Judex (1916)

Originally posted to Facebook on 7/13/2016

Judex was our second film from 1916, and it took us a little longer than planned to finish watching it. It was another serial, directed by Louis Feuillade, who also directed Fantomas. It was twelve episodes long, most in the half-hour range, plus a prologue, so it really felt a bit more like binging on a television show than watching a movie. It had a few actors in common with Fantomas, and also with Les Vampires, an intervening serial which we did not watch. One of the most entertaining things about Fantomas was how insane it was -- python-proof armor, false prosthetic arms, and various ridiculous plot twists. This serial was more level headed and sensible -- making it a better film in many ways, but with fewer signature moments. Judex (played by René Cresté) in this film is essentially a vigilante, similar in some ways to Batman (and may be somewhere in the lineage of Batman’s influences, though that’s a bit murky.) Like Batman, he operates outside of the law, but with his own moral code. He is dressed in black, and wears a cape and prominent black hat -- which is what you’d expect from this kind of proto-super hero, but it does make it a little strange that his chief accomplice is his brother Roger, who dresses in a business suit, and tags along with Judex, a weird conventional grace note to a variety of eccentric adventures -- who probably could have been eliminated from the movie entirely with minimal rewriting. Judex’s primary target is a corrupt banker named Favraux, played by Louis Leubas, who also had a prominent role in A Child of Paris, which we saw a few months back. Given the running time, there is sufficient space to flesh out an assortment of other characters, including The Licorice Kid (an Artful-Dodger-type, named, so far as we could tell, for the fact that he is never seen eating licorice), Favraux’s young grandson (played, I believe, by a little girl who compulsively kisses everyone with whom she is in a scene), an incompetent detective and his fiance (the latter showing up late in the picture and mostly seen wearing a bathing suit, whether or not the situation called for it), and the female ringleader of a gang that is trying to recover Favraux’s money, played by the single-named actress Musidora, who also played Irma Vep in Les Vampires. The movie as a whole was entertaining and polished. It was lightweight, but not as tongue-in-cheek as Fantomas.

Next week we will watch our third film from 1916: Intolerance, one of the canonical “film-school” silents, and the first D.W. Griffith film we’ve watched since 1914’s Judith of Bethulia. It is not a serial, but it is a very long film at over three hours, so I hope we’ll be able to finish it in a single weekend, but we’ll see. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT