#maybe this isn't so much a crossover as just making peter lorre be the phantom of the opera

[peterlorrefanpage]

Mad Love / Phantom of the Opera crossover

Peter Lorre & Frances Drake - Mad Love studio promo (1935).

It's images like this that bring what I call my latent Phantom of the Opera desires to the forefront.

I mean, look at this. Look at his utter absorption as he drinks in the face of his beloved, at his regard palpable even in the poise of his chin, in his lowered eyelids:

Unhf.

It's because of Mad Love and tons of other things that Peter would have been fabulous as the Phantom of the Opera (just as he was in a different way as the Phantom of the Ballet). He'd have used similar elements, I just know it - the obsessiveness, the fractured personality, the masterfulness. He would have made PotO his own.

And after all, Claude Rains did it without singing (I do love Claude Rains).

Now, Peter could carry quite a nice tune. See The Verdict, and even the deliberately-goofy Was Frauen Traumen. But since it's already been established that singing on the Phantom's part isn't strictly necessary, even if we do mingle up movie and musical versions...

...and we already know Peter looks divine behind a keyboard, a la Three Strangers (1946)...

...and even when he's more menacing in All Through the Night (1942). I get that he's standing up from the piano at this moment, but still...

Now.

Imagine him as Erik, the lonely Hades of his own subterranean kingdom beneath the opera house, surrounded by all the lush and profane trappings he'd acquired over the long years. It's a home and a mausoleum in one, built to last out the rest of his days with everything he needs but nothing he wants.

Jaded and dejected, he sometimes feels his heart thudding so strongly it fills his ears like a tell-tale, ticking down the hours to the death he half-longs for. Time, there's too much time no matter how he squanders it, spending hours reinforcing the horrible stories that surround him like the wings of the stage.

Bah. Parlor tricks; amateur work. It's all too easy. He who had made audiences convulse and froth with horror, he who had designed masteries of diabolical architecture for petty gods on earth! What is an off-key shriek from a chorus girl or a whites-of-the-eyes bluster from a manager to that?

It's only when someone comes too close to his home, his security, his intactness, that his heart starts beating a vibration off the true, igniting his darker, more infernal urges...

Yet when he's with his music, tempering and mastering (though he knows he's a mere student of this, this cosmic glory) the pure energy that he hears with his eyes, feels with his skin - sound masquerading as air, as life - when he's more himself than at any other time - there's a small, stubborn, ridiculously hopeful part of him that glimmers up a foolish little wish that someone could sense and feel and know the humanity left in him.

For someone to see him, really see him, away from the shadows, away from the shroud, unshielded in unfiltered daylight.

And not leave him.

Such a hope is somehow the most damning of all. Yet he can't seem to obliterate it.

And then, one day, there - ! Above in the opera house! Something new has come: A budding voice, tremulous, pure.

A voice that brings the light right down to him through the corridors and casements, shafts and stairwells, along the crooked passageway second from the left, around the dust-covered boxes spilled out into the hallway from the broken-hasped door, down alongside the subterranean lake, through his doorways and walkways and archways, down to where he sits on his throne of an organ bench, hands frozen in mid-air, transfixed, overcome.

A voice without affectation. Without guile. Without, perhaps, much timbre or assurance.

But with, somehow, comprehension. Knowledge of suffering, of heartache, of the foibles of humankind. In fact--

Ah. There it is, a glissando of shade like a dark lantern closing, like the edge of an eclipse. He somehow knew it would be there.

How can such light coexist with this shadow?

He must behold its source. He must. Just a glimpse, that's all, surely he can have that. Just to see the face and form that voice comes from, just to fill his eyes and spirit.

And then to creep back to his cold hell of a home, there to feast on the image and the sound, knowing that the corporeal is not for such as him.

...but then, he thinks, as his hands twist his composition paper, crackling dry like mummified bones, why couldn't it be?

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