OSS117 - Double Agent

The Assassination Game

OSS117 - Double Agent
aka Niente rose per OSS 117
aka OSS117 Murder For Sale
France/Italy 1968
Directed by Renzo Cerrato, 
Jean-Pierre Desagnat & André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Well this is going to be another very short OSS117 review but I can finally say I’m very disappointed with Kino Lorber’s Blu Ray set, OSS117 Five Film Collection, which collects the films made about this character in the 1960s and which, in the case of this film, is based on Jean Bruce’s novel Pas de roses pour OSS 117. Not because Kino Lorber have done a bad job... on the contrary, the transfers and prints on these things look fantastic. I think it’s more that these bandwagon competitors to the Bond franchise are just, mainly, as dull as ditchwater. And I can’t blame the actors either. 

OSS117 - Double Agent is about Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, alias OSS117, infiltrating the crime syndicate known as ‘The Organisation’ (no, not that organisation... a much smaller, fictional one) in order to foil their plan of assassinating people for money. Why the secret service are targetting this organisation in particular was, I think, passed off with an attempted explanation at the start which I really didn’t understand and it felt like a bit of an excuse to be honest. The plot goes from silly to worse as OSS117 is injected with a poison which will kill him once every 24 hours unless he has the next stage of the antidote, as the way his new employers try to keep their hired help on a leash and more pliable to their assassination missions. Hubert gets involved with a few ladies, has a few fist fights and eventually saves the day in the most anticlimactic, throwaway manner possible... which you wouldn’t expect from a film populated with some quite good actors, to be honest. 

For this fifth and final of the 1960s screen outings for the character, the lead actor has once again been replaced. John Gavin is playing him here and there’s even a reference... and a jokey dig... to the change in the male lead this time as one character describes him as having had plastic surgery to look like a specific killer and he gets the reply, “He’s much better looking now.” I guess it serves as some kind of testament to the acting talent that even Gavin... who was later signed on to take over from George Lazenby as James Bond, starting with Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here), before Sean Connery decided to come back on board at the eleventh hour... can’t help save this film. The script and pacing is so awful. 

Nor can some of the other exciting names in the cast liven things up either... such as George Eastman playing a splendid henchman to the arch villain, played by future Bond villain Curd Jürgens, the wonderful Rosalba Neri and, five years after trying to kill Connery’s 007 in Thunderball (reviewed here), the stunning Luciana Paluzzi. I am guessing Paluzzi may just have been cast for her former association with the Bond film because, bizarrely, she disappears from the narrative about a third of the way in and is never mentioned again, even when it’s logical that OSS117 should run into her again at the close of the picture. 

Replacing composer Michel Magne for this one is the late but very great Piero Piccioni but, it has to be said, as nice as this score is as a standalone listen on CD, even Piccioni can’t save this one. I have to wonder at producer/director André Hunebelle’s decisions about this. He has two great composers on these films and it’s like he’s ordered them to play almost against the images and make them feel somewhat antiseptic and inappropriate to what’s going on in the film. As I said, Piccioni’s music sounds very easy on the ears but, really, does nothing to improve this one. A John Barry score would have really helped liven this picture up but, yeah, I have to wonder how both Magne and Piccioni seemed to both turn up such ‘out of place’ scores for these movies. 

And that really is me done with OSS117 Double Agent. I said it was going to be a short review and I can’t think of anything really good to say about the experience. The film feels somewhat lethargic and has a script which really lets everyone down. I can’t, in all consciousness, recommend this one to anybody. Possibly the dullest eurospy movie I’ve seen, I would guess. 

OSS117 - Mission For A Killer

Hell To Peyote

OSS117 - Mission For A Killer
aka Furia à Bahia pour OSS 117
France/Italy 1965
Directed by André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

OSS117 - Mission For A Killer is the third of the films presented in Kino Lorber’s Blu Ray set OSS117 Five Film Collection. This time around, the main lead has been recast... we no longer have Kerwin Matthews in the role of Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath aka OSS117, Instead we have Frederick Stafford who, it has to be said, is even more of a block of wood in the role than Matthews was. He does, to be fair, look much more capable of doing all the fights and is quite confident in the role but, well, when I say that Matthews displayed much more emotion and personality in the role, you can see what we’re up against here. I’m not sure I’m blaming the actor here though... I’ll get to that in a minute. 

