Fantomas
Move over James Bond and let Fantomas terrorize the world’s richest men.
I have been watching the 1960s Fantomas movies with Jean Marais - one of France’s best known leading men and a man who is as camp as camp gets - as the famed face-changing bad man battling it out with France’s supercop, Louis de Funes. In his time, De Funes was one of the country’s best loved comedians and usually played the role of the small, vile, conservative and intolerant authoritarian - a French stereotype which survives in national politics to this day.
Fantomas wears masks impersonating his compatriots and victims, blackmails wealthy industrialists, and always stays at least one step ahead of the French police. A masked crusader against excessive wealth, Fantomas could be the greatest screen villain and best role model France has given the world. Best of all, he gives nothing to the poor and keeps it all to himself. Fantomas does not fight for a better world, he merely does not like this one.
The Fantomas movies, based on French pulp stories by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre and dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, are spectacularly effective exercises in low budget high camp, similar in entertainment and production values to Hammer films in the UK, Edgar Wallace and Karl May productions in West Germany, Spaghetti Westerns in Italy and the Shaw Brothers martial arts flicks from Hong Kong.
What happened to low budget genre cinema? They don’t make them like that anymore.
