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!

Short-fused By Showgirls!

Pictured above: Showgirls dancing with a "robot" in a floorshow at the London Casino in 1937. There's a great in-depth piece about the Jazz Age dinner club at the Jazz Age Club website, which makes for some pretty interesting reading.

The Wild Wild West

Evelyn shares her thoughts on ladies who falsify their cup size.

Lobby card for A Night At The Follies (1947).

Everyone has prurient interests; it's a part of the human condition. Whether those interests are seasoned with psychological detritus is dependent on the person in question. As with all of the pieces that make up the pie chart of the (ideally) rounded human personality and worldview, of course, it's about finding a balance. About making sure we're not so surgically focused on one aspect of ourselves and fetishizing it, that we lose sight of all of the other important stuff that makes us us; or shutting ourselves off from other points-of-view or ideas. At the risk of sounding once-again like Joe Friday  barking at "these times", with the continuing struggle rational, progressive-minded people face in the long outmoded sexist mindset that one gender is merely a pleasure device and thusly has no place in the broader world of business and human development beyond, well, developing humans (and dinner), and the equally zealous stance of another faction that brands any form of figure appreciation baseless commodification, sex has become a sticky subject.

Of course I don't need to tell about the selling power and influence some expertly teased pulchritude or pudendum has on the buying public. It only takes a web search for, well, anything, to verify that. Porn, strip clubs–these things are more prevalent than ever. I'm not putting a moral qualifier on them, just pointing out that while floor shows and burlesque houses and under-the-counter stag loops existed in the myopically viewed "Good Old Days" that a lot of people seem to want to return to, despite all of the fallout that would occur from such a backslide, that in the age of the Internet, the lever seems to have been cranked so far in the other direction, that there isn't a reasonable middle ground anymore. 

There is such a thing a sex positivity and yes, as a heterosexual male I am able to appreciate the form of a female without reducing said female to the simple embodiment of said form, or being disrespectful about it. I know you only have my word on the matter, and in the interest of full disclosure I am probably self-biased, but there you have it.

Evelyn campaigns for nudity.

Before the draw of strip clubs became, primarily, the dancers' pole dexterity and the amount of Motley Crüe and 50 Cent on the sound system blaring in the background, or Ed Hardy Lotharios with big wads of singles sitting around pretending that they're big shots because the lap dance squad seem to be paying them a lot of attention, there was the performance art and spectacle of the burlesque routine. Where basement-level, baggy-pantsed comedians would try to amuse audiences between dance routines ranging from painstakingly choreographed dance numbers with intricate costumery and thematically linked stage dressing set to live bands, to top-tossing strip teasers disrobing to records. Yes, it was still essentially women taking their clothes off to music, but admittedly the world of burlesque dancing isn't just about sex. It requires creativity, skill and panache. It's about tease and seduction, not in-your-face anatomy.

Burlesque dried up in the 1960s, but like vinyl, is hip again; it's been en vogue for the last decade or so, and fortunately it's retained the performance art aspect and sensuality of the art form rather than being rebirthed as a kitschy cousin to the LIVE NUDE GIRLS atmosphere of a Spearmint Rhino or Tom's Jiggle Hut. There are, of course, a number of names associated with the past-time, both classic and contemporary, from Bettie Page and Candy Barr to Dita Von Teese and the Pontani Sisters, and most metropolitan areas have a thriving contemporary burlesque scene that incorporates not only traditional female performers, but LGBTQ acts as well. 

One of the big name stars of the salacious stage of yesteryear is Evelyn West. Born Amy May Coomer to a poor farming couple in Kentucky in 1921, Amy moved around quite a bit from Kentucky to Chicago to Sacramento, California, following her mother through a divorce, re-marriage  and eventual relocation for plant work during World War II. After the war, Amy began to strip in San Francisco, and eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where she appeared in the 1947 stag feature A Night At The Follies. In the fifties she returned to the midwest, where she married a St. Louis club promoter named Al Charles. When Al passed, she moved to Hollywood (Florida, that is) and spent her golden years interacting with fans online until her death in 2004.

Like most exotic dancers of the time, she supplemented her income by posing for men's magazines, similar to the way adult film stars of the 80s and 90s would appear as Penthouse Pets and double as headlining dancers in strip clubs. Or so I'm told.

Clearly Evelyn had some ideas about the male-female relationship, as indicated by the blurb in the top image. It's hard to tell how serious she was with the quote, as she reportedly had a pretty wry sense of humor and was an ardent publicity hound as well. She allegedly had her 39-and-a-half inch bust insured for fifty grand by Lloyds of London, the same company that Creature From The Black Lagoon star Julie London had her legs underwritten with. 

Whatever you think of Evelyn West and her career choice, you have to concede that it was a choice, and that even through all of her exploits, she carried herself with confidence and a self-awareness that intimated that she was a glamour girl because she was comfortable enough with herself to be one, seemingly not because she was using it as some sort of thrill-seeking psychological balm.

