Ho-ho-horror

The Phantom of the Opera. Two eyes blaze in the darkness like candles flickering inside a skull. Flesh hangs from the skull in soggy clumps. Black bags hang from the eyes like evil growths. The nose is two wormy holes. The ragged lips reveal a clutter of dirty tusks. And over the ghastly object hangs a straggle of stringy hair that looks like horrid skinny legs and suggests that on top of the skull there may be something squatting.

As Lon Chancy portrayed him in the 1925 shocker, the phantom of the opera was a sight to make small boys behave. After that apparition, though, the monster disappeared for some years, possibly spent in a beauty parlor. At any rate, when he reappeared as Claude Rains in the 1943 production, he looked disconcertingly like Liberace. Indignant, the critics told him to go right back through that secret panel and take his Ugly Pills.

He obviously didn't. In the third screen version of the grisly Gothic novel by Gaston Leroux, the phantom as interpreted by Herbert Lorn looks about as dangerous as dear old granddad all dressed up for Hallowe'en in a mouthless lavender mask that could probably be duplicated for a dime at any corner candy store. And why does he wear a mask? Because his face is so horrible that if people saw it they would run out of the theater hollering eeeeeeeeeek? No. Because, it turns out, he still looks like Liberace.

In other respects, the film rises to those occasions when a fellow needs a fiend. Michael Gough makes a wonderfully.sinister Lord d'Arcy. There is a splendidly splashy scene in which a man is stabbed in the eye. And there is a gorgeously juicy line, spoken by a ratcatcher to the horrified heroine (Heather Sears). "Oi cud let yew 'ave baoth rats fer tappence," he says sweetly, turning on the charm. "Mike a lavly pie, y'knaow."

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