Although acting and screenwriting are not strong points, nor are they expected to be, the film did garner two Oscars—for Color Cinematography (Hal Mohr and W. Howard Greene) and for Color Interior Decoration (four artists headed by color pioneer Alexander Golitzen). Two unrewarded nominations were for Sound Recording (Bernard B. Brown) and Scoring of a Musical Picture (Edward Ward).
Phantom has been criticized for being just that, more a musical than a horror flick—and that’s true, and the “horror” is rather subdued compared with most subsequent remakes. It opens, in fact, with a lengthy opera sequence, the only authentic opera in the film, Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha, with Eddy, Foster and Farrar (dubbed by Sally Sweetland). Foster was a trained singer, though not well-used by Hollywood. Eddy, a singing sensation in his time a few notches below Mario Lanza, had recently filmed the last of his eight singing duos with Jeanette MacDonald. Both stars would die in their sixties, a little over two years apart.
For one fictional opera sequence, Ward adapted themes by Frédéric Chopin and for another, at the film’s climax—the most bizarre of all—bits from Peter Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony for a Russian opera with the French title Le Prince Masque du Caucasus! That scoring nomination is quite surprising, since Ward essentially borrowed from the works of others, except for his own “Lullaby of the Bells.”
Besides these operatic “intrusions,” although I don’t regard them as such, there is, related perhaps, a certain element of comic operetta silliness in the antics of Anatole and Raoul toward Christine—in their droll banter and repeated attempts to pass, simultaneously, through the same door—more than once yet. In the end, neither suitor gets the girl. They end their rivalry and propose to dine together, after all, as the closing lines of the film have it—
“Would you join me for a bit of supper at the Café de l’Opéra?” Raoul asks.
“With pleasure, monsieur,” Anatole replies.
“Think we can get through this crowd?”
“Certainly. After all, who’d pay any attention to a baritone and a detective?”