Evelyn West with her Lloyd's Of London contract.

Will The Real Dr. Beecher Please Stand Up?

Another blast in Minnesota's perpetual snowstorm cycle kept me indoors yesterday, so I set myself up in front of the television with a 50s b-movie double feature. I suppose the folks over at MGM already knew when assembling the Midnite Movies double-feature disc of The Vampire (1957) and The Return Of Dracula (1958), what I stumbled upon watching it, thus rendering this whole article pointless and meandering in its minutiae breakdown, but that's what I do; so here we go.

The art of recycling isn't anything new in the world of entertainment. The Mayberry set from "The Andy Griffith Show" has been famously repurposed a number of times for "Star Trek", from "The Adventures of Superman", and so on. There's more info in this MeTV article. When you watch enough television from the same era, or movies produced by the same studios, especially low budget ones, you begin to notice familiar landmarks and objects popping up over and over again. For example the computers in Adam West's Bat Cave doubling as the sonar equipment in The Seaview on "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" or as miscellaneous set dressing in "Lost In Space".

There was one small split-second shot in The Return Of Dracula that caused me to pause and consider if the two films had more in common than just shared space on a DVD. This shot below, of an establishing shot of a doctor's shingle near the forty-five minute mark.

Actor Robert Lynn plays a minor, uncredited character in the film named Dr. Paul Beecher. Now I wasn't as familiar with The Return Of Dracula as I was with the second feature, having seen The Vampire a number of times (it's kind of a favorite of mine). I hadn't seen The Return Of Dracula in probably ten years. But the shot piqued my interest, because I knew that John Beal, the principal actor and titular monster in The Vampire, played a doctor named Paul Beecher. Sure enough, as you can see below, we see Coleen Gray (Paul's nurse Carol Butler) walking past the exact same sign, in front of the exact same house!

Well, I hadn't even bothered to note the opening credits of the films, but sure enough, both were produced for Gramercy Pictures and distributed by Universal. Both films were directed by Paul Landres, who did a number of low budget genre pictures and directed quite a few episodes of television shows like "Flipper" and "77 Sunset Strip". Both pictures were produced by Arthur Gardner and Jules V. Levy of the Gardner-Lavin-Levy production team that produced genre pictures for Gramercy in the 1950s, as well as television shows like "The Rifleman", "The Big Valley" and "The A-Team". Both pictures were written by Pat Fielder, a screenwriter-for-hire who wrote dozens of television show episodes and four Gardner-Lavin-Levy produced Gramercy pictures: The Vampire (1957), The Monster Who Challenged The World (1957), The Return Of Dracula (1958) and The Fire Barrier (1958).

The Return Of Dracula came out a scant ten months after The Vampire, so Gramercy undoubtedly scrambled to pad out a feature fraught with time and financial constraints, as the pictures were reportedly received rather poorly and made poor box office returns. It's likely that Gardner and Levy were cranking out these little noir-horror thrillers to see if one would stick and recoup the losses from the previous one(s).  

Both films also feature great music by (and in the case of The Return Of Dracula, is improved by) Gerald Fried. If you haven't seen either film and you're a fan of 1950s b horror and science-fiction pictures, I definitely urge you check out The Vampire. It's similar in tone to the Sam Katzman-produced The Werewolf from the year before, mixing mid-century science-fiction elements in to explain the origin of the film's creature. This vampire in question's transformation is brought on by pill addiction and a reversal of the character to primitive instincts (similar to Arthur Franz in 1958's Monster On The Campus ) rather than needing sustenance to bring life to an undead body.

Trailer for The Vampire starring John Beal, Coleen Gray 

and Dabbs Greer

The Return Of Dracula, on the other hand, has all the thrills and suspense of a lackluster episode of NBC's Boris Karloff-hosted "Thriller". There isn't much there beyond Fried's score until you reach the end. Similar to the famous bathtub scene in William Castle's The Tingler, which came out the following year, we get a color insert used for the staking scene, which the trailer has the audacity to show, but in black-and-white!

Trailer for The Return Of Dracula starring Francis Lederer 

and Norma Eberhardt 

Color insert shot of staking scene, jolting enough to be effective

and probably the only really interesting thing about the film. 

The Experiment in Progress

My painting is still in progress. Not super familiar with acrylics, so the layering is taking some getting used to. For such thick paints, they sure do brush on translucent!

Doodle Doodle Doo

Yeah, I'm back with more Doodle-A-Day cards. Two more drawings of two of my favorite things: robots and dinosaurs.

Character Study

I’ve been doodling this guy in various forms over the last couple of days. Just some nerdy little guy who can fit all kinds of requirements in visual expression. Like having his face torn off or making a meek point of order.