{"id":13957,"date":"2020-04-30T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=13957"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:19:18","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:19:18","slug":"a-field-guide-to-fantomas-on-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/a-field-guide-to-fantomas-on-film\/","title":{"rendered":"A Field Guide to Fant\u00f4mas on Film"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the Shadow of the Guillotine<\/em>. The Murderous Corpse<\/em>. The False Magistrate. <\/em>The titles are as macabre as the masked madman that appears in them. From the publication of his first adventure in February 1911, the character of Fant\u00f4mas seemed tailor-made for the movies. A master of disguise and evil genius capable of pulling off all manner of diabolical deeds, Fant\u00f4mas was the creation of French writers Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. Working by alternating chapters, they turned out Fant\u00f4mas books at the rate of one a month, meaning 27 were on the stands by the time Louis Feuillade\u2019s adaptation of the first was released in May 1913. Souvestre and Allain kept up the pace until that September and the publication of the 32nd volume, La fin de Fant\u00f4mas<\/em> (\u201cThe End of Fant\u00f4mas\u201d), with Allain reviving the character in serialized form twelve years later \u2013 thanks in part to the continued popularity of the five Fant\u00f4mas films Feuillade made in 1913-14.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Feuillade\u2019s films greatly condensed each of the novels in the series they tackled. In fact, In the Shadow of the Guillotine<\/em> is so streamlined it doesn\u2019t even bother with the first half of its source novel, Feuillade taking as read that he could cherry-pick which parts to dramatize and the viewer would fill in the blanks. He also starts with a montage of the four guises lead actor Ren\u00e9 Navarre would adopt as Fant\u00f4mas cycled through his various identities, all designed to bewilder his enemies \u2013 personified by the indomitable Inspector Juve and crusading journalist Fandor. Also in the mix: Fant\u00f4mas\u2019s love-struck accomplice, Lady Beltham, who has an on-again off-again relationship with the unrepentant murderer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
(Kino International)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By far, Fant\u00f4mas\u2019s most iconic identity is the \u201cMan in Black,\u201d he of the black tights and loose-fitting hood. (Feuillade was so fond of the look he made it the uniform of the gang in his next crime serial, Les Vampires<\/em>, made in 1915-16.) The character\u2019s first appearance in this garb occurs in 1913\u2019s Juve vs. Fant\u00f4mas<\/em>, in which he lures Juve and Fandor to Lady Beltham\u2019s villa and blows it up with them inside. He also uses it in The Murderous Corpse<\/em> (1913), in which he baffles the authorities by leaving the fingerprints of a dead artist at his crime scenes. And he\u2019s so famous for it by 1914\u2019s Fant\u00f4mas vs. Fant\u00f4mas<\/em> he can attend a masked ball given by the reformed Lady Beltham to which two other people \u2013 Fandor and a policeman \u2013 come in the same outfit. The genuine article isn’t flattered by his imitators, however, and kills one of them before departing in a huff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following The False Magistrate<\/em>, released in May 1914, Feuillade closed the book on the flamboyant Master of Crime, but he would not stay inactive long. In America, Fox produced a 20-episode Fant\u00f4mas <\/em>serial in 1920-21, but this is believed lost. Thankfully, that\u2019s not the case with the 1932 French feature of the same name, which Hungarian director Paul Fejos based on the half of the first novel Feuillade skipped over. In the process, Fejos turned out a Cat and the Canary<\/em>-like thriller in which Fant\u00f4mas appears in his all-black ensemble to strangle a marquise to death and frame feckless youth Charles Rambert, who assumes the identity of Fandor in the novels. In the film, Juve reconstructs the crime and enlists Rambert\u2019s help in solving it while Fant\u00f4mas eliminates the witnesses. When he\u2019s captured, Lady Beltham helps him escape, which is true to the novels and Feuillade\u2019s films as they always ended with the villain getting the last laugh. It took a Surrealist to make him the butt of the joke, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Written and directed by Ernst Moerman<\/a>, 1937\u2019s Mr. Fant\u00f4mas<\/em> is a 17-minute short light on plot and heavy on cutaways to bizarre vignettes that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in Luis Bu\u00f1uel and Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s Un Chien Andalou<\/em>. As for Fant\u00f4mas himself, he appears in the top hat, evening dress, and simple mask he wears on the cover of the first novel, as well as his “Man in Black” getup, a nun’s habit, and a swimsuit. When