Judex (1916) - film review

When his family is ruined by the unscrupulous banker Favraux, Jacques de Tremeuse resolves to bring him to justice.  Adopting a disguise and the name Judex, he captures the crooked banker and takes him to his secret lair.  Learning of Favraux’s dishonest ways, his daughter Jacqueline gives away his wealth when she learns of his death.  This infuriates a pair of ruthless crooks, Diana Monti and Moralés, who immediately swear to take revenge on Jacqueline, and her protector, Judex…

Director Louis Feuillade won fame and critical acclaim, in both Europe and America, with his early crime serials, Fantômas (1913-14) and Les Vampires (1915).  These episodic films were hugely popular, but they also brought Feuillade a fair amount of criticism from the bourgeois establishment, who accused him of glorifying crime and making heroes of criminals.  Feuillade’s well-meaning response to this brow-beating was another serial, the 12 part epic entitled Judex .

In Judex, the central character is not a master criminal, but a crime-fighter with special powers, unusual technology and a penchant for extravagant dress wear – in effect, the moving image’s first superhero.  His name is Judex, which, coincidentally, is the Latin word for “Justice”.  The actress who played the principal villain in Feuillade’s Les Vampires – the stunning Musidora – resurfaces in this film, albeit in a far more restrained role.  The part of Judex is played by the René Cresté, a charismatic actor who cuts an instantly recognisable profile in his wide-brimmed hat and flowing black cape.

Judex has less of the expressionist fantasy element of Feuillade’s earlier serials but is still a magnificently constructed piece of cinema, and one which shows that, both artistically and technically, Feuillade was way ahead of the game.  There’s less action than in Les Vampires, but the characters are much more developed and believable.  Far from being an infallible hero, Judex turns out to be a much more interesting character, one whose methods for fighting crime progressively erode his moral authority and cause us to question whether he is really as noble as he seems.

Contrary to Feuillade’s intentions, Judex ends up being the most anarchistic of his thriller serials.  By presenting us with a flawed hero, the film subtly undermines the notion that good will always win out over evil, and that moral goodness is all it takes to save the day.  In Judex, it is possible to see the origins of film noir and the film policier, genres which would leave a very heavy imprint on French cinema.   In such films, the boundaries between good and evil are seldom well-defined, and notions of moral superiority are, if anything, totally subverted.

The popularity of the Judex series led Feuillade to make a sequel, which again consisted of twelve episodes, and was entitled La Nouvelle Mission de Judex, released in 1918.   Subsequently, Judex was remade by his son-in-law Maurice Champreux in 1934, and then by Georges Franju in 1963.

© James Travers 2005

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