Often considered a parody of the early 007 entries, the knockabout Fantômas flicks have a great deal more going on than that might imply. Based on a series of novels from the 1910s, these films are all about the bizarre and murderous exploits of the titular baddie. There’s no suave, crime-fighting hero as such; just a mischievous master of disguise who bests and humiliates his pursuers at every turn. At times, the impassive but wry Fantômas (“I kill people, but always with a smile”) gives off vibes not a million miles away from the fantastical campery of early Bond villains Dr No, Auric Goldfinger and From Russia with Love’s Rosa Klebb. And previous film adaptations of the books had even introduced a few pre-Bondian elements: secret lairs, fantastical science experiments and gangs of anonymous henchmen.
However, two key differences mark our guy and his oddball villainy from the 007 fan favourites: firstly, Fantômas always gets away, escaping the forces of order to wreak yet more havoc; secondly, and hilariously, he wears an ultra-smooth turquoise mask that makes him look as if Yul Brynner joined the Blue Man Group.
The template of the 60s series sticks to the pattern that was established in 1911 by the character’s creators, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. In the films, as in the books, the villain’s enemies are newspaper reporter Jérôme Fandor (also played by Marais), his girlfriend Hélène (Mylène Demongeot) and the dogged Inspector Juve, played with manic energy by comedy star Louis de Funès. Certain finer points have been lost — Hélène, for instance, was originally Fantômas’s vengeful daughter rather than a mere love interest — but the smoother dynamic of these adaptations has real charm. The main change is a simple one: the once stolid, heroic Juve has been made bumbling to the point of total ineptitude. The films might have been influenced by the Bond craze, but the zany result is just as similar to the Pink Panther series.
View oEmbed on the source websiteYep, all of Paris is being terrorised by this phantom; but no evidence has been uncovered to definitively prove his existence. Fantômas spends the first act of the film framing Fandor for his crimes; then doing the same to Juve; eventually our heroes are lured away by the villain and, with Hélène in tow, end up chasing him across France and into the sea, where Fantômas escapes in a little submarine.
Things get still more farcical (and fantastical) in the 1965 sequel, Fantômas se déchaîne, or Fantômas Unleashed. Filmed in the wake of Goldfinger’s smash success, this takes another step towards Bond-lite sci-fi as the supervillain kidnaps leading scientists in the hope of developing a mind-control device and taking over the world. This time, he boasts a secret lair inside a volcano (two years before Blofeld did the same thing in You Only Live Twice!) and even a flying car. By the end of third film Fantômas v Scotland Yard (1967), which takes a more gothic tack and relocates the action to a Scottish castle — the screenwriters having presumably misunderstood what Scotland Yard refers to — Fantômas is extorting the world’s richest men before planning to flee Earth altogether. One question remains: what would he then do with all that money?... But of course, it doesn’t matter; spectacular nonsense is the order of the day around here.
At the end of each story, Fantômas would give his nemesis, Juve, the slip and live to fight another day. It was his particular combination of elusiveness and creative cruelty that stood him out from similar pulp fiction thieves and villains (such as Arsène Lupin) and that made him such a tantalising rejoinder to serialised heroes like Joseph Rouletabille, Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes. It was a pleasure to root for this inventive and utterly fluid villain who spread anarchy and chaos wherever he weaselled himself. Readers across western Europe were hooked, while a whole generation of avant-garde artists applauded Fantômas as an icon of surrealist subversion.
What’s remarkable, then, about the relationship between 60s “Bond-itis” and the contemporary Fantômas revival is that Fantômas never needed 007 in the first place. Quite the contrary: Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale (published 1953), was pipped to the post by a French equivalent, the debonair international spy OSS 117, who was introduced by author Jean Bruce in 1949. The latter’s first film appearance was in 1956; years before cinema audiences were treated to Sean Connery uttering the immortal introduction, “the name’s Bond. James Bond.” OSS, moreover, appeared in a pair of films directed by André Hunebelle and co-written by Pierre Foucaud, before the two then started work on — you guessed it — the Fantômas series.
Yet, it was still the box-office success and cultural impact of Dr No that pushed Hunebelle, Foucaud and their co-writer, Jean Halain, into the pop-art approach that marks their striking, supervillain-style take on the character. Fantômas had been adapted several times since the days of Feuillade: as an American serial in 1920, then separate French productions in 1932 and 1946, the latter followed by a sort-of sequel in 1949. All of these were, the occasional gag aside, straitlaced mystery tales. After a postwar revival of the Feuillade serial (it was literally rescued from the bin), directors Georges Franju and Claude Chabrol, as well as one-time surrealist René Clair, went sniffing around the Fantômas property; but it was Hunebelle’s more irreverent pitch that would win him the assignment from Gaumont studios. His idea was simple: replace the staid old bumps in the night and black-and-white terror with something fresh, fun and modern that could truly compete at the box office; that could reflect the prosperity of France and its studio system (he even approached Connery to star, before turning to Marais). To the delight of the film-makers, the studio and de Funès — who would become, partly off the back of Fantômas, one of France’s all-time biggest movie stars — it worked a treat.
After his breakout, de Funès was bumped up to co-lead for the second film, and his increased presence makes it the best — or at least the most furiously funny — of the three. Fantômas Unleashed opens with Juve demonstrating to his force that the only way to defeat the villain is with an increased use of gizmos. A false arm and a deadly cigar provide de Funès with ample ridiculous showcases throughout the film, each more satisfying than the last.
It was the tussle over screen time and paycheques that eventually killed the series, as well as the outrage of surviving creator Marcel Allain, who won an intellectual property case over the way Hunebelle and co. had muddled his vision. This may have been for the best — who knows if the planned fourth film, Fantômas in Moscow, would’ve been any good? — but the satirical bent and the delight in anarchy expressed by Hunebelle’s trilogy remain, in their own way, just as subversive for the 1960s as the original stories were in the 1910s. If the Bond series offered escapist, globe-trotting fun as their hero worked to bring down villains and restore balance, the Fantômas trilogy flipped this on its perfectly coiffed head in deliriously oddball style. You won’t exactly be shaken by its frivolous antics, but you’ll certainly be stirred.
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