Though the character of Fantômas – ruthless arch-criminal and master of disguise – had been around in book form since the early 1900s, and there’d been regular film adaptations through the 20th century, the modern Fantômas, blue of face and black of glove, starts with this 1964 movie simply named after the man himself, which re-introduced the character to French audiences and exported him to the rest of the world.
The original Fantômas of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre was something of a response to another successful French character of the time, Arsène Lupin. Both operated in similar fashion as lords of misrule disrupting the boring everyday with mad feats of fantastical excess, with Fantômas going one step beyond Lupin in his willingness to commit murder.
All that being said, early James Bond and 1963’s The Pink Panther are the two key influences on this Fantômas, which was such a success it spawned two sequels, both of them successful too.
The film opens with an ingenious heist, carried out in broad daylight by the disguised Fantômas himself, who buys some gems at a jeweller’s, pays for them and then leaves, whereupon the ink on the cheque he’s just written disappears completely. Neat.
Cue opening credits, with Michel Magne’s loungecore soundtrack slinking away in faintly Pink Pantherish style, with 007 horns occasionally stabbing the air.
And so to the plot, which is limp and a bit one-thing-after-another. What shape it has comes from the decision early on by newspaperman Fandor to capture the reflected glory of this audacious heist and up his paper’s circulation by writing a story about Fantômas that’s 100% fabricated. Fantômas, outraged, decides to strike back. And since both Fandor and Fantômas are played by the big star Jean Marais, it is no surprise that Fantômas takes his revenge by impersonating Fandor for his next crime. They are not, Bruce Wayne/Batman style, secretly the same person, let’s put that to rest.
Louis de Funès plays the policeman on the case, an Inspector Clouseau-style comedy cop bumbling his way towards bagging his man (he hopes) and on the way there also becoming the subject of one of Fantômas’s impersonations.
Funès was the bigger star at the time and Marais was very aware of it. His big lion head and dignified, status-aware style of acting are no match for Funès’s mobile features and his way with a pratfall, though Marais is athletic enough, especially as Fantômas, doing many of the stunts which come to dominate the back end of the film, as things devolve into one long chase.
Strong, silent Marais is upstaged by loud, silly Funès in all the scenes they share, and as Fantômas sequels came along, Funès would take more and more of the spotlight, much as Peter Sellers muscled ostensible-star David Niven into the shade in the first Pink Panther movie.
Director André Hunebelle had already made one of the OSS 117 films – more Bond spoofery – so knew what he was after. There’s a casino sequence, beautiful women in strange nipple-emphasising bras, a bit where a car hurtles down a hill with its brake lines cut, a fabulous sportscar (a BMW 507 for the fans) to gawp at, a batcave-like villain’s lair for Fantômas, a motorboat bouncing across an azure sea, a sequence on top a speeding train. It is all a bit Mission: Impossible at times, with Marais a plausible Tom Cruise template (the IMDb trivia section points out that Marais was in his 50s and did “many of his own stunts”).
And yet, at bottom it’s a poor Pink Panther movie, not as witty, not as fun, and departing plausibility entirely once Fandor the journalist decides to strike back and, blow me, if he isn’t every bit as stuntacular as Fantômas himself. But the appetite for this sort of thing – glamour, sex, stunts, fun – seemed to be almost bottomless back then and that’s the way to consume it now too, as an exercise in high 1960s style.
Fantômas – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
