, and also shows the producer thrilled by the publicity of having a rock star assassinated on stage.
In Phantom of the Paradise, artists are robbed of their talent and ideas to perpetuate the business of pampered tastemakers. It’s a vision of art and commerce that De Palma knew well from the film industry and his main villain/collaborator Paul Williams knew from the music industry. Williams was an award-winning songwriter at the time, who worked behind the scenes to craft the career of many artists’ years, and clearly got De Palma’s joke. In addition to playing Swan to sleazy perfection, Williams wrote all the songs on the Oscar-nominated soundtrack, which mock and perfect virtually all the pop music styles of his day. The movie is really a partnership between De Palma and Williams, since a musical isn’t much without the music, and Williams delivered some definitive parodies to match De Palma’s endless supply of baroque imagery.
The Phantom of the Paradise was never a mainstream hit for a reason. To appreciate the movie requires a background in all of the high-and-low-brow cultural obsessions that tickled De Palma and Williams in the ’70s, as well as a healthy sense of camp and irony. The film is an assault on the senses in a delightfully excessive ’70s way. If it speaks to your guilty pleasures, there are few films out there more riotously entertaining. If not, there will be no film you find more irritating. However, I choose to ignore the screaming voices of the latter audience on this one. The film is a riotous explosion of ideas, goofs, and images, its two collaborators given a blank cheque by a studio to bring their wacko vision to life.
It might not have the same outcast-baiting themes of Rocky Horror Picture Show, but in many ways Phantom of the Paradise is the superior comedy/horror rock opera. At the very least, it deserves a similar cult of supporters outside of France and Winnipeg. If you’ve got a sweet tooth for oddball cult films, this isn’t to be missed and could very well end up being one of your favorites. Few filmmakers can craft a deranged genre outing like Brian De Palma, and this movie represents the director at his most unhinged. In this case, that’s a good thing.
The Phantom of the Paradise will screen at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema on August 10 (at 11:30 pm) and August 13 (at 9:15pm).
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Phil Brown writes about film for Toronto Standard.
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