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Fantômas
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (15th February 2025). |
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The Film
 Master of disguise Fantômas (Judex 34's René Navarre) first makes himself known as the scourge of pre-war Parisian society in "Fantômas in the Shadow of the Guillotine" (63:57) with the bold theft of a string of pearls and a large amount of cash being carried by the Princess Danidoff (Jane Faber of the Comédie-Française) and leaving behind a calling card in invisible ink. When the venerable Lord Beltham mysteriously vanishes, Inspector Juve (Gaslight's Edmund Breon) suspects that Fantômas is responsible but accidentally stumbles upon his current alter ego in Gurn, the secret lover of Lady Beltham (Pépé le Moko's Renée Carl) when her husband's body is discovered in one of Gurn's trunks bound for South Africa. Juve and young reporter Jérôme Fandor (The Citadel of Silence's Georges Melchior) stake out the Beltham villa for months awaiting his return. When they manage to nab the master criminal, he plants a story in the newspaper announcing that the actor Valgrand (Nelly's André Volbert) will essay the role of Gurn in the hours before his execution on the stage. On the eve of Gurn's appointment with the guillotine, Lady Beltham arranges an assignation with the actor (in costume) and bribes prison guard Nibet (Naudier) into arranging for her a private meeting with Gurn. In "Juve vs. Fantômas" (58:26), a mangled corpse believed to be that of Lady Beltham is discovered in the home of Dr. Chaleck. He would seem to be the least likely suspect, but Juve and Fandor follow him and mistress Josephine (Yvette Andréyor) stumble right into Fantômas' next caper and a head-on collision with the Orient Express. Lights in the empty Beltham villa spark rumors about ghosts, but Juve and Fandor discover that Fantômas has been secretly meeting with the guilt-ridden but helpless Lady Beltham, and they overhear that the couple plan to run away together as soon as Juve meets with his "silent executioner." In "The Murderous Corpse" (97:27), Fandor is recovering from the explosive climax of the previous episode and believes along with the rest of the world that Juve is dead; but the detective is actually disguised as the simple-minded handyman for well-known fence. When the body of a wealthy baroness is discovered in the shop of ceramist Jacques Dollon (Inferno's André Luguet), he is unable to explain how she got there and is arrested for her murder only to himself be murdered in his cell by the guard Nibet. When his sister Elisabeth (Fabienne Fabrèges) asks to see the body, the police are baffled to discover the body is missing. While Fandor tries to employ Juve's skills of ratiocination to determine how a corpse could have gotten out of a locked cell, a series of crimes – including yet another robbery of poor Princess Danidoff of her pearls – erupts all over Paris and the finger prints point to the dead man. Elisabeth's life is put in danger when she discovers an incriminating list that connects her brother to a handful of other personages who have either been or are about to be the victims of crimes (including Danidoff's fiancé whose disappearance has caused the stock market to collapse). By " Fantômas vs. Fantômas" (75:14) rolls around, the public has started to suspect that Fantômas and Juve are one and the same, and the public prosecutor orders the detective's arrest. Meanwhile, Fantômas presses Lady Beltham – now remarried as the Duchess Alexandra – to throw a ball in order to collect donations for a reward for his own capture; that is, when he is not manipulating the police in the guise of American detective Tom Bob (whose calling card does indeed read "American Detective") and planning to swindle his own gang as an associate of Fantômas, the corrupt cleric Father Moche. When Fandor and the police hear of the event, they decide to go in the black-garbed guise of Fantômas, which may prove fatal for one or more.  The series comes to an open-ended close with "The False Magistrate" (61:25) which opens with the robbery by priest of a jeweler who has just purchased the baubles of the Marquise de Tergall (Germaine Pelisse) when her husband suffers a reversal of fortune. When the Marquis (Mesnery) is himself robbed of the money he received for the jewelry, Fantômas is of course the prime suspect until the police receive a report from Beligum that the master criminal has been captured there and received a life sentence. Sworn to deliver Fantômas to the guillotine, Juve hits upon the idea to travel to Belgium as an Austrian delegate, help Fantômas escape and take his place so that he can be arrested at the French border (whereupon Juve plans to have himself extradited back home where his true identity can be revealed). Fantômas gives the French detectives the slip, however, murdering and taking over the identity of new Saint-Calais prosecutor Pradier. In that guise, he murders the Marquis, blackmails the Marquise, and determines to discover the whereabouts of the missing jewels and the money for himself. While Juve languishes in a Belgian prison awaiting extradition, Fandor has become suspicious of the new prosecutor. Before there was Dr. Mabuse, Batman (or The Bat), and just about any other fictional master criminal, there was Fantômas. Based on a series of hastily-written novels with the chapters divvied up in between two authors – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre – with differing writing and plotting styles (with transitions smoothed over in the week before printing) and directed on a hasty schedule by a Louis Feuillade who favors long takes with little concern for composition or staging (an artlessness that turns out to be more evocative of being a fly on the wall than watching a badly-staged play), the Fantômas serial is unevenly paced and plotted but manages to be suspenseful even at the most predictable developments. Feuillade keeps the camera static for the duration of many scenes, rarely resorting to close-ups for emphasis apart from a couple inserts of business cards, letters, and rarely props. The number of pans and tracking shots can be counted on one hand. The serials also resort to intertitles for dialogue far less than one may be accustomed to from later silent films, usually introducing each scene with context and then commenting on important actions. For a master criminal, Fantômas spends more time pilfering the pockets of the rich that pursuing world domination; and yet, the brutality and ruthlessness with which he terrorizes innocents and betrays his partners alike makes the otherwise blank slate of a character a threat and almost admirable for audiences craving sensation. Although the series ran into trouble with the French censors and comes nowhere near to the explicitness of the Grand Guignol, the series can be quite grisly with gloves made of human skin, walls gushing blood, a body raining blood and stolen jewelry from a church belfry, and more. Already a famous actor, Navarre would become identified with Fantômas in the eyes of the public, although he would also embody master criminal turned criminologist Vidocq, the detective hero of Belphégor, and would go on to collaborate with Allain's and Souvestre's better known rival Gaston Leroux. Carl was also a regular collaborator with Feuillade in more than one of his long-running Bébé and Bout-de-Zan comedy shorts series, while Andréyor would become the damsel in distress Jacqueline of Feuillade's later Judex series (the character played by Edith Scob in George Franju's later feature). 
