Fantômas

Fandor Snatch

Fantômas
France/Italy 1964
Directed by André Hunebelle
Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Fantômas is a very popular master criminal character who appeared in a series of over 40 best selling books by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, written between 1911 and 1963. I’ve only ever read two of them myself because translations from the French are especially hard to come by over here in the UK but in the original stories he’s a pretty ruthless and vicious criminal who is more of a terrorist and will stop at nothing to achieve his goals.

And that’s the tone director Louis Feuillade took with him in his excellent, silent, Fantômas film serials, which in some ways are more a series of interlocking shortish films but, yes, pretty much in the serial format and, of course, he’d later go on to direct two more very famous serials (internationally famous, that is, he churned out a lot of interesting stuff)... Les Vampires (with the original Musidora incarnation of Irma Vep... played by Maggie Cheun many decades later) and Judex (who also resurfaced in 1960s movies). Since Feuillade’s serials, many versions of Fantômas hit the silver screen (and television) in various incarnations and this one I’m now seeing for the first time on an American Blu Ray release of the 1960s trilogy (these still haven’t been released in the UK, can you believe?), is a more lighthearted take on the master criminal.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s still quite ruthless but the other characters in this play it more for laughs and, surprisingly, they all just manage to get away with it without harming the movie... too much. So we have Jean Marais in a dual role here both as Fantômas himself and the main protagonist Fandor, the newspaper man originally created by Fantômas in the first book but, well, that part of the story doesn’t come into play here at all, Fandor starts off as his own man here. We also have Louis de Funès playing Inspector Juve completely for laughs (and it’s a fairly charming performance), Mylène Demongeot playing Hélène (Fandor’s girlfriend and news photographer) and Marie-Hélène Arnaud as Lady Beltham, whose husband, if I’m remembering correctly, was killed in the first book but, again, not much mention is made to her origins as the current girlfriend of Fantômas here.

And it’s a bit of a romp. It’s well paced (for the first half of the movie, at least) with a certain competence behind the shot design, without being all that spectacular. Looked at now it seems a little clumsy in places but you can see the director and producers were just finding their legs with it and I suspect they got a little wilder as the series progressed (I hope). It’s also very much, it seems to me, to be a reaction to the current cinema trends in which the James Bond films had started making waves. Dr. No and From Russia With Love (and possibly Goldfinger) would have preceeded this film and you can certainly see the influences here. The set for Fantômas’ underground lair is absolutely taking a page from the Ken Adams school of 'evil villain power base' design and this is coupled with a kind of slightly underplayed (but still quite over the top in terms of most films) homage to the The Pink Panther films, regarding the incompetence and bumbling of the policemen lead by Juve in the movie. Indeed, even the smooth, secret agent style scoring from Michel Magne seems a bit like a pastiche where John Barry meets Henry Mancini from their respective, famous franchise scores.

It’s a bit uneven in terms of on screen action, especially for the last half an hour of the film which is pretty much just one, long ridiculous chase. An over the top (especially in terms of length) sequence where Fandor and Hélène try to negotiate their car down a mountain without breaks really outstays its welcome and then leads into an equally lengthy pursuit by car, bike, train, helicopter and submarine scene which, frankly, gets a little dull in places but, overall, it’s not a bad movie and I think I’m maybe being a little too harsh and not allowing for the historical context of the release of the film to make an impact. This would have been quite well received at the time and you can certainly see why.

Marais looks older here than in anything else I’ve seen him in (which just amounts to some of his collaborations with Jean Cocteau, to be honest) but he shows a certain versatility in various guises here, not least of which is the harsh title antagonist who, bizarrely, they’ve chosen to give a blue face to. The ‘mask’ of his face is actually quite cleverly put together and I reckon it’s a half mask prosthetic blended with his ‘blue skin’ because it’s a lot more mobile around the mouth and completely dead and sinister in the upper part of his face. This is not, by the way, what Fantômas looks like but, it’s a nice idea and, well, it was the 1960s... I’m happy to accept it.

My biggest criticism is, perhaps, the softening of Fantômas. Don’t get me wrong, he seems utterly ruthless here and somehow ‘gets away with it’ amongst all the comedy hi-jinks but, well... for instance, there’s a caper where he steals a load of ‘unstealable’ jewellery from under the police commissioner’s nose during a presentation. To do this he gasses a load of models who were wearing the jewellery in their dressing room but, later, it’s revealed that this was a sleeping gas from which they all awake. All I’m saying is that, in the books, I’m pretty sure Fantômas would have just killed them all with the poison gas... he has no regard for human life, as I recall and it wouldn’t have been a big deal for him. Indeed, it would just feed his reputation as a terrorist before whom the world should tremble even more so, yeah, I can half see why they’ve done it here but, I still think he’s a little bit of a compromised version of the character, nonetheless.

And that’s me done with this one. Really glad I’ve started to catch up to the 1960s cycle of Fantômas movies and I’m looking forward to watching the next one in the series. That review will be coming in a couple of days.