THE CLIMAX (1944)

When Boris Karloff reported back at Universal to begin filming The Climax in February 1944, it was his first film in any genre for two years. He was fresh from his enormous success touring America with the stage show of Arsenic and Old Lace for roughly three years which proved highly lucrative for him and gave theatre audiences the chance to see more of the comedic skills hinted at in his last movie, 1942’s The Boogie Man Will Get You - which we’ve already discussed.

The Climax was originally intended as a direct sequel to the studio’s hit remake of The Phantom of the Opera (1943), a ravishingly beautiful and rare Technicolor reworking of their 1925 original. Mixed reviews had criticised Universal for watering-down the famously Grand Guignol tone in favour of turning it into a musical operetta to gain the maximum return on their investment. Even so, it was enough of a commercial success to warrant the studio going after Nelson Eddy, Claude Rains and Susanna Foster to secure their return for a proposed follow-up. However, negotiations only secured Foster’s reprise of her role, so the material was retooled under the guise of an adaptation of a play by Edward Locke.

The director was George The Wolf Man Waggner who enlisted his collaborator in werewolf matters Kurt Siodmak to handle the new script. Like its predecessor, The Climax is gorgeous to look at; the sets, recycled from both the previous iterations, along with the costumes retain the sumptuous gloss of the 1943 version. Less favourably it also recaptures the controversial operetta model, which is not everyone’s cup of tea (including this reviewer), and despite some aspects of Locke’s play reminds us so much of Gaston LeRoux’s basic source plot that it might as well be another Phantom remake.

At least Karloff fans get to see the horror maestro back to playing type and in stunning full colour. He

plays Dr Friedrich Hohner, nineteenth-century house physician to the performers of Vienna’s Royal Theatre. We learn immediately that in his own way he haunts the theatre with the same homicidal possessiveness as Rains’ Man in the Mask. A flashback details how ten years ago he throttled his beloved wife Marcelina (June Vincent) for the crime of allowing her talent to be enjoyed by the public instead of solely his private pleasure. “I only hate the thing that’s come between us – your voice”, he tells her with chilling understatement before his hands give her a terminal ovation.

The focus then shifts to the theatre’s current daily management issues, the largest of which is massaging the high-maintenance ego of established Prima Donna Mme. Jamila (Jane Farrar) who is threatened by the rise of superb ingénue Anne Klatt (Foster). Farrar and Foster essentially replay the same clear relationship dynamic they had in the 1943 Phantom as diva Biancarolli and Christine respectively. Surely a prettier surname for Anne could have been found, especially as the other characters pronounce it even more inelegantly as ‘Klott’. Blooper-spotters, when not being distracted by the chocolate box visuals, may also enjoy Thomas Gomez’s Count Seebruck breezing in with ‘The chestnut trees are in broom’ – a sweeping statement indeed. (Rewind to hear it like I did).

Much more palatable to listen to is the lavish and versatile music score reuniting the 1943 team of musical director Edward Ward and orchestrator Harold Zweifel. Vocal director William Tyroler rejoins them – his connection in fact going back even further to directing the 1925 opera orchestra. Incidentally, Waggner himself wrote the librettos for the operetta sequences that adorn or hamper the action according to one’s taste.

Another of the plus points of The Climax is the casting of Turhan Bey as young composer Franz

Munzer, giving him a main part worthy of his light leading man potential recently wasted upon lesser fare supporting roles such as in The Mummy’s Tomb and the Mad Ghoul (see reviews). Coincidentally Viennese by birth, the effortless suavity required fits him like an opera glove and makes him a worthy counterpoint of velvety tones to his rival Karloff.

There’s no need for us to remind ourselves of the further ways this film parallels the Phantom story. The points of departure (if not originality) are really those that are taken from Locke’s play, the evil protagonist of which uses hypnosis under the guise of medical treatment to control his female subject and a medicine that he commands her to take every day, thus robbing her of the gift she would otherwise share with the world. A subtle variation is that in the film Hohner feels an occult link to his dead wife, preserving her body in a white silk draped home chapel. He believes Anne’s voice belongs to her and by psychological sabotage it will be paranormally returned to Marcelina as its real owner, which doesn’t make much motivational sense since he was responsible for his wife’s talent being erased in the first place.  Furthermore, Locke allows Doctor Raymond in his play to ultimately feel remorse for his monstrous behaviour, a luxury not accorded the hell-bent Hohner of the movie.

There is a subtly macabre fun to be had in seeing Karloff’s pursuit of Anne and her “exquisite throat”

from first studying her in performance through his strictly non-medicinal grooming of her. Franz becomes gracefully frustrated to the point of kidnapping Anne with the aid of Gale Sondergaard, belying her usual genre territory as Hohner’s initially cold sentinel of a housekeeper Luise. She is revealed to having been playing the implausibly long game of working for Hohner all these years to gather enough evidence of his murdering Marcelina – I may have missed any personal connection she had justifying this if there was one. The atomiser medicine spray may be just what the doctor ordered but when examined by a chemist employed by Franz it is found to be nothing more than a lurid Technicolor green water. Even so, such is the doctor’s remote mental power over Anne that Franz even resorts to imploring the boy king (a precocious Scotty Beckett) to call for a command performance so she may get back on the horse and cure her psychosomatic condition on stage.

As Franz looks up from the prompt box, will our young song-bird have the courage to overcome her erstwhile captor’s mesmeric machinations? Sadly yes, resulting in the viewer being assaulted with finale attack-waves of high-pitched budgerigar trills that seriously grate on even this musical fan’s sensibilities. (In spite of the style, Foster’s voice itself is hugely impressive).

To balance the cloyingly twee, Karloff manages to bow out with a little masculine grit, setting fire to his chapel and going down slumped protectively over his self-maligned beloved. Now that’s a bedside manner.

The Climax did not turn out as profitably as Phantom on release. Perhaps copying what didn’t work in the 1943 musical as well as what did meant the revised concept pushed its luck a remake too far.