Louis Feuillade had enjoyed enormous success during the silent era with his action/adventure serials involving master criminals such as Fantômas and master crime fighters. Georges Franju’s Judex, made in 1963, is a remake of the 1916 Feuillade production of the same name. It’s a movie that really does seem to come from another era – you have to keep reminding yourself that this movie came out after the first of the James Bond films. Franju’s movie is deliberately archaic, and once you get used to the feel of it its considerable charm starts to win you over. It has the touches of the surreal that you expect from the director of Eyes Without a Face, and it really is unlike any other movie of the 1960s. The convoluted plot involves a crooked banker (is there any other king of banker one may ask), his beautiful daughter, a masked-avenger style crime-fighter called Judex, and a remarkably appealing and very sexy (and very wicked) female criminal named Diana Monti. She gets to wear an extraordinary array of costumes, ranging from typical 1914 women’s clothing to black catsuits and at one point she even gets to dress up as a nun. Francine Bergé’s performance as Diana is the highlight of the movie. The great crime-fighter Judex is played by an American stage magician named Channing Pollock, and his magic act plays an important role in the movie, especially in the memorable masked-ball scene early on. Audiences whose ideas of pulp cinema are derived from Quentin Tarantino may find Judex a little slow and disappointingly lacking in mindless violence. This is a movie that has to be accepted on its own terms – it’s an arty, surreal action/adventure movie and if you can get your head around that concept then it’s a fascinating viewing experience. - princeplanetmovies.blogspot.com/
By Roderick Heath
Amongst early pioneers in film, Louis Feuillade, who made his famous
serials between the lead-up to World War I and his early death in 1925,
produced ür-texts of almost incalculable impact on subsequent
architectonics of film and popular culture. For many French and German
directors, in particular, his style is almost endlessly resonant: his
example gave immediate birth to Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.
Feuillade’s style moved beyond the theatrical wonderment of Georges
Méliès to embrace a perfervid blend of realism and make-believe,
utilising the realities of the then-contemporary Parisian landscape and
filling it with bizarre emanations of the fantastic, populated by
figures accumulated from tropes of gothic fiction and stage melodrama,
and the evolving science fiction and detective genres. He did so with a
deadpan grace that made him an immediate ancestor for the surrealist
movement, which would bloom in the following few years, and captured, in
several senses, the birth of modernity. More than that, the tensions
within Feuillade’s work seem to capture an innate dissonance in the
nature of film, poised to be both a tool for capturing the world as it
is, and yet ripe for subverting reality and delighting the eye with
wonders and perversities that take on totemic power. The images and
driving ideas of his serials have been sustained and transmitted through
innumerable tributes and imitations, both drawing from and contributing
to the common lore of pulp heroism and comic-book super-heroism. As
such, it’s arguable something of Feuillade’s spirit trickles down to us
even in such contemporary product as V for Vendetta (2005) or The Dark Knight Rises
(2012), where the source material owes its definite debts, however
distant, to Feuillade’s fantasias of masked avengers and cat-suited
femme fatales dancing over rooftops and reigning over a cityscape
transformed into a psychic playground.
Georges Franju, for his part, had been making short documentaries
since the 1930s, most famously, his 1945 exploration of an urban charnel
house, Les Sang Des Bêtes, but he retained links to the cinema
avant garde, and his own surrealist sensibility remained in evidence
even in explicating strange and terrible textures, constantly locating
the charge of the unearthly in the seemingly harshly realistic. His
fascination with cinema history became apparent when he made a short
documentary about Méliès not long before he made a successful entrance
into feature cinema. After his seminal horror film, Eyes Without a Face
(1959), named after a Feuillade work and remixing themes from fairy
tales and 1930s horror films, he decided to remake the silent master’s
1916 serial Judex. Some New Wavers made fun of him for crawling
back into historical daydreams, and yet Franju has been proven smartly
anticipatory of where popular fantasies were heading. Within a few
years, a surge of pop-art-hued superhero mockeries would hit screens big
and small, long before comic-book progeny would begin to invade
multiplexes. In turn Franju would provide some inspiration to other
filmmakers, especially horror directors like Don Sharp, whose The Kiss of the Vampire
(1964) was immediately indebted, and French underground gothic auteur
Jean Rollin. Franju’s touch is far more delicate, however, than most of
his followers, and certainly more so than the blockbuster fare he
anticipated. His film’s closing title reads, “Dedicated to Louis
Feuillade – In Memory of an Unhappy Time: 1916,” a reminder that many of
the most disturbing fantasias well out of the most troubled of eras.
