And with that, the story is off and running, and it doesn’t let up until the final shot. The film’s screenplay was penned by Jacques Champreux and Francis Lacassin; the former being the grandson of, and the latter being a scholar specializing in, Louis Feuillade, the director of original 1916 serial). It is a model of narrative efficiency, even though it necessarily relies quite heavily on various plot contrivances and developments that quickly unravel if you give them more than a moment’s thought. But, that’s part of the fun; even though Franju treats the material with visual grace and a veneer of seriousness, Judex is little more than a clever riff on the popular superhero mythos that, at the time, was confined largely to B-movies, Saturday morning serials, and comic books (one wonders if Franju could have possibly imagined a cinematic era in which superhero movies constituted one of the dominate modes of filmmaking, gobbling up billions of dollars and commanding some of the top talent in the industry).

Unlike today’s superhero movies, particular Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012), there are no shades of gray in Judex. Rather, Franju plays the line of good-versus-evil with an unwavering straightness, positing his hero as a stoic and unblemished crusader for what is right and just, while the villains are uniformly malicious, cruel, and wicked. Granted, Favraux is something of a mixed bag, as his greed, malevolence, and willingness to murder in cold blood are offset to some extent by the fact that he is a doting father to his porcelain-faced daughter, Jacqueline (Edith Scob), who is engaged to be married. The same cannot be said for Diana Monti (Francine Bergé), a determined femme fatale who spends much of the film in a slinky black cat suit plotting various nefarious deeds to ensure that she and her fiancée make off with Favraux’s money. There are crossings and double-crossings, kidnappings, murders, a faked murder, disguises, secret hideouts, and sudden revelations. The film even climaxes with a suspenseful rooftop battle, with Diana Monti struggling against Daisy (Sylva Koscina), a circus acrobat dressed all in white who arrives in the middle of the third act for virtually no other reason than to do to-the-death battle with her moral antithesis.

In many ways, Judex is a lot of fun, especially for discerning cinephiles who know their film history. Throughout the film we can see bits of pieces of the cinematic past—flashes of silent movie aesthetics, sequences that would delight any good surrealist, moments of cliff-hanging suspense worthy of the best serials—as well as many popular movie trends to come—not just superhero blockbusters, but also the James Bond franchise. The original Judex was one of silent film pioneer Louis Feuillade’s most popular serials, and Franju had re-discovered it when he and Cinémathèque française co-founder Henri Langlois were putting together a retrospective program for the 1938 Venice Film Festival. At the time Feuillade had been largely forgotten by the general public, and Franju’s remake of his serial is as much a tribute to one of his cinematic heroes as it is an opportunity for the great director to engage with many of his favorite themes and aesthetics, particularly paranoia and the stranger qualities of physical beauty. Both of these are most brilliantly realized in the sequence where Franju tracks Judex as he walks through a costume party dressed as an enormous bird, a moment of such surreal intensity that it holds us with an almost hallucinogenic grip.

However, Judex never fully takes off because Franju deliberately makes the film’s hero such a bore. Judex is a two-dimensional cypher, a stand-in for moral right whose mysteriousness can only take him so far. It doesn’t help that Franju cast Channing Pollock, an American magician with limited acting range, to play the role; Pollock’s amazing sleight of hand produces some incredible moments throughout the film, but his emotional rigidity weighs it down. It is interesting that Franju would make such a calculated decision regarding the protagonist, given that his previous work, the poetic horror film Eyes Without a Face (1958), was centered around a fascinating and infuriating protagonist who sacrifices his humanity to restore his daughter’s horribly scarred face, yet never entirely loses our sympathy. The daughter in Eyes is also played by Judex star Edith Scob, although she spends almost the entire film with her face hidden behind a frozen white mask. Scob’s performance in Judex doesn’t boast significantly more range, which further hinders our involvement in the characters’ plight. Thankfully, Francine Bergé is on hand to camp it up as Diana Monti, who doesn’t think twice about pulling off some of her worst tricks disguised as a nun. While Franju may make goodness look as dull as dirt, at least he had the good sense to make the film’s villains memorably wicked.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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