Video
Fantômas was first released on DVD in the U.K. by Artificial Eye in a transfer with intertitle explanations for missing sequences – the same master was released stateside by Kino Video but with English intertitles – while both Eureka's Blu-ray – previously released last year as part of the nine-disc, four serial Louis Feuillade: The Complete Crime Serials set – and Kino Lorber's Region A Blu-ray are both derived from a new Gaumont restoration that showed up the year after Kino's in France in the Louis Feuillade - Les Sérials noirs set with Les Vampires. While the other films in the Eureka set were 1080p24, Fantômas is MPEG-4 AVC 1.33:1 pillarboxed fullscreen has a resolution and framerate of 1080i50 with interlacing, ghosting, and blended frames evident but generally not as noticeable in regular motion – unless you step through the motion – which was apparently true of the master in spite of Gaumont's and Kino Lorber's Blu-ray encoding 1080p24 with the same artifacts evident when pausing and stepping through (and it appears that Gaumont is unlikely to fix this). Underneath the framerate issues, much of the series looks spotless, with very infrequent scratches and some flashes of nitrate decomposition and some portions that were missing from the earlier restoration patched in from print material. The newer restoration makes use of fewer tints than the DVD version, with seductive blues used for night exteriors and interiors while everything else remains in sensuous black and white. The French intertitles are based on the text sent to theater owners, and have also been newly recreated on plain black backgrounds without the gold border of the DVD versions. 
Audio
The newly-created intertitles are in French with optional English subtitles that also translate the inserts of letters and calling cards. Whereas Kino Lorber presented the score in lossy Dolby Digital 2.0, Eureka features an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 track of Gaumont's score which is mostly effective and occasionally out of place. 
Extras
Extras on the first disc consist of an audio commentary by film historian David Kalat for the first two episodes – recorded for the Kino DVD – in which he proves just as informed about Feuillade and Fantômas as he did on Fritz Lang and Dr. Mabuse. He provides context for the novels as the first original publications of Fayard after success with budget-priced pulp reprints of earlier serialized detective fiction, the beginnings of writers Allain and Souvestre at an auto magazine, and the breakneck thirty-two book, thirty-two month writing and publishing schedule of novels. He also discusses Gaumont's beginnings as a camera equipment manufacturer – rival to Pathé and Éclair – and the films mounted to advertise the equipment by early movie mogul Alice Guy who then hired and trained Feuillade who became her successor as head of production when she left for America. He classifies the period in which Feuillade was working as "primitive cinema" telling stories on-camera rather than with the camera, and that it is unfair to compare his style during this period with the works of Lubitsch, Lang, Murnau, Eisenstein, and even D.W. Griffith just a few years later. He also discusses the breakneck production schedules, the anti-cinematic staging, largely improvised staging, lack of coverage, close-ups, and inserts, and his waste-not-want-not approach to filming. He spends the length of the second episode tracing the real-life and fictional precursors to Fantômas and Juve, as well as those inspired by the series including Feuillades' Judex and Les Vampires (sold by Fox in the United States as a sequel to Fantômas), Fox's own American Fantômas serial, Lang's Spies and Mabuse films, Fantômas' pop-art makeover in the sixties which in turn influenced the sixties Batman, along with Claude Chabrol's and Juan Luis Buñuel's TV miniseries adaptation.  New to the Eureka edition is "Cast a Long Shadow" (37:57) in which writer and critic Kim Newman traces the origins of Fantômas to nineteenth century pulp fiction and British Penny Dreadfuls and the Feuillade series' influence on British and American pulp fiction, serials, comics, and even modern blockbusters. He notes that the notion of a supervillain precedes that of a superhero, describing Fantômas as a fusion of Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, as well as how Fantômas goes further in its questions of identity with Fantômas never truly identified and possibly being either a ghost of a shared identity of multiple criminals just as he plays multiple roles. Of Feuillade, he describes the filmmaker's approach as combining the naturalism of the Lumiere brothers and the trickery of Georges Méliès. Since the piece accompanied the Feuillade set, the rest of it focuses on the other films in that set. 
Packaging
Eureka has not carried over the box set's booklet even in part due to their decision late last year to extend their practice of restricting a booklet to the first pressing in their Eureka Classics line to the Masters of Cinema line as well.
Overall
While it seems quite antiquated now, Fantômas was a substantial if unacknowledged influence on later iterations of supervillains and superheroes.
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