Judex, d. Georges Franju (1963)
Thirty years ago, when I was a film student, I'd spend my down days lying on the bed in my little room and watching film after film I'd taped off the telly over many years, sometimes all day until it was dark and time to go to the pub. I watched everything I could, but I had a somewhat self-conscious bias for 'the pantheon': Truffaut, Godard, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Hawks, Hitchcock, Cocteau, Franju.
Hitchcock, Cocteau and Franju provided the most watched films - Vertigo, Orphee and Judex, respectively. Whatever criteria of film art I currently possess was largely formed by repeat exposure to these three masterpieces.
Judex has, over the years, become my favourite, not least because its wears its brilliance so lightly. Franju's homage to Louis Feuillade's seven hour crime serial from 1914* is a hugely engaging 90 minute film that moves quickly but smoothly, as if on castors, from one striking scene to another until it ends (the transitions sometimes take the viewer by surprise, and it takes a minute to become reoriented). Franju is an inventive and stylish director, but not a flashy one: his greatest skill here is in creating a wholly believable secret dream world where people with incredible talent (for good, for evil) are conducting an epic running battle while everyone else goes about their boring business.
Judex has an incredible internal integrity: everything is off by a few degrees, but it is never weird or outlandish - the settings and the situation and the people all makes sense, they are recognisably real. There is something of the 'uncanny valley' in it, i.e. the discomforting feeling real humans get when confronted with something almost but not quite human-like, here extended to a world which is familiar in most ways but simultaneously slightly askew. The viewer is not uneasy, however, instead they are intrigued and, besides, Franju does everything he can to entertain: a non-stop plot, crisp cinematography, wonderful visuals, convincing and attractive characters, and a great score of music and composed sound by Maurice Jarre.
Towards the end, the absurdities begin to pile up to almost delirious effect. The mysterious crimefighter Judex, who so far has been presented as an almost omniscient mastermind and technical genius, is reduced to sending the comic relief detective and his street urchin sidekick to a local bar to make a phone call to get help. From nowhere, a passing Circus provides a hitherto unknown beautiful acrobat (the wonderful Sylvia Koscina) who is immediately caught up in the action. Ironically, it is her, not Judex, who hastens the conclusion, becoming engaged in a life or death struggle on a Parisian rooftop with the delightfully evil, catsuit clad supervillain(ess).
The heroic acrobat Daisy also has the best line in the film (perhaps any film), when she meets up with her old flame, quite by chance: 'Remember my Uncle, the evil lion tamer? The lions ate him! We are free to be together!'
I've probably seen Judex forty times. I never tire of it, I hope I never will.
* an end title states that the film is 'in memory of an unhappy time', but then 1914 did mark the beginning of the slaughter of WW1, in which 1.3m French soldiers were killed along with half a million civilians.
