Fantômas

Fantômas: L’échafaud magique

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Fantômas in a mask

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 … Read more

Fantômas

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Fantômas in blue make up

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, … Read more