This 1943 movie follows the trials and tribulations of violinist Erique Claudin ( Claude Rains) who is dismissed from his job once it is discovered that one of his hands is suffering from arthritis, unfortunately, Claudin had been anonymously spending his twenty years’ worth of earnings on singing lessons for the beautiful Christine Dubois ( Susanna Foster), who he has been secretly devoted to all those years, and now he can’t even pay the rent for his crummy apartment. There have been many adaptations of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera, from Lon Chaney’s brilliant silent version in 1925 to Andrew Llyod Webber’s Broadway musical smash, but in 1943 Universal Pictures took their own shot at this classic tale, just so they could add another star in their line-up of Universal Monsters, this one with Claude Rains as the disfigured maestro obsessed with a beautiful girl.Īside from a masked man running around the Paris Opera House, and his obsession with a young soprano, there isn’t much similar to that of Gaston Leroux’s novel and what we see in this film, at best, this film can be called a “loose adaptation” of the source material.

Phantom of the opera songs 1925