Franju’s take on Feuillade’s material both looked back to the hazy dawn
of modernism and anticipated an oncoming age of moral destabilisation,
rebellious countercultures, and anarchic subcultures.
For Franju the mocking, pseudo-surrealist possibilities of this
material became paramount. Compressing the five-hour serial into a
90-minute feature, Franju dashes through narrative with a troubadour’s
rollicking wit, refashioning the tale as a display of subversive
surfaces and magic-realist artifice. His protagonist Judex (Channing
Pollock) struts through the proceedings in black cape and hat, playing
the vigilante avenger. Yet, he often seems less a force of traditional
heroic potency, usually expressed through rock-solid fists and guns,
than a bringer of graces, karmic balance, and atonement: he offers bleak
but symmetrical punishments without violence. The film’s thematic
stresses also take up where Eyes Without a Face left off in
extending Franju’s insidious disassembly of the old French patriarchy
through motifs torn from fairy tales and genre yarns and pasted back
together in his own pattern. Like his successor as a Feuillade fan and
natural cinematic rebel, Jacques Rivette, Franju was fascinated by the
cinema as an assembly of carefully textured surfaces whose surface order
and frippery always contain the seed of the mysterious and the chaotic.
The film offers up tycoon Favraux (Michel Vitold) as a corrupt and
oppressive overlord, and as per Balzac’s great maxim, he’s a former bank
clerk who’s built a fortune and become a capitalist titan through
criminal acts. The first few minutes witness him contemptuously
dismissing an old vagabond, Pierre Kerjean (René Génin), who took the
rap for him years before for a criminal act and now has lost contact
with the wife and child Favraux was supposed to protect. Favraux
patronises his daughter Jacqueline (Edith Scob), introduced looking
shocked into immobility by haute-bourgeois conformity as inescapable as
the sunlight she lounges in, with her father; having forced her into one
marriage, he now plans to force her into a second with a wastrel
aristocrat. But justice is already looming over Favraux: he’s received a
threat of death in the form a letter from the mysterious Judex, and he
calls in oddball private detective Alfred Cocantin (Jacques Jouanneau).
Whilst driving into town along a country lane, Favraux sees Kerjean
walking and takes the opportunity to rid himself of this potential pest
by running him down.
The crimes of high society will soon encounter both the reaction of
repressed and degraded classes, represented by the devilish Diana Monti
(Francine Bergé) and the vigilante actions of Judex, a shape-shifting,
self-appointed knight. A key joke is that both of these characters are
posing as people close to Favraux. Diana pretends to be Marie Verdier, a
governess for Jacqueline’s daughter: Favraux asks her to marry him
after she refuses to be his mistress, spurning him because of his great
fortune, the perfect hook. Judex poses as his trusted elderly aide
Vallieres, a benevolent guardian hovering over the otherwise blighted
Favraux household. With a typical sleight of hand, Judex is, then,
secretly present in the narrative even before he makes his official
entrance in one of the most amusingly bizarre and iconic introductions
in film history: Franju’s camera slowly tilting up from his feet,
revealing a well-formed masculine body in an elegant suit, before
revealing a head encased in a bird mask, gazing with an implacable
raptor’s intensity at the camera. In the same year as Hitchcock’s The Birds,
Franju peppers his film with constant avian images utilising them, like
Hitchcock, as emblems of emotion and the inexplicable, except here
they’re the tools and symbols of benevolent forces rather than the
underlying chaos in nature. This imagery is also based partly in
justifying one major tool at Franju’s disposal, Pollock’s gifts as a
magician: the American-born performer was world-famous for his conjuring
of doves.