he\u2019s captured and put on trial, the Emperor of Crime is sentenced to death, with the execution carried out by a cannon fired at point-blank range. Seems like overkill, but with Fant\u00f4mas, it pays to be certain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Subsequent attempts to bring Fant\u00f4mas to the screen took him further from his literary origins. The most notable thing about the 1947 Fant\u00f4mas<\/em> is the casting of a young Simone Signoret as the criminal\u2019s daughter H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, a character from the novels making her first appearance on film. It also illustrates the drawback of wearing such a distinctive costume since it\u2019s easy for Juve to replicate it and fool his gang. (In the \u201960s films, Fant\u00f4mas would turn the tables by disguising himself as Fandor and Juve and framing them for various crimes.) As for 1949\u2019s Fant\u00f4mas Against Fant\u00f4mas<\/em>, it fails to deliver on the promised clash between the Lord of Terror and someone impersonating him, but like its predecessor, it finds Fant\u00f4mas employing the kinds of high-tech gadgets that would become the hallmark of the James Bond series, which likewise informed the character\u2019s next revival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Directed by Andr\u00e9 Hunebelle, 1964\u2019s Fant\u00f4mas<\/em> and its follow-ups, Fant\u00f4mas Unleashed<\/em> (1965) and Fant\u00f4mas vs. Scotland Yard<\/em> (1967), were made with the authorization of Marcel Allain, but are far removed from his novels. This is most apparent in Louis de Fun\u00e8s\u2019s characterization of Juve as a bumbling boob in the Inspector Clouseau mold. (The second film even opens with a Pink Panther<\/em>-like animated recap of the ending of the first.) Hunebelle\u2019s main inspiration was casting star Jean Marais as both Fandor and Fant\u00f4mas, whose blue rubber mask is almost as distinctive as Navarre\u2019s \u201cMan in Black\u201d guise. Also present is H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, although she\u2019s pointedly not Fant\u00f4mas\u2019s daughter, but rather Fandor\u2019s fianc\u00e9e, who has her own career as a photographer. All three films emphasize Fant\u00f4mas\u2019s uncanny disguises, and his plans \u2013 from daylight jewel robberies to developing a mind-control ray to levying a \u201cright-to-live tax\u201d against the obscenely wealthy \u2013 get more outlandish with each entry. After the first film flopped in the States, though, the other two bypassed US theaters and went unseen in their original forms until KL Studio Classics released the trilogy<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skipping the \u201970s entirely, Fant\u00f4mas next resurfaced in a quartet of TV movies, the first of which premiered on German television on May 3, 1980. Directed by Claude Chabrol and Juan Luis Bu\u00f1uel (who traded off episodes much like Souvestre and Allain alternated chapters seven decades earlier), this new Fant\u00f4mas<\/em> went back to the basics, adapting the first, second, third, and fifth books as self-contained episodes. In each, Austrian actor Helmut Berger plays Fant\u00f4mas, but only some of his secret identities; Chabrol and Bu\u00f1uel took the unusual step of casting other actors in some of them, cleverly recreating the experience of reading one of Souvestre and Allain\u2019s novels, since they could go on for hundreds of pages before revealing which of the eccentric characters are really Fant\u00f4mas (or Juve or Fandor) in disguise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the four decades since Fant\u00f4mas\u2019s last escape from justice, the arch-fiend has mostly stayed out of the spotlight, popping up briefly in the pages of Alan Moore\u2019s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen<\/em> before getting his own graphic novel, The Wrath of Fant\u00f4mas<\/em>, published in 2017. The closest he came to returning to the silver screen, however, was in 2010, when Vincent Cassel signed on to star in a new adaptation of the novel from writer\/director Christophe Gans. Somehow that fell by the wayside and the two of them remade Jean Cocteau\u2019s Beauty and the Beast<\/em> instead. Not exactly a fair trade-off. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the Feuillade silents are streaming on Kanopy (and available on Blu-ray<\/a> from Kino International); the first one is also on Fandor; the entire 1980 miniseries is on Hoopla.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Shadow of the Guillotine. The Murderous Corpse. The False Magistrate. The titles are as macabre as the masked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":13962,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[1422,162],"class_list":["post-13957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13957"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22846,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13957\/revisions\/22846"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}