The Great Movies III

The other famous scene involves the falling chandelier, which became the centerpiece of the Webber musical and functions the same way in Joel Schumacher's 2004 film version. In the original film, it is curiously underplayed; it falls in impressive majesty, to be sure, but its results are hard to measure. Surely there are mangled bodies beneath it, but the movie stays its distance and then hurries on.

Much more impressive is the masked ball sequence and its sequel on the roof of the opera house. The filmmakers (director Rupert Julien, replaced by Edward Sedgwick and assisted by Chaney) use primitive color techniques to saturate the ball with brilliant scarlets and less obtrusive greens. Many scenes throughout the film are tinted, which was common enough in silent days, but the masked ball is a primitive form of Technicolor, in which the Phantom's great red cloak sweeps through the air like a carrion bird that enfolds him. And on the roof, as Raoul and Christine plot, he hovers unseen above them on the side of a statue, the red garment billowing ominously. Chaney's movements in all of these scenes are filled with heedless bravado, and yet when he pauses, when he listens, when the reasons for his jealousy are confirmed, he conveys his suffering.

In a strange way, the very artificiality of the color adds to its effect. True, accurate, and realistic color is simply ... color. But this form of color, which seems imposed on the material, functions as a passionate impasto, a blood-red overlay. We can sense the film straining to overwhelm us. The various scores (I listened to the music by the great composer for silent film Carl Davis) swoop and weep and shriek and fall into ominous prefigurings, and the whole enterprise embraces the spirit of grand guignol.

The Phantom ofthe Opera is not a great film if you are concerned with art and subtlety, depth and message; Nosferatu is a world beyond it. But in its fevered melodrama and images of cadaverous romance, it finds a kind of show-biz majesty. And it has two elements of genius: it creates beneath the opera one of the most grotesque places in the cinema, and Chaney's performance transforms an absurd character into a haunting one.

athered by strangers, abandoned by their mothers, thrown away by society, the children of Pixote live by their wits on the cruel streets of Sao Paolo in Brazil. They improvise their own families, forming shifting alliances based on need, fear, and even love. Their economy is based on the only two markets open to them, those for sex and drugs. Many of them are so young, they only vaguely understand sex; they are hardened to sights and experiences they don't even comprehend.

Hector Babenco's 1981 film was created in the spirit of Italian neorealism; his child actors are the real thing, discovered in the streets and essentially playing themselves. The adult characters are mostly played by professional actors, but these performances coming from completely different backgrounds seem to feed from the same desperation. There is no answer to the problem of the millions of homeless children, no remedy, no hope. It is not surprising to learn that Fernando Ramos da Silva, the illiterate eleven-year-old who plays Pixote, returned to the streets and was killed by police bullets in 1987.

The movie is told in a loosely structured, episodic style. Not every scene pays off neatly or makes a smooth connect with the next one. The jagged tone seems appropriate for these lives, which have no continuity, no balance point, no reason for something to happen today, tomorrow, or ever.

In a society of children and adolescents who have no homes and no money, crime is the natural way of survival, but they're not very good at it (the gangs in City of God, made twenty years later, are much more sophisticated). Their approach to crime, as to life, is thoughtless improvisation; they respond to situations, but have no control over them. We sense that Babenco isn't leading his characters but following them, and scenes don't always have a point or a purpose because neither do these lives.

We meet Pixote when he is rounded up along with other street kids after the murder of a judge. Society demands the appearance of justice and revenge, and so the murder will be pinned on one of them-never mind if it's the right one or not. Some fairly confusing dialogue indicates that one of these kids may have been involved in the crime, or witnessed it, but solving the crime is not the point of the movie, and the police despair of ever knowing who the real killer is. The code of silence, enforced by the possibility of death, is complete.

The kids are taken to a reformatory. Inside would be better for them than outside, if it weren't for the brutality of the guards, the corruption of the staff, and the crimes of one prisoner against another (on his first night, Pixote witnesses a rape).