Judex’s most famous scene follows this first sight of the
hero as he proceeds through a masked ball held by Favraux to announce
his daughter’s engagement with an apparently dead dove in his hand, held
out before him like a pagan offering and symbol of the damage Favraux
has done to others. As he reaches the stage with the eyes of the guests
on him, the bird suddenly flutters to life, and the masked magician
begins to release more birds that flit above the society guests. He
closes in on Jacqueline, herself wearing a dove mask, and charms her
with his pets, before her father, clad aptly in a vulture mask, takes
the stage to announce the engagement at midnight—the time when Judex has
promised he will die. Just after the clock finishes striking the hour,
Favraux immediately falls to the floor and is pronounced dead by a
doctor (André Méliès) who is amongst the guests.
Franju reconstructs Judex into a kind of artist-hero, an Orpheus
figure standing at the gates and wielding powers of life, death, and
resurrection through his artful execution, a figure with an otherworldly
quality that stands in stark contrast to the equally multitudinous, yet
deeply, deliciously corporeal Diana. This is partly a side effect of
the fact that Franju had originally wanted to remake Fantômas
(1914), and was more interested in the villains Musidora had played for
Feuillade, with her potent eroticism and air of ungoverned radicalism,
than in traditional hero figures, and this tension contributes to the
peculiar texture of Judex. Franju clearly doesn’t care about
the usual rules that are supposed to preoccupy filmmakers engaging with
such material, like trying to make the flimflam logically or
psychologically convincing, opting for uncovering an animating spirit of
transformative delight.
Caught between the two masked protagonists is Scob’s Jacqueline, an
ironic touch considering she played the disfigured, perpetually masked
and imprisoned heroine in Eyes Without a Face. Scob is here
just as angelic and victimised, but this time she’s just about the only
major character who is not adopting some kind of disguise. She is rather
the character who is the most integral being, needing nothing more than
what she possesses, and for whom all decency is a private epiphany.
Jacqueline is initially dominated and pinioned by her father’s
prerogative; his “death” comes as both an aggrieving shock and an
opportunity to declare autonomy, rejecting the poisoned chalice that is
his estate in favour of raising her daughter Alice on her income as a
piano teacher, and seeing off her loser fiancé with passing delight.
Scob, rather resembling a blonde Audrey Hepburn with her swanlike neck
and large, expressive eyes, inhabits the role of nominal damsel in
distress with an ethereal grace, relentlessly hunted, snatched, drugged,
and nearly murdered by Diana and her coterie of dimwit thugs. Yet, she
also is the moral light of the film: after she spurns the estate, Judex
changes his original plan to execute her father, who was merely
paralysed with a drug, for his crimes, and instead keep him prisoner.
Judex and his band of warriors unearth Favraux from his tomb and
transport him to their abode, a super-futuristic hideout underneath an
ancient, perhaps Roman ruin (felicitous, given the Roman roots of his
adopted name and creed), an abode reminiscent of Cocteau’s Hades in Orpheé
(1949) translated into proto-science fiction, as seemingly solid brick
walls slide apart, ceilings become panels upon which written words
appear delivering messages of almost deistic judgement, and Judex keeps
an eye on his captive with the sorcery of technology—television. Judex,
like some other films of the late ’50s and early ’60s, including a
small rash of period-dress Jules Verne adaptations, offers a
prototypical version of the spirit that drives the more recent Steampunk
movement: a delight in modern and futuristic technology viewed through
the sensibility and conceptualism of the past, coupled with an
effervescent, yet quietly meaningful reflection on the subtler
transformations of society. Franju coats the film with a veneer of the
comedic and the ethereal that don’t entirely hide its awareness of the
fluidic moment it depicts, with characters, particularly the female
ones, shaking off the dead weight of Victorianism to claw their way into
a new era. Judex already seems to live in that new era, like a time
traveller, or perhaps a Merlin, who was said to age in reverse:
fittingly, then, one key image of perverse sensuality arrives when
Jacqueline is shocked to discover Judex in the act of transforming
himself into the elderly Vallieres, mantle of snowy white hair over his
young face, her aged protector revealed as dramatically handsome
potential lover/persecutor/saviour.
