Fantômas Unleashed

Juve Delinquent

Fantômas Unleashed
(aka Fantômas se déchaîne)
France/Italy 1965
Directed by André Hunebelle & Haroun Tazieff
Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Once again ‘inspired’ by the popular Fantômas novels of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Fantômas Unleashed is the second of the trilogy of films which, not so much reinvented the central antagonist but transformed the milieu in which he operates to a 1960s sensibility. The plot on this one is much more straight forward and more a rip off of something you’d see in a typical espionage or super villain movie of the time... be it James Bond, Derek Flint or, very much so, a Fu Manchu film... in that this one is the usual master criminal kidnaps a bunch of scientists in order for them to construct him a super weapon with which to threaten the world. In this case, the plot device in question is a telepathic ray with which you can cause people to do your bidding through the power of your mind.

However, while the story line is pure spy stuff, the overall tone of the movie betrays, even more, it’s partial basis on the success of The Pink Panther movies of the time. Once again we have Louis de Funès playing the put upon Inspector Juve who has the task of capturing Fantômas, although Fantômas and the newspaperman Fandor (once again played as a dual role by Jean Marais) are very much the sturdy, serious characters they always were in previous incarnations of the property, the tone of this one is even more comic with the emphasis now more on Juve than Fandor. Funès plays the part of the bumbling police inspector quite well but there’s not much room for anything else in the movie when you have his larger than life antics filling up most of the scenes as he utilises a number of special gadgets and not so clever disguises in his unending failure of a quest to bring Fantômas to justice. Even the opening title sequence is a Pink Panther style cartoon sequence starring Juve, which gives us a humorous recap of the previous story as scenes from the 1964 movie are recapped in animated form.

Once more, Mylène Demongeot plays Fandor’s photojournalist girlfriend Hélène but, this time, a young juvenile delinquent of a brother is thrown into the mix and you just know he’s going to come under the grasp of Fantômas by the end of the movie, as the villain tries to use his life as leverage. Incidentally, the young brother is played by the son of Louis de Funès and this was the first time they’d worked together on screen.

It’s another film that could have been fantastic but kinda plays the comedy a little too broadly in parts for my liking. That being said, it’s a much more even film (it doesn’t feature a chase scene that lasts for nearly half an hour, thank goodness) and I’d say it’s an improvement over the previous one (reviewed here), in pacing at least. There’s also a lot of points of interest in this one, most notably in terms of the secret agent 'Q branch' style gadgets that Juve employs in his pursuit of the villain. These are all played for laughs, naturally but, unusually for instruments that seem to be there only to get a laugh for the audience, Juve actually manages to use each gadget to get him out of a tight spot and put one over the enemy when needed so... yeah... they’re not just throwaways.

The first ‘gadget’ is a mechanical fake arm which allows Juve to have his real arm hidden under his jacket and holding a gun when he’s in trouble. Despite the comic shenanigans which ensue from the use of the moving fake arm, he does gun down two of Fantômas’ men when they are not expecting it. Similarly, he uses some cigar guns to have two guards shoot each other so he can free himself from Fantômas’ clutches. Lastly... and I’m so pleased I’ve seen this now... he makes use of a fake wooden leg which doubles as a machine gun. Yep, Cherry Darling’s machine gun leg from Planet Terror (which I’d thought was an original invention), actually makes its debut here in prototype. So now I know.

There are some other quite interesting things too, which put it a little ahead of Bond at the time (Thunderball, reviewed here, was released the same year as this movie). For example, when Fantômas is making his getaway at the end of the movie, he uses a Citroen which converts into a flying car at the flick of a couple of switches (I don’t believe the Bond series had a flying car until The Man With The Golden Gun... reviewed here). Another thing which is special about this movie is that it contains the first large format cinema filming of a skydive stunt where a man catches up to another before operating his parachute. This is for a sequence where Fandor has to catch Juve in mid-air because the bumbling police inspector has accidentally put on a ruck sack instead of a parachute and, well, like I said, it’s pretty much the first time this was done for a feature film, predating the stunt’s use in the Bond series, in Moonraker (reviewed here), by over a decade.  

So, Fantômas Unleashed is an ingenious film but perhaps just a little too much slapstick in some areas... indeed, there are even a couple of ‘silent movie’ style comedy sections, one of which, frankly, I couldn’t make head or tail of. All in all, though, the film is quite entertaining and, frankly, Jean Marais still looks great as the blue headed title character... although, the best gadget in the entire movie is Fandor’s frilly fronted shirt. I wish more people wore those these days, so I can bring my own one out of retirement. These should definitely make a come back because, as far as I’m concerned, they should always be considered the height of fashion. Hopefully there will be another fantastic, frilly shirt in the third and final film of this series, the review of which you can catch in a couple of days on this blog.