Word: franju
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Judex adds a subtle, sophisticated and endearing chapter to the swollen literature of cinematic pop art. In homage to French Movie Pioneer Louis Feuillade, Director Georges Franju tenderly resurrects Judex, a formidable mass hero whose dime-novel adventures burgeoned on the silent screens of France between 1916 and 1918, decades before Superman got off the ground as a force for good. Happily, Franju never yields to the temptation of playing a soggy old classic for easy laughs as a smart-alecky spoof. Instead he celebrates it with sound, as a nostalgic song of innocence, an ode to an era when...
Judex has too much low-key charm and seriousness to be wildly funny, but Director Franju seems content to woo a minority taste. He affectionately thumbs through an album of thrills remembered from boyhood, shrewdly heightening the original and sometimes shading in his own touches of nightmarish reality-most strikingly at an eerie masked ball where all the guests are feathered out as birds, again in a cell where a rotter confronts his festering conscience in a mirror that swivels to catch his every move. The spare, clever background music by Composer Maurice Jarre is a pleasurable bonus...
Therese appears obnoxious not because she marries the boor in the first place, nor because she fails even to try to make a go of it (this girl's so sensitive she's a fish in her wedding bed). What is so insufferable is that Mauriac and Franju create such a sympathetic Therese...
...Mauriac and Franju are no fools; why did they cast Therese as a sensitive heroine to begin with? The fault lies as much with their adaption of the novel as with the direction. By cutting the story of Therese's failure to make a new life in Paris, of her degeneration into a paranoid and confused old lady, they change a tragic character into a superficial...
...intelligent direction could have saved the film, Franju was not up to it. With a sophisticated modern audience, problems of subconscious motivations and existential living require subtlety and understatement. Perhaps Truffaut's achievement in Jules and Jim is too much to ask, but when Franju has his lead remark, "Don't you realize how useless we are?" it's embarrassing...