Fantômas: L’échafaud magique (aka Fantomas: The Magic Scaffold) is the first of four feature-length adaptations made in the 1980s for French TV. No less than Claude Chabrol directed this first one, with Juan Luis Buñuel (son of Luis) picking up numbers two and three, before Chabrol returned to round the series off.
If you know Fantômas at all then it’s probably not through his TV outings. The infamous master-criminal appears in a vast number of novels and was famously turned into a rollicking silent feature by Jean Feuillade in 1913 (the first of five that appeared over the next year and a bit), returning even more famously on film in a series of Pink Panther-esque 1960s capers starring Jean Marais as Fantômas.
Here it’s Helmut Berger as the super-villain, in a reworking of the same story that featured in the 1913 film. After some introductory throat-clearing Fantômas’s alter ego (hence the man himself) winds up in jail – destination the guillotine – accused of murder. It is a strange way to introduce a master criminal, as a failure. Even more weirdly, Fantômas is only sprung from prison by the intervention of Lady Beltham (Gayle Hunnicutt), whose husband he is supposed to have killed.
What cop Inspector Juve (Jacques Dufilho) and his newspaper-reporter sidekick Fandor (Pierre Malet) don’t realise is who they have in jail. Gurn is the man they have locked up for the murder. But Gurn is in fact Fantômas. He and Lady B were having an affair. So she’s not the grief-stricken widow she appears to be either. It seems the police don’t know very much at all.
The cunning plan involves “borrowing” a vainglorious actor who looks is the spitting image of Gurn (because he’s also played by Berger) and using him to pull an elaborate switcheroo.
It’s done straight. In other words Fantômas really is a villain – he kills people. And the cop is not a bumbling fool but a determined loner, the only policeman who is convinced of the existence of Fantômas.
Fantômas is also a bit of a cad. Take that scene early on where he breaks into the apartment of the vastly entitled Princess Danidoff (Kristina van Eyck) and catches her in the bath. He’s not come to steal anything, but to have a look at her naked.
As for the other leads – Jacques Dufilho is on a hiding to nothing trying to outdo Louis de Funès’s 1960s version of Juve, so he doesn’t try to. His Juve is an entirely serious man, driven to the edge of sanity by his obsession with this phantom criminal.
As for Chabrol, if you didn’t know it was him you’d not guess. Once he’s got some cartoon gothic flourishes out of the way in the film’s opening scenes, he relaxes into routine TV-detective direction and allows the joys of genre to do their thing. This means lots of really good character actors giving it their best shot. Though you might argue (against much hope of winning) that Chabrol’s framing is elegant and his pace a notch above the usual.
That said, the execution scene is handled interestingly, with Chabrol focusing on the barbaric mechanics of chopping off a man’s head and the bloodlust of the people who have gathered to watch. He takes it really slowly, so the implications of what’s going on have time to sink in.
As with the 1913 film, it is an odd way to kick off a series – Fantômas does not seem particularly smart or in command of the situation. Luck (the fact that an actor who looks like him exists) and Lady B do most of the running. And Helmut Berger, for all his square-headed handsomeness, makes a fairly inert Fantômas.
As for the “master of disguise” angle that’s meant to be Fantômas’s stock in trade, there’s little evidence of it here. When Berger plays the dandy actor Valgrand he looks, apart from some camp waving of hands, like Gurn, who looks like Fantômas.
As said, three more followed (all included in the box set linked to below), and I gather they do improve as they go on. Whether I’ll follow that lead and have a look myself, I don’t know. But I doubt it.
Fantômas: L’échafaud magique (as part of the Fantômas box set) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
