characters of many faces
by
Douglas Messerli
Jacques
Champreux and Francis Lacassin (screenplay), Georges Franju (director) Judex / 1963, USA 1966
Georges
Franju’s 1963 film, Judex, is one of
those films that critics might be immediately puzzled about how to describe to
viewers who have never seen it. Despite Franju’s often very original
filmmaking, this work is based on a 1916 French film by the great serial
cinema-creator, Louis Feuillade (several of whose shorter films I have
previously reviewed), in which the same character and some of the same events
enchanted the early 20th-century filmgoers.
Yet, Franju makes this film, suggested to
him by Feuillade’s grandson, Jacques Champreux, who also as a collaborator on
the script, with many completely contrary movies from the original. Franju has
long wanted to remake Feuillade’s Fantômas,
for which he could not get permission. No matter, Franju took matters into his
own hands, focusing on his own beautiful black-and-white images, which he’d
already established in his 1960 classic, Eyes
Without a Face, while, as he had also done in that film, basically ignoring
the acting talents of his characters. Franju loved the inter-connectedness of
all his films, while embracing film history in general. In this case, he hired Édith
Scob, who played the terribly scarred and frightened daughter in that earlier
film to play the villain’s daughter Jacqueline; as the hero he chose the
handsome American actor, Channing Pollack to be Judex, but dressed him up throughout
much of the film as an elderly bearded man, Vallieres, serving as secretary to
the film’s villain, banker, Favraux; the building-climbing cat-like woman, also
nanny to Jacqueline’s child (Francine Bergé), is eerily similar to another
Feuillade villain, Irma Vep in his Les
Vampires; and Franju even manages to bring in Fantômas as reading matter for the bumbling but gentle detective
Cocantin (Jacques Jouanneau).
Indeed, it appears that the director
spent more time on his cinematography and numerous film associations than on
finding actors who could fully express his characters psychology and
motivations. Entire portions of the original were jettisoned, making, at times,
for inexplicable behavior and acts. Why, for instance is Vallieres so
determined to out the evil-doings of his employer, and why has he waited so long
to accomplish what we gradually perceive is revenge? Why does the same rather
staid and boring Vallieres suddenly become a kind of bird-loving magician,
returning to life a seemingly dead dove before conjuring up an entire flock of
the same birds, and how does he poison Favraux without the man drinking a sip
of the poisoned wine he has offered? These and dozens of other questions throw
the viewer into a sense of utter confusion, which, evidently, is was Franju
sought.
For any excitement in this film lies
within its sudden and utter transformations: Vallieres becoming the matinée
idol-like figure (the producers noted his facial resemblance to Rudolph
Valentino), Favraux, a dead corpse, suddenly returning to life, and the
formerly demur nanny becoming a knife-packing cat before transforming herself
again into a nun right out of Hitchcock’s The
Lady Vanishes. The previously passive Jacqueline, after her father’s
apparent death, even becomes noble, denying her inheritance to help pay back
those whom her father has defrauded. In his story-telling capacities (he begins
the tale of Alice in Wonderland) to
Jacqueline’s daughter, Cocantin becomes a better teacher than her nanny, Diana,
might ever have been.
With each of these shifts, moreover, Franju’s
film also sheds its genre, taking on various movie types: a revenge drama, a
spooky murder mystery, a devious film about kidnapping, with its almost comic
intertitles, a silent movie with spoken dialogue, and, finally, in its absolute
devotion to birds, a kind of tribute to Hitchcock’s movie of the same year, The Birds. As The New York Times justifably commented at the time of Judex’s US release: “It is hard to tell
whether Georges Franju, who made it, wants us to laugh at it or take it
seriously."
Given my basically contrarian nature, I’d
argue that the film is both a loving and almost comical tribute of the absurd
Feuillade original while also being a kind of serious exploration of the very
tropes of filmmaking that for so long dominated French cinema. One must
remember that Franju, as co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française film archive,
knew film history intimately, and in this film was not only exploring some of
its various manifestations but putting himself and his films into that context.
If to many viewers of Judex the work
might seem more like pastiche than a coherent movie, I agree with them, but
simply ask them to enjoy the circus of nods to popular film history. This may
be a kind of silly movie at times, but it is also an extremely intelligent one
which ought to be take utterly seriously. The film is clearly not one of his
greatest, but if seen from the right perspective is so fascinating that it
cannot be forgotten.
Los Angeles, July
10, 2018
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