Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com:
This 1943 version of the horror story is more Technicolor musical than scare piece. Claude Rains plays the unfortunate, masked anti-hero, but he doesn't get the room to showcase a promising and sympathetic performance. Susanna Foster and Nelson Eddy, on the other hand, get plenty of screen time to warble. Well worth a visit just for the look of the film, which won an Oscar for cinematography. --Tom Keogh

Rating : - Too little phantom ,too much opera
If you set aside the movie of the Lloyd Webber musical this is probably the most lavish version of the Gaston Leroux warhorse ever made.It is visually sumptuous with superb sets which saw the team working on them garner a much deserved Oscar .The costumes are splendid and the colour photography luminous and eye catching .All this unfortunately is at the expense of the horror element and the scenes of drama and tension are subservient to depictions of operatic performance and ones of broad comedy .The suspense and fear of both the original book and the much lauded Lon Chaney Junior movie version are missing amid the welter of staged opera and bufoonery backstage

The Phantom is Enrique (Claude Rains)a former violinist at the Paris Opera who has lost his job due to his diminishing physical powers .A frail and middle aged man ,he loves from afar the young aspiring singer Christine DuBois (Susanna Foster) ,a talented artist but one languishing in the Chorus of the Opera House .Enrique is secretly paying for her singing lessons while seeking to make a new living as a composer.When a music puplisher cheats him over a piano concerto he has written Enrique attacks him and is disfigured by acid in the fight that results.He haunts the catacombs under the Opera House and threatens all those who stand in the way of Christine's advancement including her boyfriend and the other performers

Rains makeup is restrained and there is no attempt to replicate the grotesquerie of Chaney's make up or performance .It is a touching and beautifully judged performance by a great screen actor .The horror scenes when they arrive are effective -the chandelier scene in particular-but they are too few and far between and the plot gets sidelined by too many stodgily staged opera scenes and these ,too be absolutely blunt , are not at all well sung .Eddy and Foster are more Operetta than Opera .

The movie falls between two stools and eventually becomes more a mundane musical than a tale of terror and the performances Rains aoart are woeful.It looks good though and can be enjoyed for its decor but not for its intensity