Judex is filled with such deft shifts of emphasis and
perception, as it moves from incident to incident borrowed from
Feuillade with diversions into moments of private wit and invention.
Franju constantly gleans strange humour from tropes of melodrama:
Jacqueline, dumped in a river by the notorious criminals, floats
blithely into the arms of fishermen whilst her tormentors look on in
frustration; Morales with a hand caught in a trap on Favraux’s desk,
trying to hide long enough for Diana to sneak up on the interloping
Jacqueline, who screams on seeing the apparently disembodied limb;
Diana, pretending to be a nurse with a voluminous wimple perched on her
head, checks herself out in her compact to make sure her makeup hasn’t
been despoiled by lying on the ground to spring a trap on an another
unsuspecting victim. The sight of Judex’s men scaling a sheer wall like
so many four-limbed spiders is both physically impressive and yet,
somehow, hilarious, as is the heroes’ appearance in costume dashing
about in full daylight, which ought to get them arrested on general
principal. The two roving bands of mysterious heroes and villains chase
each other around the landscape in a roundelay of costumes and roles,
both infiltrating and slipping outside the confines of society, before
finally reverting to their purified roles as emblems of good and evil.
Franju rigorously contrasts environs, shifting slowly from the
old-world mystique of the country mansion to the rundown Parisian suburb
where the finale takes place, with the building Diana’s gang holes up
in turned into a lonely castle in a gloomy waste ground at the very
frontiers of a bleak and bottomless modernism, with stygian factories
burning away in the background as Diana dangles above a void. Judex’s
presumption in labouring according to a desire for essential human
justice to be upheld is based in a sense that society is, on the level
of villainy that Favraux has worked, corrupt beyond the possibility of
real justice. Favraux himself is so scared of the powerful men he has
done business with or has dirt on that he doubts he could ever return
safely to his former life even after Diana and her cohort rescue him
from Judex’s prison. This news only makes Diana happier: even better to
feed off the dark secrets of high society than to steal its trinkets.
The spirit of fin-de-siècle anarchist movements and
proto-revolutionary zeal lie underneath both sides, whilst the lone
figure of even vaguely official justice, Cocantin, is a comical figure
given to excitedly flipping the pages of the original Fantômas novel.
An sly sensuality charges Judex throughout, most obviously
with Bergé dancing about in tights, culminating in a delirious moment in
which she strips off her nurse’s garb down to her basic bodystocking,
with that absurd wimple still on her head, before finally tossing that
aside, too, and plunging through a trap door into a river to elude Judex
and his men. The erotic edge is, however, equally manifest in the
undertones of Judex’s and Jacqueline’s encounters, crystallising in
images of symbolist power, like a doped-up Jacqueline left splayed in
the driveway of the mansion by Morales and Diana when they’re faced with
guard dogs, one of the hounds placing one paw protectively over the
girl moments before the equally watchful, beneficent Judex strolls out
of the woods and carries Jacqueline back home, her white clad form aglow
in moonlight and seeming to float in the arms of the nocturnal-cloaked
hero.
Aided by Bergé’s mischievous, but never winking, performance, Franju
delights in Diana’s displays of sexy evil and rapid alterations of
attire, playing the prim Madonna for Favraux’s benefit, the sister of
mercy, the urban coquette, the mannishly garbed leader of her cell of
rebels, and most indelibly, slinking through the night in her
form-hugging black bodysuit with silver dagger at the hip a la
Musidora’s Irma Vep and many a Catwoman after her. Diana is not merely a
naughty anti-heroine, however, but a cold-blooded killer constantly
poking lethally sharp objects in Jacqueline’s face, as if she’s seized
hold of phallocratic power, but can only fashion an intent to violate
her feminine opposite with it. Diana lives with a boyfriend and partner
in crime Morales (Théo Sarapo), first glimpsed lounging on his bed and
looking very like Jean-Paul Belmondo, as if Franju’s making a wry link
between the older fantasies and Godard’s contemporary brand of
eroticised, rough-trade criminal. Turns out that Morales is actually the
missing son of Kerjean, progeny of a family unit torn asunder by
Favraux’s malfeasance: his father wasn’t actually killed by Favraux’s
attempt to run him over, but is, in fact, another of Judex’s operatives,
and father and son recognise each other when locked in a deadly battle.