Luckily, he has a really excellent female lead in Mylène Demongeot, playing a random lady who gets accidentally mixed up in the mechanics of a threat to the world, probably because she strikes up a friendship with Hubert as much as anything else. Said threat to the world starts off as a promising proposition, explained in a truly unmemorable and dull pre-credits sequence which, rather than starting off with an action piece as the Bond films would, is just lots of talking about important figures being assassinated by brainwashed, drugged up, suicide bombers. Hubert’s mission is to take over from another guy in Brazil (who obviously gets killed almost as soon as OSS117 gets there) and find out who is making and using these brainwashing drugs etc. I say etc because, it would seem implicit that they would also want to find out who’s actually programming these living bombs and stopping them in their tracks but, yeah, I don’t think that aspect of the mission is ever actually made clear.

From there on it’s the usual shenanigans where Hubert will get into a fight with a bunch of bad guys, romance a lady, step and repeat for a while before flying to a different part of Brazil to rescue some Indians who have been ‘making’ peyote, which apparently turns you into an easily suggestible robot (hmmm... I’m really not sure that’s what peyote and its mescalin ingredient does, to be honest). 

And it’s a fairly dull and plodding film it has to be said. Some of the fist fights do their best to break up the monotony, which is not in any way helped along by Michel Magne’s ponderous lounge score. I have to wonder how these were supposed to compete with the Bond films, which were already up to Thunderball when this was released without, apparently, the filmmakers managing to pick up on anything which made those films so good. This film is a big yawn compared to what EON were churning out at the same time. I also have to wonder how this was the 11th most popular film in France in the year it was released. 

I wish I could say that the film had some unseen twists or unusual things to recommend it. I suppose a fists against flame thrower fight in a hotel room is quite interesting in its own way and, later, when Hubert drives his car through a sheet of flame, the sight of the tyres on all four wheels of his car spinning orange flames is eye catching. But, over all, this film is as similarly snooze inducing as its predecessors.

I blame André Hunebelle... I thought his 1960s Fantômas movies made around the same time (and reviewed on this blog elsewhere, check out the movie section of the index) were somewhat okay but ultimately lacked a lot of the punch they might have had (although I think their screenplays were a little better) but these OSS117 movies are a somewhat duller affair than those. At least the Fantômas films had some novelty moments in them but, these OSS117 movies don’t even seem to have inherited Bond’s mania for sophisticated spy gadgetry... which is overplayed somewhat in the Bond series over time, to be fair but, yeah, they really could have done with something to lift these movies. 

So it would be true to say that OSS117 - Mission For A Killer is no better or worse than the previous two movies in the series. It’s not a film I would recommend, even to lovers of spy movies and, yeah, I won’t be watching this one again in a hurry. Still, there are two more films left in this set and the fourth, while produced by Hunebelle, is not actually directed by him so, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Frederick Stafford’s return engagement in the OSS117 role will be a better movie than this one. I should find out fairly swiftly. 

OSS117 - Panic In Bangkok

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bangkok

OSS117 - Panic In Bangkok
aka Shadow Of Evil
aka Banco à Bangkok 
pour OSS 117
France/Italy 1964
Directed by André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

The year following the release of OSS117 Is Unleashed in cinemas (reviewed by me here), Kerwin Mathews once again starred as Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, code name OSS117 in his second and final go at the role, OSS117 - Panic In Bangkok, adapting one of Jean Bruce’s original novels. And, I have to say that although they’ve gone into colour for this second outing to be presented in Kino Lorber’s OSS117 - Five Film Collection Blu Ray set, it’s not a great film and still nowhere near a match for the Bond films it’s obviously trying to compete with. Although they’ve certainly trumped Bond by a year in terms of going for a full 2.35:1 aspect ratio (1965’s Thunderball would be the first Bond film to deploy this treatment... reviewed here) and, to be honest, the whole film looks really good... which I would expect from a director like André Hunebelle.

