Movie review – “The Climax” (1944) **

Universal wanted a sequel to Phantom of the Opera but Claude Rains didn’t want to repeat his role and Nelson Eddy wasn’t available, so instead they came up with this MAWB (may as well be) sequel. It reprises many of the same elements as that first film – there’s a mad person played by a distinguished horror actor (Boris Karloff), Susannah Foster singing opera, technicolour, gorgeous sets (including the opera house), a handsome leading man (Turhan Bey), an impressive support cast (including Gale Sondegaard); the plot involves a man being obsessed with Foster, who also has to battle a jealous primma donna.

But it doesn’t have the name recognition of the Phantom or the crashing chandelier – or the underlying feature of love. So the story is weak at the core. The Phantom wanted to do the best for Foster, to support her career; that’s what made him kill. But Karloff’s hypnotist wants to stop Foster singing. (Another influence on this is Trilby, which actually would have been ideal material for a Phantom follow up but presumably they couldn’t get the rights. It’s a shame because I think that would have solved the problem - Svengali wanted Trilby to sing.)

There are other story problems too – Karloff doesn’t really do anything villainous apart from kill the singer at the beginning, and try to stop Foster singing. He should have done a few nastier things. You keep waiting for him to kill someone, especially the nasty primma donna but no – she lives; everyone lives - he doesn’t even kill Sondegaard. To top things off, his death scene is unmemorable – a fire at his house (which doesn’t wreck the big performance).

Bey is a little irritating. During the first opera show, they keep cutting back to him chewing on his program – it’s like he or the director or whoever went “what a great bit of actor’s business” and kept putting it in the film. There are too many close ups of him looking mooningly at Foster, and he’s too much like a stage door Johnny, running around after this girl (he’s meant to be a great composer but we don’t see that much of it – and the way he carries on when Foster can’t sing it’s like “What’s your problem, Bey? Afraid your meal ticket won’t come through?”)

Gale Sondegaard is wasted – it would have been better had she been in cahoots with Karloff. Foster is likeable and very pretty, with that great voice – it’s a shame her subsequent life had so much tragedy (although she lived to a great age.) The sets are tremendous - Deanna Durbin must have seen all the money and colour that this got and wondered why she was never treated this way at Universal.

This film goes to show you can still have all the elements, but if you don’t put them in the right order it’s not going to work.