Cocantin’s return to the fray late in the film comes when a village
boy, a pal of Alice’s who, having recognised Diana in her nurse costume
as the fake Marie Verdier, approaches the detective to succeed where
Judex has momentarily failed in tracking her down. Cocantin’s childlike
spirit has already been confirmed when he was glimpsed gleefully
relating blood and thunder tales and stories of her namesake to the
delighted Alice; now, he and the kid form a fairly effective
crime-fighting duo, allowing Franju to offer a nod in the direction of
Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) and further undermining any pretences
to seriousness. Yet, the film’s very last act is a brilliant whirl of
reversals, as Judex is captured by his enemies, and fends off Diana’s
attempt at sadomasochistic-hued seduction as she tries to kiss him while
he’s tied up. Franju performs another pirouette in offering surprising
sympathy for Favraux as a man who’s alive and yet might as well be dead,
now wanting only peace. He still falls for Diana’s pretence to being
the kindly Marie who will marry him now that he’s no longer rich, for
she still hopes to use his knowledge. Favraux trusts her completely and
understandably fears Judex, so much so that when the hero arrives to
save him from the villains, Favraux knocks him out, and shoots himself
rather than be retaken by his rescuers, lending of note of tragedy to
the story, but also saving him from the disillusionment of learning
Diana’s real nature.
Meanwhile, of course, a gentleman like Judex can’t be seen to hurt a
lady, so to deliver Diana a comeuppance and save Judex from his
apparently inescapable death, a deus ex machina arrives in the
form of Cocantin’s gorgeous acrobat girlfriend Daisy (Sylva Koscina),
whose circus caravan just happens to trundle past as Cocantin and the
kid are watching the enemy hideout. Daisy reports to Cocantin that her
own domineering uncle is now dead (“The lions ate him!”), so she’s a
free agent now. A perfect equal and opposite to Diana, she wears a
dashing white bodysuit for her act, initially entering wearing a
spangled cape and tiara that she hands over to Cocantin for the
duration. She is the one who will climb up the wall of the house and
spring Judex, allowing him to turn the tables on Diana and Morales by
substituting the criminal male for his bound and hooded form; Diana
unknowingly plunges a knife into her lover’s heart, in a typically
inspired, vicious twist. Diana’s own comeuppance comes as Daisy chases
her onto the roof, where the mirror opposites battle to the death.
Franju even offers a gleefully sexy and exciting shot showing only their
legs, clad in leotards of contrasting black and white, entwining and
tangling in the dance of combat. Diana loses, and finishes up sliding
down the roof to dangle from the drain pipe as Judex’s men try to reach
her, to no avail. That she was as much of a life force as a destroyer is
suggested when her end comes, falling to her death and lying open-eyed
amidst rubble and flowers, wept over by the young boy, with a mournful
taps blown by one of the circus musicians: for Franju, even a villain’s
end is something to be mourned. The very end belongs again to Judex and
Jacqueline, who, leaving behind the past, are seen on a beach with the
lady love now dressed in a sailor suit and the avenger reverted to
magician, producing flapping totems of love from thin air. It’s a
glorious end to a film that’s made an instant leap into the ranks of my
personal favourites. - www.ferdyonfilms.com/
Judex (1963)
Georges Franju's Judex is an arch, playful tribute to
the serials of the influential silent filmmaker Louis Feuillade. Franju
shuffles through the plot of Feuillade's lengthy serial of the same
name, about an adventurer named Judex (Channing Pollock) whose revenge
against the corrupt banker Favraux (Michel Vitold) unleashes a
complicated series of schemes. The film is defined by its complex twists
and turns, its melodramatic indulgences: a wronged father (René Génin)
who's searching for his missing son; the fiendish femme fatale Marie
Verdier (Francine Bergé) who faces off against Judex; the plots
centering around Jacqueline (Edith Scob), the daughter of Favraux; the
incompetent detective Cocantin (Max Montavon), who seems more
comfortable as a babysitter than an investigator. The film opens with
Favraux being blackmailed by Judex, who threatens to expose the banker's
many crimes if he doesn't give his ill-gained fortune back to his
victims.