It’s fun and games in Bangkok this time around, as Hubert gets involved in trying to stop villain Dr. Sinn (played by Robert Hossein) from unleashing a master plague to destroy all the inferior races on the globe (apart from the chosen few with the vaccine, obviously). Hubert recruits, through means of his irresistible charms, Dr. Sinn’s beautiful sister Lila (played by Pier Angeli) and it’s the usual shenanigans with... a little more action than the first movie but in terms of pacing and punchiness, nowhere near the likes of Bond, or indeed, some of the American productions which would start spoofing the British franchise over the next few years. 

And there are some nice little quirky things about the project though, asides from Hunebelle’s wonderful use of verticals to split compositions. He’s definitely into the whole visual compartmentalisation thing and it all looks pretty spectacular, especially now it’s in colour and with a much wider canvas, so to speak. So one great moment is at the start of the picture where, a couple of decades before Lethal Weapon did a similar thing, OSS117 shoots eyes, nose and big smiley face on the target when he’s practicing his shooting skills near the start. 

And another nice thing is when Dr. Sinn presses the alarm bells in his Monastery Plague Lab... which, by the way, is not quite up to Ken Adams’ designs for the Bond films but it is pretty impressive. Each time the klaxon of the alarm sounds, the frame goes red until it stops sounding for a second, then goes red again. And it’s not done with lightning as it would be too difficult to get the actors running around various rooms on the set, the sound and the lights coordinated in editing, I think. That’s why they’ve gone for a full red tint on the print whenever the siren sounds... like an old silent film frame might be tinted. It’s obvious that’s what’s been done but that makes it no less effective and gives things an almost psychedelic feel. 

Okay, those are the positives. There are a heap loads of negatives too, other than it being a fairly dull film throughout (I think I preferred the first one, in some ways). For example... that old trope often associated with comic moments where a character says that they’re definitely not going to be getting talked into doing a thing... cut to them now doing that thing? Well Lila Sinn does this twice in the space of just a few minutes... it’s just not good writing to use that device twice in a row, I think. It makes the following shots quite predictable. You can always see that stuff coming a mile off. 

And the music isn’t great either. Well, okay, scratch that. The music is great, as a stand alone listen but, like the first movie, Michel Magne’s score is really not hitting the right notes of support for the piece. It’s doing its own thing and really not supporting the on screen visuals with the kind of dramatic emphasis needed, it seemed to me. At several points, a cute, stereo-typically orientalised, ‘this music denotes Asian people’ style instrumental rendition of Magne’s OSS117 song from the first movie kicks in and, yeah it sounds fine but somehow fairly racist to my ears. It doesn’t bother me in the least, this is just the norm for the time and even John Barry’s score and opening song for You Only Live Twice (reviewed here) had a degree of this in it... but this one does seem like a fairly ‘in your face’ use of this particular musical tool and, at a couple of points in the movie, I kept thinking to myself that they just couldn’t get away with this kind of thing on a score these days. 

And that’s me done on this one... Kerwin Mathews is fine in this but doesn’t really have the larger than life personality of actors like James Coburn and Dean Martin, who would use their presence to carry them through their own Bond parodies in a much more successful manner (reviews of all these coming to the blog at some point soon). OSS117 - Panic In Bangkok is a nice enough film but, it’s just not punchy or innovative enough to hold it’s own in the Bond/spy market, I think. Still, I’m hoping these things get better and, with Kino Lorber’s lovely Blu Ray set, I guess I’ll know soon enough. 

OSS117 Is Unleashed

Muffed Diving

OSS117 Is Unleashed
aka OSS 117 se déchaîne
France/Italy 1963
Directed by André Hunebelle
Gaumont/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Some spoilers.

The OSS117 novels comprise a vast array of stories about the French/American espionage agent, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath with the titular code number. Starting in 1949, the first 88 novels were written by Jean Bruce who died in a car accident in 1963 (the same year OSS117 Is Unleashed was released). Then his widow Josette took over and wrote another 143 before she apparently retired in 1985. And then, keeping the family business going, I guess, her daughter Martine with her husband François... wrote another 23 novels before the series was finally finished in 1992 (to date). And I can’t tell you what any of these 254 spy yarns are like because, it seems to me, they’ve never been translated into English? At least, not that I’ve found. If anyone wants to point me in the right direction for English translations I’d like to give them a go. 

