Three Fantomases, a Judex, and a Shadowman: Adventures In French Pulp Cinema

The infamous cover image of the first Fantomas novel;
the name of the cover artist, sadly, appears lost to time.

Kino Lorber has just released the entire1960s André Hunebelle Fantomas film trilogy on Blu-Ray and DVD; all three films remastered and available with English subtitles for American audiences for the first time. It seemed a good a time as any to take a little journey down the rabbit hole of French cinema and the history of the pulp hero (and villain) and its odd relation to the American material of the same ilk.

Pierre Souvestre

For those who aren't familiar with the character, Fantomas is a pulp villain created by authors Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre in an attempt to provide their publisher with a popular and enduring pulp magazine for the general market. The pair authored thirty-two adventures for their shadowy character between 1911 and 1913, which seems preposterously prodigious, but understandable when you note the fuel behind such a drive consisted of one part public obsession with the material and the almost factory-like method of production the two authors used for writing the books: Souvestre and Allain would formulate a general plot outline, and then break off to write alternate chapters, which allowed them to complete an entire novel in less than a month.  After Pierre Souvestre passed in 1914 of lung congestion, his parter in pulp penned an additional eleven volumes of the Fantomas series. Only the first two volumes of the series were translated and printed for the English market, though the subsequent volumes have been since translated and made available in a digital format, all of which (and much more) can be found at the Fantomas Lives! website, which has essentially any and all information you could want on the character and his various iterations throughout history and mediums.

Marcel Allain

The important thing to note is that the American pulp and serial market primarily focused on heroes and their superhuman ability to overcome some diabolical menace each month. Of course there are exceptions, like Republic's magnificent serial The Crimson Ghost (1946) and their evil space invader serial The Purple Monster Strikes (1945), but the market predominantly focused on the likes of The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage and The Lone Ranger. Even Fantomas's French criminal predecessor, Arsene Lupin, was a gentlemanly rogue who would not kill or seriously injure an individual (though this appeared to have its caveats at points), and even eventually became friend to the police who so ardently sought to capture him, eventually assisting them in solving crimes (though usually while perpetrating another theft in the process).  Fantomas was not a rogue. He is a sadistic, anarchistic serial killer who kills and steals because it amuses him. He is a master of disguise who leaves the world–and the reader–wondering exactly who he is or whom is being impersonated by him. Without Fantomas, there would likely be no Diabolik and no Joker. Fantomas became the rage with artists and French society, serving as subject matter for paintings by Juan Gris (below) and René Magritte. 

Cubist painter Juan Gris's piece Fantomas (Pipe and Newspaper) 1915.

Poster for Feuillade's first Fantomas serial.

To move right along, a film serial was made in 1913, titled, simply, Fantomas. It was directed by French filmmaker Louis Feuillade, and was popular enough to spawn four sequel serials. Feuillade also directed a highly influential and downright amazing silent serial, playing heavily off of the Fantomas success, titled Les Vampires (1915-16) (also available from Kino Lorber). It centers not around actual vampires, but a covert gang of ruthless, underground criminals who give the appearance of being vampires to put fear into the hearts and minds of the police and the frantic public. The primary figure of this series is the shadowy criminal Irma Vep, dressed primarily in her body-stocking catsuit and built very much in the Fantomas vein. 

Poster for Louis Feuillade's silent serial
Les Vampires. 

Naturally, after the success of his Fantomas and Les Vampires serials, Feuillade sought to keep the ball of his success rolling by attempting to add a third shadowy character to his repertoire, but by this time, public sensationalism had somewhat given way to criticism of Feuillade's films glorifying murderers and criminals, so Feuillade got together with writer and playwright Arthur Bernéde to create Judex, a shadowy avenger who (initially) sets the sights of justice on a malevolent banker who caused the death of his father. 

René Cresté as the shadowy vigilante Judex (left) in his super-
scientific underground lair in Feuillade's 1914 (released in 1916)
serial.

Looking at the figure of Judex in his black suit and cape, his black slouch hat pulled down over his eyes, his network of helpers, it's hard to imagine that it didn't overtly inform the design of the prolific American pulp character The Shadow. In further comparison, Judex makes his lair in an underground hideout filled with technological gadgets that help him interrogate criminals and aid in his efforts, much like Batman's renowned Batcave. Like Fantomas, Judex is a master of disguise, a man who keeps to the shadows to achieve his goals and uses subterfuge to stay ahead of the law. Irma Vep is resurrected as conniving criminal Diana Monti, trying to blackmail the banker Favraux and outwit Judex at the same time, in her black catsuit and domino mask. 

Maxwell Grant's The Shadow, one of radio and pulp
literature's most enduring characters.

Embedded below is the first chapter of the silent 1916 Judex serial.

Let us jump nearly half a decade into the future. The 1960s saw a revival of both Judex and Fantomas, released only a year apart from each other, but with drastically different leanings.

Poster for Judex, 1963.

Director Georges Franju, perhaps best known, if at all in the States, by horror fans for his shocking 1959 film Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face). Franju injected a heavy German Expressionist  influence into the French New Wave of cinema. Looking at his films it's easy to see the lighting and set design aesthetics gleaned from the likes of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. In 1963, Franju reintroduced Judex to audiences in a surreal black and white adventure/drama with American magician Channing Pollock as the titular character. Inspired by Feuillade's early serials, Franju stays true to the tone of the character and the shadowy world he inhabits, but injects some dreamlike imagery into the fold. Particularly the famous costume party bird scene. Franju's Judex is definitely in the top five favorite film list for me. There are so many elements colliding in Judex, that it could very easily be an aesthetic mess, but the individual elements seem to compel each other into favorable unification.


