Judex/Nuits Rouges [Masters of Cinema] [DVD] [1963]

I first saw this film at a Franju season at the National Film Theatre about 30 years ago (gulp), and it has haunted me ever since. Now at long last here it is on DVD. It is as rich and strange and odd and messy as I remembered. The first 20 minutes set the tone with elegance and precision. A banker, wealthy and smug in his country pile, receives several mysterious notes. They say that he must give away half his wealth to those he has wronged or else he will die the next day at the stroke of midnight, on the occasion of his daughter's engagement party. The notes are signed Judex (Latin for judge). The banker arranges to apparently comply with the note's instructions while really planning to cash in even more. He also calls in a private detective to hang around the house and uncover the identity of Judex. His daughter's engagement party goes ahead as planned, a masked ball where everyone wears bird masks. A masked magician performs illusions involving doves and then at the stroke of midnight the banker...well, you'll have to watch and see.

After this well wrought opening, the film becomes something completely different and goes off on an unexpected tangent. You should bear in mind that it is a re-make of a silent serial from 1916, directed by Louis Feuillade who also made the more well known Fantomas and Les Vampires. Fantomas was a sinister master criminal like Dr Mabuse, Fu Manchu or the Bond villains. Judex was intended to be a similar character but a hero instead of a villain. Franju had actually wanted to re-make Fantomas but for some reason this did not happen but he was offered Judex instead. In interviews Franju derided the character of Judex; in Franju's film, he is initially set up as a dark avenging angel, an Edwardian era Batman figure, an infallible upholder of justice to balance the failures of the law, in a manner which we find familiar. Judex uses misdirection and disguise. He has a ruined castle lair for an HQ and he deploys charmingly retro/futuristic technology to aid his scheme. But as the film progresses he becomes ever more ineffectual and useless.

Georges Franju's most well known film remains the justly celebrated Eyes Without a Face, a beautiful, austere and poetic horror film that shares many elements with Judex. Like Eyes, Judex has a deliberately slow pace and despite having the trappings of a pulpy crime thriller it plays these elements not for suspense but with a tender and ironic detachment. The tone is dreamlike, disjointed, both playful and sombre, the scenes are like little sketches, some replicating cliff hanger type situations familiar from old serials. Characters appear and disappear and reappear and the plot progresses by a dream logic. At one point the private detective bemoans his inability to get into a building where the baddies are cloistered because he is not an acrobat. At that very moment a circus troupe passes along the deserted street and there on the last wagon is a long lost friend of the detective...and she is an acrobat.

In Eyes there is a famous sequence where Edith Scob wanders around her house accompanied by Maurice Jarre's elegant score. There is a similar scene here, where the same actress plays Jacqueline the banker's daughter who walks along the corridor of her father's chateau looking into the empty rooms. Also the use of trapped birds and guard dogs and other visual motifs carried over from Eyes makes Judex the unmistakeable work of the same director.

The film is unsentimentally nostalgic, not harking back to the pre-war era with a spirit of yearning but refracting it through a modern sensibility. It is not couched in a gauzy period glow, but photographed in beautiful crisp black and white; in fact lots of black and lots of white. It is no surprise to learn that this was a favourite film of Edward Gorey, as it has a very similar feel to Gorey's melancholy monochromatic grotesqueries .

Judex incidentally is played by Channing Pollock, an American magician who had turned to acting and this is by far his most prestigious role. He plays Judex as a straightforward hero which is at odds with the director's perception of the character. He is, however, allowed a redeeming flourish in the very last scene.

One niggle, perhaps minor, is that at least one of the jokes is fudged in the subtitles - at one point Judex asks the detective to go and get help by phoning his men; "Call 3 at Loisy" he says, and the detective goes off repeating "3 at Loisy, 3 at Loisy" to himself so that he doesn't forget it. In the subtitles however, Judex simply says "Call Loisy" so the surprising jolt that in the early days of such technology there would indeed have been single digit telephone numbers is lost, as is the detective's comic anxiety in trying not to forget it. I'm no French speaker, and only picked up on this because it is mentioned in Raymond Durgnat's book on Franju, but it does make one wonder about other little felicities like this being lost.

This is a two disc set and the second disc is Franjus's later movie, Nuits Rouge (aka Shadowman) from 1974 which covers similar pulp ground. This is in colour, but it is clearly a cheap TV derived effort which is diverting enough but lacks the appeal of the earlier solemn and amusing film.

Franju's Judex is a strangely faithful remake of the 1916 Feuillade serial. Strangely because Franju seems not to have seen the original when he made it, but based it on a novelisation and stills. The remake adds poetic touches, the bird masks, most obviously, but it follows the original in a lot of details, but compresses about 8 hours into 90 minutes!

It's most valuable as a tribute that makes you go back to the original. The original is only available on Region 1 at the moment - but it's a beautiful and inventive (but very long) masterpiece. The original has an astonishigly poetic style for uts period and has actually funny comic relief. If you can't play Region 1 get "Les Vampires" which is wonderful fun - but you have to give it time as they are inventive cinema as they go on - moving from primitive one shot theatrical scenes to proper cutting by the end.

But Nuits Rouges. Dear me. It's awful. It;s cut down from a TV series which was presumably trying to be a 60s (well 70s) take on Feuillade serials. It may have thougt it was being like The Avengers but it is staggeringly dull in its visual style and lacking any real inventiveness.

Most oddly it has Henry Soskin (otherwise Henry Lincoln) as a professor expert on the Templar treasure. It is a curious side light to his notorious "Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" - and the whole hoax that inspired that book comes from the same French fantasy thriller world of Feullade serials and Arsene Lupin stories. Poor Henry is killed by a zombie rather unconvincingly.

So Nuits Rouge is a worry. Judex suggests Franju is a forgotten master. Nuits Rouges suggests he hadn't a clue and that his earlier successes were just luck.

This DVD contains two films by Georges Franju: Judex (1963) and Nuits Rouges (1973).

Judex feels somewhat like an old or even silent movie, and this is intended. It is based on Feuillade's film from 1916. Franju has captured the b/w "orthochromatic" look and and also used inserted text tableaus to mark new chapters. The story of Judex is quite simple and is about a masked avenger and a villain, and it is not at all realistic. Also, the introduction to and psychology of the characters are barely sketched. In spite of this the plot is full of suspense, and the film has it's own visual style. It is all very entertaining.

Nuits Rouges is made 10 years later and is in the same genre, but in color. Here the villain is the masked powerful being ("the man without a face") whose identity is totally mysterious. And the good side are just normal guys who try to outsmart and escape the vilains hunt for the secret of the knight templars treasure. As in Judex the psychologies and the story is not at all realistic but rather takes place in it's own universe. Here we also have a mad scientist who can make zombies out of humans and use them as killers. All of this is totally hilarious.

I give the films 4 stars and the DVD 5 stars. You get two unique and interesting films for the price of one. The transfer is very sharp, but on Nuits Rouges the voices were a little out of sync. Also included is a thick (47 page) booklet with interviews and stuff. Recommended to everyone interested in cinema.