Word: judex
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...REMARKING a 1914 secret-avenger thriller, Georges Franju has capitalized on our distance from its prewar society. Judex (1963) is designed to lay bare the moral content of people's actions-- of the hero's as much as the villain's. At the same time Franju's treatment makes us marvel at the beauty of those actions, the beauty of everything that happens in this world of the past...
...Judex is designed to let all the characters look at what is going on. Its slow pacing frequently pauses while we and the characters savor the beauty of the world. This quality of leisure gives the film the true feeling of its period, as does the quality of its images: less recorded action than set-pieces, tableaux. Characters are presented behind windowpanes and in portraits, shown as individuals first and only later as figures related to other people. Each character is complex and complete, composed of light and dark...
...JUDEX. A sophisticated French tribute to period pop art, based on the serialized adventures of a half-forgotten superhero who liked to vanquish villains and save maidens in the silent-screen...
Wearing a black cloak and several delicious disguises, Channing Pollock portrays Judex with the stubborn, single-minded intensity of a reformed Dracula. The plot that roils around him is mostly post-Victorian gimcrackery, carried out in a pure period style that offers everything from mad little chases in vintage jalopies to the acrobatics of human flies, from reunions of long-lost sons and ruined fathers to the machinations of a rascally banker whose ill-gotten capital gains keep Judex awake nights. So does the banker's daughter (Edith Scob), a lovely wisp of a heroine. All crumpled organdy...
...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...