Empire Down: The Phantom of the Opera/The Gorgon (Patreon)

Hammer's five-pictures-per-year deal with Columbia seems to have worn everybody down. By the early 1960s, Terence Fisher has gone from shooting classics like The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula to misfires like The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll and The Brides of Dracula. But Jekyll and Brides were Fisher desperately lampshading script problems. With The Phantom of the Opera, we have a first: Fisher almost completely screwing the pooch. The Phantom of the Opera looks wrong. The Phantom's lair is an overlit grey that's shot mostly in the wide, Fisher seemingly has no idea how to shoot opera, and he can't make his setpieces come together for the life of him (he shoots this movie more like an Archers picture when it needs to look like James Whale). The script is also a shitshow (producer Anthony Hinds writing as John Elder), seemingly unable to figure out who the fuck the Phantom actually is. There's some interesting stuff about bourgeois aesthetes who long to possess women, but nothing that's not done better in other Hammer films. The only scene where the movie comes to life is when Patrick Troughton emerges for three minutes, and bizarrely, Fisher's failings go out the window for a bit. Good old Patrick Troughton; he can make any mediocre Terence Fisher or Ray Harryhausen movie start to work.

With The Gorgon, Fisher kicks off his renaissance era which will give us gems like Dracula: Prince of Darkness and The Devil Rides Out. There's more of an unfolding story to The Gorgon than Phantom; we discover that a town is living an evil lie because the truth is much worse. We get an effective story about abusive misogyny that develops the "bourgeois aesthetes who long to possess women" story much more than Phantom. Fisher's direction is his best in years, and the score is creepy. The movie cycles through one too many protagonists, and ultimately has to resolve into a generic "the monster must be destroyed" ending that cuts against the most interesting parts of the story. But we still get that creepy metamorphosis and Cushing and Lee playing against type. A cracked masterpiece at times, schlock at others, but one of Hammer's most memorable pictures of the era.