The Monster of the Opera

Fresh off his success with “The Vampire and the Ballerina” (1960 – Italian title: “L’Amante del Vampiro”), Renato Polselli dives back into Gothic-tinged horror (black cats, frightened damsels in nightgowns, premature interments, dancing skeletons, supernatural curses, crumbling castles, etc.), envisioning his own unique blend of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897) and Gaston Leroux’s “The Phantom of the Opera” (1910). In fact, the film should have been entitled “The Vampire of the Opera” right from the start.

After a long, arduous production (1961-1964), the final result stands out for its pathetic back-and-forth between deadly dullness and unintentional humor. Practically nothing happens for long stretches of the story, resulting in the former, while the latter is a byproduct of the huge chasm between Renato Polselli’s characteristically lofty artistic ambitions – he takes himself so damned seriously – and the abysmally incompetent acting, dialogue, and everything else.

On the emotional front, the director repeatedly tries to dazzle with poetic and profound reflections (he even turns to Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac”), but those reflections frequently get lost in the translation to actual dialogue, giving rise to chuckle-inducing lines such as: “I’m not a sentimental woman, I’m primitive. I’ll never understand your love, so why do you blame me?”. Or this gem: “What is a kiss? A pledge properly sealed, a promise seasoned to taste, a vow stamped with the immediacy of lips, a rosy circle drawn around the word ‘love’…”.

Despite the high profile accorded to the erotic dimension, a distinctive trait of Polselli’s subsequent productions as well, it suffers here on account of the general zeitgeist, and in that respect, we can define this as a “sexually frustrated” film, inhabited by a bunch of incredibly horny characters forced to sublimate their respective urges, resorting to other activities (the vampire, unable to even penetrate his chosen victims’ necks, is forced to turn to a farmer’s pitchfork, while the dancers, caught up in uncontrollable Sapphic urges, take refuge in the notes of a Charleston).

All this sexual fever comes to a fitting climax in a frenzied finale where on one hand we witness a bizarre “musicarello” ballet where the protagonists appear to be under the influence of psychotropic drugs, and on the other hand we get to admire Polselli’s conception of hell, a place obviously filled with scantily clad women chained to walls.

If you’re looking for something better, you’ll have to wait for the psychedelic trash that the wonderful Renato brings to the screen in the legendary seventies. As one of the leading ladies puts it: “I want to soar into real art, art with a capital letter, great and eternal, to sigh with Hamlet, ‘To be or not to be… that is the question,’ but this is not it!”. It’s all in how you look at it.