Below is a scene from the film where Judex infiltrates a costume party thrown by his enemy, the unscrupulous banker Favraux.

Aside: Fans of comic artist/author Richard Sala will recognize many of the elements of Judex and Franju's 1974 Fantomas homas Nuits rouges repeated in his work. He has stated in interviews  over the years how Franju's work has been inspirational to his own work, and I strongly recommend checking out, well, everything that Sala has produced. You can find his work on Monsters Illustrated and his Official Tumblr, which also directs you to his ongoing webcomics. 

Francine Bergé as Diana Monti, a proto-Catwoman character in
Georges Franju's Judex, 1963.

Jean Marais doing double duty as the  sensationalist
reporter protagonist Fandor, and as the master of disguise
monster Fantomas (above).

It was Fantomas that Franju had wanted to remake, but after he relented to helm Judex, director-for-hire André Hunebelle, who had made everything from swashbucklers to a few of the entries in the  OSS 117 spy series, picked up the Fantomas baton. A far cry from Feuillade's shadowy world of black masked killers, moody lighting and serious melodrama, the first in Hunebelle's Fantomas series, simply titled Fantomas, arrived on the screen less than two months after the trend-setting Goldfinger, with as much droll humor, bombastic action, explosive pop color and bizarre spy-fi gadget fetishism as any entry in the Bond franchise. Predicating the Adam West "Batman" series by two years, the film plays like a Bond film mashed with an episode of the William Dozier tongue-in-cheek superhero series, pitting reporter Fandor (played by actor Jean Marais), his photographer fiancee Hélene (Myléne Demongeot) and bumbling Inspector Juve (Louis de Funés) against the malevolent super-criminal Fantomas (also Marais). Unlike Feuillade's simple black cowled murderer, Fantomas is now an almost alien looking blue-faced super-villain who has exotic hideouts in dormant volcanoes and beneath the Catacombs of Paris, armed with infinite wealth, and a slew of Batman villain-esque indefatigable henchmen.

Here, below, is an albeit grainy French-language trailer for the first Hunebelle Fantomas film, I find it curious that they show you most of the stunt-based action in the film, much like the Bond picture trailers, but go out of their way not to reveal the titular character's face at all.

You can see from the trailer how heavy situational humor was kneaded into the script, which actually helps the picture. If it had been a strait-laced action film about a garish, hip super-villain, the film would have been pretty to look at but less engaging to watch. 

Fantomas introduces the character who has gained notoriety through various crimes, but his existence remains ambiguous, as Fantomas desires. The public see him everywhere, though they've never actually seen him at all. The police think he's an invention of the sensationalist press. After reporter Fandor tries to cash in on the Fantomas fervor with a mock interview, Fantomas kidnaps him and commits crimes using Fandor's face, setting the stage for Fandor to try and clear his identity by apprehending the criminal while evading the police, and the police to pursue Fandor with some mistaken identity hijinks.

The film had two sequels, both directed by Hunebelle: Fantômas se déchaîne (Fantomas Unleashed) hit screens in December of 1965, and Fantômas contre Scotland Yard (Fantomas Against Scotland Yard) in March of '67.

Below is the trailer for Fantômas se déchaîne.

Fantomas Unleashed picks up where the first film left off, literally. Inspector Juve and Fandor are receiving medals for their attempt to apprehend Fantomas when the criminal makes his presence known again. He attempts to kidnap a scientist, Professor Lefevbre (Marais in a third role, for Pete's sake) who has developed a ray that can induce a hypnotic trance in a subject and forces them to adhere to commands. Obviously Fantomas wants this to take over the world. The third film is easily the weakest in the series and plays to the Old Dark House scenario that Agatha Christie made famous with And Then There Were None (previously titled a series of very offensive epithets based on horribly racist children's rhymes of the time of publication), with the cast being confined to a large, secluded manor with a killer (this time Fantomas in the guise of the head of the household whom he has done away with). In Fantomas Against Scotland Yard, Juve and Fandor have followed Fantomas to Britain where he's surfaced in an extortion deal to wheedle exorbitant amounts of money from the country's wealthiest citizens (Mafia included). 

Below is the trailer for Fantômas contre Scotland Yard.

Georges Franju, clearly deeply and lastingly inspired by the Fantomas mythos, finding himself instead helming Judex, which he described as (paraphrasing) "the Feuillade serial that was the least Fueillade", finally got to try his hand at his preferred faceless maniac with his 1974 made-for-television feature Nuits Rouges (literally translated to Red Nights, titled Shadowman in the 1975 US dubbed version). While the character isn't named Fantomas, the ruthless red-masked L'homme sans visage (The Man Without A Face) and his army of zombies seek the lost treasure of the Knights Templar, killing anyone who gets in their way. We see the Diana Monti character repurposed from Judex, here in the form of a cat-suited woman simply named La femme. Again we have an intrepid hero, this time a sailor, and his girlfriend teaming up with a police inspector, here played by Goldfinger himself, Gert Frobe, to try to bring the criminal to justice. The screenplay for Nuits Rouges was written by Jacques Champreux, who is none other than Louis Feuillade's grandson, and had previously worked with Franju on the 1963 adaptation of his grandfather's original Judex.

It didn't fare well with critics and is still unavailable in a format outside of Youtube here in the U.S.

Below is a trailer of Nuits Rouges cut together for a public showing somewhere at some point. Enjoy the funky Goblin-like soundtrack!

Far from being completist, I hope this article either piqued your interest in the fun–and finally readily available!–world of French pulp cinema. Maybe someday I'll get into the films of American actor-cum-French film star, Eddie Constantine. That, however, is for a different time.

Enjoy and thanks for reading!