Judex

In the surrealist works of Max Ernst, the figure of Loplop, the King of the Birds is particularly striking.  Tall and regal, sporting a tuxedo, Loplop is a man with the head of a bird.  With beady-eye, he strides through costume balls and presides at the dinner parties of the haute bourgeois.  A figure like Loplop appears in Georges Franju's 1963 film, Judex.  Judex (Latin for "judge" or "avenger") is a proto-super hero, a masked vigilante impelled by obscure motives not to fight crime but to avenge and punish its results.  A wealthy banker whose fortune is built on blackmail and extortion hosts a masquerade party.  Judex attends, a stately figure in evening clothes with a huge, glaring bird's head; carrying a dead pigeon in his hands, he approaches the banker through the crowd of glittering socialites like Nemesis and strikes the man dead on the stroke of midnight.  The imagery has a nightmarish beauty and surrealist power.  This is not surprising since the scene is a reprise of a similar sequence in Louis Feuillade's 1914 serial, Judex.  Feuillade's 5 1/2 hour serial is packed with weird events:  on ordinary suburban streets, usually deserted at twilight or early morning, masked figures climb facades, women in sleek cat suits duel with stilettos, explosions rock trees, and pale, fainting maidens are borne away in the arms of caped and shadowy villains.  Feuillade's achievement was to invent a kind of cinematic paranoia that has been indelible throughout the history of film:  on a quiet street or in a peaceful garden, a horrible crime is being committed -- drawing rooms and salons conceal hidden snares, trapdoors over abysmal oubliettes, and the ground itself is mined with subterranean tunnels and dungeons.  The surrealists were enamored of Fueillade's immense and strangely poetic serials, Fantomas, Judex, The Vampires, and Barabbas, made between 1911 and 1919, all of them featuring convoluted, endlessly regenerating narratives.  Thus, Max Ernst's Loplop alludes to scenes in Judex (1914).  In turn, Georges Franju's remake of Judex in 1963 invokes both Ernst's King of the Birds and the surrealist artist's source, Feuillade's original serial. 

Franju compresses the languid and intricate, ever-evolving Feuillade narrative into a brisk 97 minutes.  The film belongs to the "school of velocity" -- it is all climax with almost no development, less then three for four minute of scene setting and exposition and, then, a network of abductions, chases, and duels culminating in an assault by black, masked figures on a towering tenement building on a desolate and dark side-street:  a voluptuous circus performer clad all in white wrestles with the villainess in her ebony catsuit on the roof of the house, a hostage, his face swathed in black cloth, and tied to a pillar is stabbed in the heart, four men climb a great brick wall, clinging to its bare windowless escarpment like flies.   Franju stages his action with cool, impassive, and, even, theoretical seeming objectivity -- nothing is excessively dramatized and everything is filmed lucidly, with an eye toward the utmost clarity.  The effect is curiously documentary -- strange occurrences captured by the camera and presented in a way that seems to deny their oddity.  The acting, as befits a super-hero movie, is stolid and wooden.  For, at least, half of the film, the heroine, played by the tremulous Edith Scob, is comatose -- she is carried around by various henchmen and villains and rescuers, a frail pennant of a woman, lying like lace across the arms of the man bearing her away.  But she is apparently indestructible:  cast into a river, she floats face up like Millais' Ophelia in the famous pre-Raphaelite painting and emerges from the glittering current, still unconscious but undrowned.  Judex communicates by carrier pigeon and has imprisoned his victim, the evil banker (who is the father of Edith Scob's character) in the cellars of a ruined Chateau.  For some inexplicable reason, Judex watches the evil banker through a prototype television in a curious Art-nouveau cabinet -- why he doesn't just use a peephole is unclear.  When the banker realizes that he is being scrutinized by a sort of mirror-like lens, he hurls his blanket onto the lens apparatus only to have the cloth instantly burst into flames.  There are secret passageways, trapdoors everywhere, sinister hordes of black-clad henchmen, a beautiful young nun who is, in fact, a murderess -- she favors either a silvery stiletto strapped to her thigh or a switchblade for her assassinations.  An ambulance conceals villains; a desk suddenly sprouts handcuffs to trap a man trying to open a lock box on that desk.  Every day events and objects are malign and the film seems like a bizarrely rational version of Hitchcock, Hitchcock without the operatic hysteria or, perhaps, like Fritz Lang's films featuring Dr. Mabuse.  The narrative is designed so that every event, even a killing is revocable -- everything that we are shown will turn out to be the opposite of what we expect and there is always a spectator, a stowaway, someone tucked into the corner of the scene or eavesdropping from behind a wall, a keyhole peeper who will witness the crime and who can summon help or villainous reinforcements as the plot demands.  In this way, Franju pays homage to the continuously evolving plots of the ancient serials, the endless array of hairbreadth escapes and rescues.  Before the final episode, a sad-looking little circus parades through empty midnight streets.  But the circus has a resplendent lady acrobat and she knows the hapless detective who is always too little too late and she climbs the façade of the building harboring the bad guys up to its very cornice to fight the catsuited villainess -- the woman has not been introduced to us before and the movie's audacity of bringing this character into the picture as a deus ex machina in a skin-tight white body-stocking is breathtaking or irritating or both depending upon your mood.  As Julie and I watched this film an elegant spider descended from an overhead fan, dangling like a black onyx pendant on its web directly in front of the TV, certainly a suitable footnote or appendix to this film.