Fittingly, Franju opens with an iris-out, and will close the film with
an iris-in, only the most obvious of his nods to his inspiration. Franju
sets his film primarily in the same kinds of gritty, realistic locales
favored by Feuillade, who loved shooting on the streets and in scenic
exteriors. The texture of the image here is grainy and dark, tending
toward shadowy nighttime scenes where cloaked figures skulk through the
abandoned streets, framed against the moon, heading out on mysterious
errands. Franju is riffing on the magical, playful qualities of
Feuillade's classic serials, and the imagery is lush. Judex's grand
entrance in particular is stunning, set at a costume ball where he
arrives in a massive bird mask, his outstretched, upturned palm holding a
seemingly dead bird before him as he weaves through the revelers, with
Franju's camera bobbing behind him. He then proceeds to perform a series
of magic tricks for the assembled guests, pulling scarves from his
sleeves and turning them into doves, which then flutter around the room.
And, foreshadowing one of the film's central twists, he even brings the
dead bird back to life with a gesture, allowing it too to fly off his
palm into the audience. It's an amazing introduction, establishing the
film's basic theme, its tribute to the magic and mystery of the cinema,
the sleight of hand by which the filmmakers can divert the audience's
attention and create startling effects.
This scene establishes the sense of low-key fun at the film's core, its
predilection for toying with genre elements. This is especially true of
the gleefully evil femme fatale Marie, the film's best character — and
its best performance in Bergé, who really projects the slinky, haughty
evil of her versatile seductress/criminal. Stalking through the night in
her tight black jumpsuit and domino mask, she seems like a master
criminal, which makes it easy to miss the fact that all of her schemes
actually don't go so well. In one of the film's most delightful
inventions, when she's breaking into Favraux's house, her henchman is
snared by a handcuff trap that unexpectedly pops out of a desk, right at
the spot where the crook had his arm resting to pick a lock. Marie is
actually foiled at every turn, often by the unflappable Judex, who
drifts around with his black cape flopping behind him and a black hat on
his head.
Franju's approach to this story is inherently anti-logical, infusing
Judex's adventures with a laidback, drowsy surrealism. The spectacle of
the bird-headed hero performing magic tricks is absurd enough, but more
subtle is the way the film utterly rejects the idea of death, allowing
characters to pass fluidly between states. Characters are constantly
being declared dead, sometimes even buried, only to suddenly come back
to life, as though they had merely fainted and were able to recover: the
convention becomes so familiar that when the villainess actually seems
to remain dead after falling off a building at the denouement, it's
startling. Franju's characters defy death, not because of any narrative
logic — these resurrections are never explained — but simply because the
magic of cinema and the strange anti-logic of this film allows it.
Similarly, Franju creates complex shots where the camera starts from the
distinctive Feuillade static camera angle, at a medium distance from
the action, only to begin flowing into the scene, creating new
compositions. This fluid camerawork suggests the technological
limitations of Feuillade's cinema only to replace it with the more
sophisticated possibilities available to Franju. At other times, he
achieves striking effects with the editing, as when he cuts from
Jacqueline walking up a staircase in her home to Marie walking up one as
she schemes against the other woman.
The film's pacing is languid despite all this plotting, allowing plenty
of time for Franju to explore the texture of the images, the vibrant
characters, and the subtle jokes embedded in the mise en scène and
performances. Perhaps the best sequence is the denouement, which keeps
escalating as Judex and Cocantin engineer a showdown with Marie and her
lover. It's a rich scene, though the action is less important than the
whimsical touches, like the way the detective acquires a young sidekick
who imitates his idol's every move, parroting his shuffling gait, the
way he folds his arms behind his back, the way he nervously paces while
waiting for Judex to save the day. At the scene's climax, a circus
suddenly pulls up, owned by one of a Cocantin's friends, an acrobat
(Sylva Koscina) who thrusts herself into the middle of the action by
climbing up a sheer brick wall to the top of the building, where she
rescues Judex from the clutches of the villains. Before she does,
however, she pauses at the top, smiling and waving as she looks down at
Judex's masked henchmen clustered below, looking up with the white
eyeholes in their masks seeming to glow in the dark. She finally winds
up stealing the show from the titular hero, even getting the final
battle with Marie. The villain in her tight black jumpsuit and the
acrobat in an equally form-fitting white outfit: light and dark, white
hats and black hats, good and evil, all the movie conventions about
heroes and villains inscribed in the clothes of these two women.
