Pluskylang Great Film overall

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

fritzfassbender The Climax is a gorgeous film due to the breathtaking Technicolor, and Boris Karloff himself is more elegantly presented than in any film he made.However, the story is lightweight melodrama, and the film as a whole is a weak attempt to recreate the success of Phantom of the Opera. Turhan Bay as the male lead is a poor replacement for Nelson Eddy, and the rest of the cast is just acceptable.Karloff is always good, but he's not that engaged with the material as this film was part of a one-year contract he took at Universal to cash in before the second horror boom faded away.Those looking to see The Climax will enjoy it much more if they keep their expectations low.

bkoganbing Without being told so it is fairly obvious that The Climax was a film made by Universal to get some more use out of the set built for Phantom Of The Opera. I do mean both versions too.Boris Karloff takes the place of Claude Rains as the man obsessed with a soprano. Unlike the pitiable Rains who went mad at the thought that someone was stealing concerto, Karloff is the house physician who is the paramour of soprano June Vincent. But the deeper he's involved the more jealous he becomes. When she gives him the brush finally he strangles her and hides the body. He's got quite the shrine to her, think of Lenin's tomb.Ten years after Karloff did the deed young music students Susanna Foster and Turhan Bey audition for Thomas Gomez the head of the opera company. Karloff hears Foster sing and she reminds him so much of Vincent he's determined to halt her career. No one should sing like Vincent or sing any of her material. Karloff embarks on a campaign of psychological intimidation against Foster. Karloff's menace Foster's soprano are the main reasons to see The Climax. Films like this and Phantom Of The Opera combine the music and horror genre well and remain popular to this day. There's also a nice performance by Gale Sondergaard as Vincent's maid who has been waiting for years to finally get the goods on the good Dr. Karloff.And the music is swell. English is used instead of the foreign languages that we of the English speaking world enjoy classic opera. I suspect that opera fans would have put down their theater admission to hear Susanna Foster sing the Erie County Phone Directory of 1944.

AaronCapenBanner Boris Karloff stars in his first color feature, playing Dr. Hohner, the physician to the Vienna Royal Theater who one day, in a fit of insane jealousy, murders his mistress, who was also the star singer of the theater. He gets away with it, but ten years later, a new singer(played by Susana Foster) reminds him strongly of his long ago love, and so plots to keep her for himself using hypnosis to convince her to sing only for him, though her fiancée(played by Turhan Bey) gets wind of this and tries to save her... Despite Karloff, this is a dismayingly slow, turgid film, with too much singing and no suspense. Color is wasted here, as is Karloff, in one of his worst films.

Coventry Even though the legendary Boris Karloff gave image to hundreds of cinematic monsters, psychopaths and mad scientists, he never played the titular character in Gaston Leroux' acclaimed masterwork "The Phantom of the Opera". Other contemporary horror stars did, like Lon Chaney and Claude Rains. Perhaps this production was Universal's attempt to involve Karloff in a horrific opera film-production anyway, re-using the expensive sets of the Phantom-film that was released one year earlier. The story is set in a prominent Vienna opera building where Boris stars as the resident physician, Dr. Hohner, and successfully hides a dark secret from his friends and co workers. After a short intro and a truly well choreographed flashback, we learn who Dr. Hohner murdered his fiancée and upcoming star-singer Marcellina because he feared her magically developing voice would come between their relationship. Now, ten years later, the new promising singer Angela – with a voice almost identical to Marcellina's – arrives at the theater and once again awakens Hohner's maniacal lusts. He hypnotizes her into never singing again, but Angela's young and devoted lover Franz carries on battling to make Angela share her wondrous voice with the world. "The Climax" is a beautiful movie to look at, with the terrific use of color and a nearly endless amount of great decors, but it surely could have used a slightly better screenplay. It's a rather predictable film with very few action scenes and only a bit of old-fashioned, legitimate tension during the last 15 minutes. There are many marvelous yet overlong opera sequences, even a lot more than in the actual "Phantom of the Opera", but they naturally slow down the film's pace and eventually even affect (negatively) the acting performances of Boris Karloff and Gale Sondergaard. It's an enjoyable mystery/thriller to a certain extent, but if you want to see Karloff at his most malicious, check out Val Lewton's "The Body Snatcher" or "Bedlam".