Paving the way for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which would come out a year later, writer-director Brian De Palma’s rock opera takes highbrow influences—The Phantom of the Opera, Faust, and The Picture of Dorian Gray among them—and filters them through colored 1970s strobe lights. William Finley plays the title character, a ripped-off and rejected singer-songwriter who becomes horribly disfigured during a run-in with a record-pressing machine. Donning a cape and a metallic, bird-like mask, he seeks revenge on Swan, the famous music producer who stole his work and left him for dead. Swan is played by Paul Williams, a pop composer who wrote for everyone from the Carpenters to Barbra Streisand to the Muppets, and is also responsible for the music here. He clearly had a blast jumping among genres for Phantom of the Paradise; your mileage may vary depending on the wideness of your own musical palette. (My favorite song was the early doo wop/surf number “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye.”) The one really letting loose, however, is De Palma, experimenting with split screens, extended single takes, POV shots, freeze frames, and superimposed imagery. Early on Swan tells an aspiring singer (played by Suspiria’s Jessica Harper), “I would never let my personal desires influence my aesthetic judgment.” One could argue that from here, De Palma let personal desire determine most of his career.
(8/29/24)
