It was a little over 100 years ago that the writing team of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre first began cranking out Fantômas mystery novels for a voracious European public. To keep apace with the relentless publication schedule, Souvestre and Allain traded writing duties. They would playfully build impossible cliffhangers before handing off to one another, daring the other to concoct a solution. It was perhaps the first commercial application of the Surrealists’ famous “exquisite corpse” game.
Over the years, the Fantômas character has appeared in a frenzied array of movie adaptations of differing degrees of quality. Arguably the most faithful adaptation to date is the 1979 TV miniseries–not necessarily the best, mind you, but the truest to the books. And as it happened, the authenticity extended behind the scenes: the producers decided to hire two visionary filmmakers to direct alternating episodes, in the spirit of Allain and Souvestre’s gonzo writing habits.
French New Wave pioneer Claude Chabrol eagerly took his half of the gig. Like Quentin Tarantino, Chabrol has not been content to merely take inspiration from certain genre faves, he feels compelled to remake those influences to impose his own personality back onto them. By 1979, Chabrol was already in decade number two of his efforts to get his own version of Dr. Mabuse off the ground (and would need another decade yet to accomplish that), and as far as he was concerned taking on Fantômas was the next best thing to Mabuse.
c came on board as Chabrol’s alternate number, handling the middle two episodes out of the four. When I say “four episodes,” though, bear in mind that each week in October 1980, a full 90 minute-long story was broadcast. This was the equivalent of four complete feature films, adapting four entire Fantômas novels. The opportunity to compare the filmmaking technique of Chabrol and Buñuel—each man working with the same cast and crew on a continuing story—is one of the special pleasures to be found in this endeavor.
Adapted from the first book in the series, the first installment introduces the basic antagonists—super-criminal Fantômas (Helmut Berger), his lover and co-conspirator Lady Beltham (Gayle Hunnicutt, playing a similar role to the one she had in Georges Franju’s Fantômas tribute Les Nuits Rouge), Fantômas’ nemesis Inspector Juve (Jacques Dufilho), and heroic journalist Jerome Fandor (Pierre Malet).
These four proceed to spend their time faking their own deaths, assuming various disguises and false identities, traipsing through secret passageways and trap doors, chasing each other across rooftops or underground tunnels, and generally trying to outwit each other.
Because the first book not only has to introduce the characters and situation, but was also written when the authors were still mired in the conventions of traditional detective fiction, it is the least satisfying story. Later books would slip loose of their rational moorings and delve into a surrealist fantasy universe of anti-logic. Saddled with the expositional nature of the first installment, Chabrol delivers an icy piece of work, whose true power only becomes evident on subsequent viewings. I’ll delay discussing Chabrol’s touch for a moment, to skip ahead to the arrival of Jean-Luis Buñuel on parts 2 and 3, which are adapted from the second book, JUVE CONTRE FANTÔMAS (published in English as “The Silent Executioner”) and book three, LE MORT QUI TUE (“The Corpse Who Kills”).
Buñuel has the benefit of two of the liveliest and craziest plots in these things, and films them with a zippy pace and an eye for action. Buñuel controls the frame carefully, and manipulates the editing rhythms to maximum effect.
This is not Chabrol’s approach. Where Buñuel masterfully exploits the conventional tools of cinematic suspense, Chabrol defiantly misues those tools. Chabrol’s camera wanders around without regard to the actors in the frame—he is prone to pan away from action to irrelevant props, or to suddenly zoom out to an establishing wide shot in the middle of a key emotional moment. Chabrol misdirects our attention, emphasizes arbitrary details, and interrupts his own pace. Through the perverse disruption of accepted cinematic practice, he creates an air of profound unease. For a film about the untrustworthiness of appearances, Chabrol denies us any familiar ground. It is quite alienating.
By way of comparison, let me describe a typical moment from one of Buñuel’s entries. In part two, Fantômas has assumed the disguise of a prominent doctor. He has fooled everyone—from the hospital staff and patients to the police and Juve himself. But in order to get out of the hospital, he will be forced to reveal an incriminating injury and risk arrest. Buñuel milks the sequence for all it’s worth, allowing the increasingly shaky camerawork and jittery editing to suggest Fantômas’ suppressed anxiety.
Now let me describe a typical Chabrolian triumph. In part four, Juve has traveled across Europe to meet a woman he suspects of being involved in Fantômas’ machinations. The scene builds to her grand entrance, tricking the audience into expecting that Lady Beltham will be the woman in question. Having built up as much tension as possible, Chabrol deflates it—the woman is not Lady Beltham. Instead the scene descends into comic relief, until suddenly Lady Beltham enters! You can practically hear Chabrol behind the screen giggling, “Gotcha!”
It is worth noting that while the first three installments work their way through the first three books in the cycle, for the finale Chabrol skips over a book to adapt instead book five, UN ROI PRISONNIER DU FANTÔMAS (“A Royal Prisoner”).
Compared to the action-packed absurdities of Buñuel’s middle stretch, Chabrol insists on returning to a quieter pace and a more small-scale story, whose subtle rhythms are better suited to his oddball techniques. By skipping to book 5, Chabrol also gets to end the series with Juve arrested on suspicion of being Fantômas himself, which makes for a better conclusion.
Just fifteen years had passed since Andre Hunebelle had turned Fantômas into pop-art camp comedy set in a James Bond-style quasi-futuristic world of gadgets. The TV miniseries returns to the roots of the franchise, with a period setting and everything played straight. There are no attempts to make ironic jokes at the expense of the material. From Georges Delerue’s jaunty music to the earnest performances from the cast, this is Fantômas at its purest.
