A masked ball, a burglar in a unitard, a little girl named Alice, a cutthroat banker, and somewhere, mixed up in this carnival, is a superhero, the title character of 1963's Judex. Director Georges Franju directed this remake of a 1916 movie serial, preserving the original's pulp and camp but adding a healthy dose of surreal. It's pretty glorious.
An immensely wealthy banker called Favraux (Michel Vitold) is being sent blackmail letters by the mysterious Judex (Channing Pollack), threatening his life and to expose the means by which he acquired his fortune. Favraux hires a detective called Cocantin (Jacques Jouanneau) who is immediately charmed by Favraux's little granddaughter Alice and can't help beginning to repeat Lewis Carroll's famous story to her. During the masked ball, instead of doing his job, he's repeating "The Lobster Quadrille" verbatim to her.
The masked ball, though--wow. I'd be surprised if it wasn't an influence on Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. It has that mysterious mix of the icy and the carnal, topped with actual magic tricks from a strange tall man.
The film's villain gets a lot more screentime than the nominal hero. Marie Verdier (Francine Berge), Alice's governess, turns out to be a crook, which she proves by later breaking into the mansion wearing only a skintight black unitard, a mask, and a stiletto.
Has there ever been a burglar like this? How can I meet her?
Judex and Cocantin switch off as the film's strangely passive heroes. Cocantin runs into a little boy who miraculously fills him in on everything he needs to know while Judex seems to get by on pure luck. In the one scene where he confronts Marie, he's immediately overpowered. The climax of the film turns out to be a battle between Marie and an acrobat named Daisy--played by the beautiful Sylvia Koscina--who appears out of nowhere.
It was so great.
It's strange--if a movie to-day did something like this, I would probably find it tediously political, but in the context of a 1963 film it's just intensely charming. It feels more organically surreal, I guess.
Judex is available on The Criterion Channel.
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