OSS117 Is Unleashed is actually the second of the OSS117 films. The first big screen adaptation from the successful series of novels was in 1958. However, this is the first of the five films presented in Kino Lorber’s OSS117 - Five Film Collection, which gathers the adaptations from a very specific stance... look at the timing. The first big screen Bond film Dr. No (reviewed here) had just been a pretty big international hit and must have prompted the producers to start their own rival series... the first two of which, starting with this one, starred American actor Kerwin Mathews (who I’m sure readers will remember from such films as The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, which I reviewed here and The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver, review coming soon). These ones are directed by André Hunebelle, who would soon go on to direct the three 1960s Fantômas revival films (which I reviewed here, here and here) but, he hasn’t really quite caught that larger than life, tongue in cheek vibe with the series here... at least not yet (he directed a few of these... I’ll let you know). 

And, if this is the case that the cinematic revival of the character was one of many films jumping on the new Bond band wagon (such as Matt Helm and Derek Flint, reviews all coming soon), then I have to say this opening shot of a film, the only one of these five in black and white, doesn’t give the Bond franchise much in the way of competition. 

It’s a fine little spy film, for sure, starting off with an American agent who muffs his diving job looking for the location of a grotto harbouring a new atomic submarine spotting device, by getting shot dead in the water. Special agent OSS117 is sent to Bonifacio in France, to find out what happened to the agent, getting involved with the freelance diver who was helping the agent and his dubious girlfriend, who has been secretly acting against him to target the agent, blackmailed into the plot by the bad guys who are controlling the device. So, of course, when Hubert gets there, shenanigans ensue and the world is, fairly anticlimactically it must be said, saved from the atomic submarine spotting device (even the secret base blowing up at the end is the size of a small car explosion in an American film... I hope they upped the budget for these as they went on).

Kerwin Mathews is surprisingly at home in the role, pouring on the charm, sexism and action man heroics in equal parts. He actually looks like he could do some of the stuff asked of him, getting away with it fairly well on the close up shots... much more so than his stuntman in some of the fist fights who, quite honestly, looks nothing like him. There are some nice lines in the movie at certain moments too. For example, when Hubert steals a non-consensual snog from the car hire girl at the airport (who returns as a running gag later in the movie), she softens and compliments him on having a gift for the French tongue. 

The film kinda misses the feel of the first Bond outing by a long chalk, though. The dynamic editing and hard hitting score stings are notably absent and, while Michel Magne’s score is pretty good and makes for a nice stand alone listen on CD, it’s noticeably inappropriate in some sections of the movie. Technically it’s no match for the Bond films... although I hope that improves as the series goes on. The opening song is great, presented as credits animate across various shots of foaming white boat wake but, yeah, it’s not exactly a power ballad but then again, Dr. No didn’t have one of those either. And though there is one sequence where a friendly agent makes contact with Hubert by using a sequence of code phrases, there’s none of the excessive caution about staking out his surroundings that Bond was so meticulous about in his early cinemtic outings. 

However, OSS117 Is Unleashed is very nice and I’m kinda looking forward to the next ones, to see how much they up the ante with, I presume, various gadgetry and harder hitting (and more frequent) action scenes but... this one is probably going to disappoint anyone going in expecting a screen incarnation who can give us what the British and Americans were doing at the time. And I’ve seen much more interesting eurospy movies too (something I hope to be getting to see more of at some point soon). I can’t speak for the other movies in this set (yet) but it makes for a nice historical watch and I’m keen to see where they go with the series after this one. I’ll keep you informed right here, of course. 

Fantômas VS Scotland Yard

Licence To Kilt

Fantômas VS Scotland Yard
(aka Fantômas Contre Scotland Yard
France/Italy 1967 Directed by André Hunebelle
Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Fantômas VS Scotland Yard is the third and final of the trilogy of 1960s Fantômas movies, based on the character who appeared in Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre popular novels. And, this will be a short review because it’s also my least favourite of the three, a real step backward from the previous movie... although I do know someone who absolutely loves this one, to be sure.

Once again we have Jean Marais playing both newspaperman Fandor and Fantômas (and, of course, various disguises of Fantômas who are always easy to spot). Mylène Demongeot returns again as Hélène, Fandor’s girlfriend and, again we have the bumbling Inspector Juve, played by Louis de Funès, along with his comical assistant, Inspector Bertrand, once more portrayed by Jacques Dynam.

And, I guess you would suppose from the title that the film is set in London with Fantômas taking on the UKs finest police force at Scotland Yard but... you’d be wrong. In a blindingly clueless move by the film makers, this movie is almost exclusively set in a castle in Scotland, with hardly any mention being made of the English police until the end of the movie, where they all come in (presumably in their bizarrely left hand drive cars, like everybody else in the movie), kitted out with something similar to, but not quite, sten guns. Because, yeah, that’s obviously what a British bobby would carry around with them.

Actually, the plot is another one played for comedy hijinks but it eschews the Pink Panther-like animated title sequence of Fantômas Unleashed (reviewed here) and instead goes for a car driving around Scotland (ish) with bag pipes playing on Michel Magne’s score (yeah, I know, let’s not talk of this again). The comedy of the movie, with Inspector Juve constantly finding dead bodies in his room which disappear before he can show them to people, is set against a plot which involves Fantômas delivering ‘living tax’ contracts to various rich and powerful figures in an elaborately fanciful and blisteringly stupid version of a protection racket. Yeah... let’s not talk of the plot again either, such as it is.

And it’s pleasant and has a lot of Louis de Funès running around like a madman, if you like that sort of thing. And I guess people probably did because he seems to be the reason most people are watching this. A fourth film, Fantômas In Moscow was planned but, according to popular knowledge, the combination of Jean Marais getting fed up playing second fiddle to de Funès and the fact that the three leading actors were getting rather expensive to employ in their success, meant that the planned follow up to this one was scuppered. Actually, that might not be a bad thing because.. well, it’s just generally less interesting than the last one.

For me, the comedy comes from the bizarre mistakes found in the astonishing assumptions that the French writers obviously had about life in England. So, for instance, you have a fox hunt (with a nice moment where a dog is disguised as a fox... don’t ask) but instead of the traditional, English costumes, the cast all seem to be dressing up in something reminiscent of the Napoleonic wars for this sequence. And, get this, instead of the leader of the hunt playing his little horn... we have four horsemen carrying massive French horns and playing those. Seriously, this is way past just getting it wrong now... I couldn’t help but think there was some deliberate ‘winding up’ of potential English viewers on this one.

In a similar matter of pushing the bounds of credibility beyond what they could possibly be expected to get away with, when Juve and Bertrand find themselves being transported around the castle on a remote controlled bed, they go into an elevator in the walls and down into an elaborate, Ken Adams style criminal underground lair. But this is not the castle of Fantômas... he’s just quickly borrowing it. How in heck did he have any time at all to have a massive, labyrinth of a high tech lair built under the castle with electric access points installed into the walls? This thing makes no sense!

One good thing about this movie is that Jean Marais really does get a chance to shine. There’s not too much of Fandor in the film but his turn in various disguises as Fantômas really shows what a good actor he could be. He has a wonderfully sinister presence here and his bluer than blue contact lenses when he is in his normal guise help complete the look very well.

Ultimately, without the gadgets and dynamic chase sequences of the previous films, Fantômas Vs Scotland Yard tends to drag a lot and, though it’s nice seeing the cast reunited one last time, I’m kinda glad they didn’t make anymore. Ultimately, I think Louis Feuillade’s very early 20th Century silent serial is the best version of the character I’ve seen committed to screen but, that being said, I’m sure there have been some other, probably better, productions over the years. Alas, trying to get a hold of most of that stuff in the UK (or, indeed, in the US) can prove difficult.

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.

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.