Find out how the director of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ ended up working on a superhero film in the ’80s!
From Italian western… to superheroes? Sergio Leone, known for his dollar trilogy with Clint Eastwood or Once Upon a Time in America, wanted to adapt the adventures of a superhero on the big screen: The Phantom!
The Phantom (The Phantom or The Bengal Phantom in French) is an American comic book hero created in 1936 by Ray Moore for drawing and Lee Falk for the screenplay, to whom we also owe Mandrake the magician. The Phantom is dressed in purple, wears a black mask over his eyes like Zorro and he lives in Africa, in the fictional country of Bengal.
King Features Syndicate
The Phantom acts as a precursor, since he appeared during the first superheroic wave. He fights crime without superpowers by night and lives as a rich playboy by day. This surely reminds you Batmanbut Phantom was released three years before the Dark Knight’s first adventure!
Later, Phantom’s origin story would be changed to draw inspiration from a jungle myth and make the character a supposedly immortal hero.
Phantom was adapted into a serial film in 1943 starring Tom Tyler (who had also played Captain Marvel around the same time), and he appeared in an animated series, Defenders of Earth, which saw him team up with Mandrake and Flash Gordon.
Syndication
Mandrake and Phantom
At the end of the 70s, Leone was approached to direct the film Flash Gordon, a project which did not see the light of day because the director did not like the script, and years later, it was he who contact Lee Falk to discuss adapting Phantom, as the author remembered:
Sergio Leone wanted to make a Phantom movie. I met him in Mexico, he was a huge guy. He simply loved [le personnage] and wanted to make a jungle film with pygmies. We met again in his Roman house, but he died and nothing was done.
Legend has it that Leone had started writing and identified filming locations, but despite this progress, the project did not come to fruition, even in other hands. Too bad for the fans, because after Phantom, the Italian filmmaker wanted to follow up with a Mandrake adventure!
Instead, fans were able to discover, dismayed, the film The Bengal Ghost, released in 1996 with Billy Zane in the title role. We could also see Catherine Zeta-Jones, Treat Williams, Kristy Swanson, Patrick McGoohan and James Remar there.
Paramount Pictures
Despite all the good will of director Simon Wincer, a fan of the character since his childhood, the feature film failed at the box office, notably due to the fact that the main character was one-dimensional and quite bland. To give it a first or second chance, head over to Paramount+, where the film is available.
In 2009, actor Ryan Carnes (Central Hospital) played the character for a two-episode miniseries (3 hours of programming in total), but she went completely unnoticed.
In the era of the superhero boom in cinema and television, no project has been announced to bring the character back to life.