René Navarre as Fantômas
Fantômas (1913-1914)
Fantômas in the Shadow of the Guillotine (1913), Juve vs. Fantômas (1913), The Murderous Corpse (1913), Fantômas vs. Fantômas (1914), The False Magistrate (1914)
Direction: Louis Feuillade
Screenplay: Louis Feuillade; from Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s novels
Cast: René Navarre, Edmond Bréon, Georges Melchior, Renée Carl, Jane Faber
True cinephiles know what to say when asked to explain the relative aggregate crumminess of the films they’ve bothered to see in 2010: "Too many lousy genre movies … everything’s based on some pre-sold franchise property … one sequel after another…"
Well, bully for true cinephiles – they can go waste their time at whatever dour, sexless movie Clint Eastwood’s directing this week. The rest of us will be left to enjoy Kino’s recent boxed set of Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas films which, in addition to committing each of the above-enumerated crimes, is one of the best archival releases of the year.
Often incorrectly referred to as a serial, the movies on this set are in fact a series of five features chronicling the adventures of Inspector Juve and his journalist associate Fandor as they pursue the mysterious arch-criminal Fantômas throughout France.
René Navarre is by turns dashing and spooky as the villain, who plays the role of crime boss, ghostly super-terrorist and world’s greatest burglar as the situation calls for it. There’s very little long-term plot development over the course of the films (aside from a shift in emphasis from Juve to Fandor as the main protagonist), but rather simply a sequence of crimes, investigation, pursuit and escape, typically with a cliffhanger ending. This lack of resolution is likely an artifact of the pulpy nature of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s wildly popular source novels, which were cranked out at a rate of one per month (they produced 32 from 1911 to 1913).
While the Fantômas films are a lot of fun in their own right as spry, breezy crime thrillers (though not quite as crazy as Feuillade’s later Les Vampires serial), the documentary value of these movies alone make them essential. Although mostly setbound, the films occasionally venture into the outside world when location scenes are called for.
In these scenes, passers-by look into the camera, a stray dog who spent a short life fighting for scraps wanders into and then out of the frame, ephemeral details of daily life – trends in men’s hats, what mailboxes used to look like – are captured for a few seconds and then vanish.
This whole world would vanish shortly thereafter – Fantômas was filmed in the France of 1913 and 1914, with the final episode of this set released shortly before August. That month would see the beginnings of a crime vaster in scope and destruction than anything Fantômas could pull off.
It is a virtual certainty that every Frenchman you see in these films would be directly touched by the coming war, several probably serving in its almost comically destructive battles – Feuillade himself set aside his camera to rush to the defense of La France – and more than a few never to return. Daily routines, social habits and political institutions breed an expectation of permanence into members of a society; there’s a certain sense of vertigo that comes with seeing – as opposed to simply reading about – a society with a rude awakening in its future. Its a feeling we ought to get used to as the medium of film ages, as years accumulate between a young audience and the historical context of a movie celebrating its 75th or 90th or 100th birthday.
Fantômas also occupies a place of interest as the beginning of nearly all European genre films. The title criminal is an obvious inspiration for similar characters in Fritz Lang’s German films (particularly Dr. Mabuse) as well as the villains of James Bond films (a connection made explicit by the Jean Marais Fantômas of the 1960s). Lemmy Caution, Diabolik and virtually the entire giallo genre have at least some roots in these films, and fans of any of the above ought to familiarize themselves with this set at their earliest opportunity.