Franju's Judex is a compelling tribute to the silent cinema and
the conventions of classic, pulpy genre storytelling. This film takes
what might've been a straightforward story and infuses it with a moody
visual sensibility and a subtly surrealist perspective that really
locates the magic and mystery in these well-worn genre archetypes.-seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/
Don’t know why I assumed this was not a good movie. I’d seen screen
captures from the DVD (some of the same ones I’ve got below) and somehow
I still thought it was possible to make a bad movie using those images.
It is not. This was astounding.
In a daring but successful shout-out to Feuillade, the story (set in
1910 or 20) is ridiculous. Plot threads do not weave together as in a
tapestry of grand design. Each scene seems to have been thought up
after the last one was finished filming. This is not a weakness, but
adds to the movie’s dreamlike effect.
Master criminal Judex’s evil plans aren’t very broad-ranging in this
story. He’s stalking rich guy Favraux acting as his servant, sends a
letter demanding Favraux surrender half his fortune or he will die the
next night. Next night at the costume ball (seen above), Favraux does
die.
But he’s not dead! Imprisoned by Judex!
Daughter Jacqueline is left alone in the house!
She is easy prey for Marie, the swinding ex-governess of the house
who returns to steal Favraux’s valuable papers and kidnaps Jac. when she
interferes.
But Jac. is rescued by Judex’s dogs!
There’s a private eye named Cocantin (seen below reading Fantomas), originally hired by Favraux, and somehow still involved.
Can he stop Marie?!? Who can??
Judex!
Ha, not really. Marie has captured Jac again, has her tied up atop a
building along with Marie’s accomplice, a man who found his long-lost
father earlier after Favraux tried to have the father killed, but that’s
another story. Highlight of the movie here, Cocantin is wondering how
to get atop that building when a circus caravan rolls past. Why, it’s
the circus of his old friend Daisy, an acrobat who easily climbs the
building!
Rooftop fight! Marie grabs the gutter! Will she fall??
Yes!
I think the only actor I knew was Edith Scob as Jacqueline – just saw her as Mary in The Milky Way. Sylva Koscina (Daisy) was in some MST3K-approved Hercules films. Francine Bergé (Marie) was later in Mr. Klein, Rivette’s The Nun and Roger Vadim’s La Ronde
remake. Channing Pollock (Judex) was a magician with only a few other
film roles. René Génin (Pierre Kerjean) had appeared in Renoir and
Carné films in the 30′s. This movie was co-written by Feuillade’s
grandson, heh.
G. Gardner with Senses of Cinema:
Franju sought in particular to recapture Feuillade’s
sense of documentary and his playfulness. He reproduced with as much
exactitude as possible the costumes and settings which Feuillade filmed
in scrupulous detail. Feuillade’s street-scapes are now an invaluable
documentary record, but Franju also paid particular attention to
reproducing the elaborate interior designs and furnishings of the day,
resulting in settings of quite extraordinary detail and clutter. Franju
also sought, despite the playfulness, to avoid any camp satire of these
elements by over-emphasis or any special attention being paid to them.
In the title role, Franju pulled off his most brilliant coup by
casting the master prestidigator of his day, near godlike in his
handsomeness, Channing Pollock. Pollock’s skills as a magician were
employed to produce a dazzling array of apparent magical occurrences
involving, most particularly, disappearing doves, a plot device that
Feuillade uses to enable the regular rescue of the heroine and others by
Judex. Franju’s Judex is a far livelier, less sombre, more inventive
and more mysterious character than that of Feuillade. -deeperintomovies.net/
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