Fantômas: The Complete Saga

I've been fascinated by 4k restorations for a while now. But seeing the beautiful work done on this restoration is amazing. I am dying to see more of these. This is fantastic work & the musical accompaniment is outstanding. Cannot recommend this one enough for silent era film buffs.

Fantomas was one of the very first super criminals in films. This blu-ray set contains a series of five Fantomas films from 1913-14, about one-hour each. Fantomas can disguise himself as anyone, go anywhere, and do anything; he works both alone and sometimes with a gang. He will stop at nothing, including sending a look-alike actor to the guillotine in his place!If you are interested in the history of movies, this set is especially interesting because it was made at a time when film makers had just begun telling stories in films (as opposed to simply showing moving pictures of things moving). There is little or no cinematic technique in use. The camera is a passive, stationary observer of actors on a stage - no pans or other camera movement, no closeups except to permit the audience to read letters and telegrams. Incidentally, cinematic techniques begin to appear in the same director's 1915-16 series, "Les Vampires".The films have been fully restored and nighttime scenes are tinted blue.Highly recommended for cinema buffs.

"Fantomas"(1913-1914) was directed by Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires). Fantomas (Rene Navarre) is a criminal who is a master of disguise who terrorizes Paris.This 2 disc set has five movies that are from 58 to 97 minutes in length. The restoration looks great as the films have been beautifully cleaned. These are black and white films with tinted sequences. The orchestral soundtrack was also remarkable and added a great deal to the movies. There are also two commentaries by film historian David Kalat, a 11 min. documentary about Feuillade, as well as two short films by Feuillade, and an animated gallery of cover art from the Fantomas novellas.

Great package with a wonderful picture quality. Only complaint is the lack of substantial bonus features; a more detailed documentary on the early French film industry would have been a nice addition.The short films by Feuillade are a nice perk, though an HD version would have been welcome.Overall, a great set.

Superb.

This five-part French silent film series is named after its main character. Fantomas (Rene Navarre) is a criminal who focuses on upper-class victims and is a master of disguise. Inspector Juve (Edmond Breon) has been assigned to hunt him down. Juve is assisted by Fandor (Georges Melchior), a newspaper reporter. Each part is about an hour to an hour and a half long. The films were restored by a French consortium in 2013 so the print looks great, the title cards are up-to-date, and the score is wonderful. Here's a part-by-part synopsis.1. In the Shadow of the Guillotine: Fantomas starts his crime spree robbing a wealthy woman at a hotel. He's bold enough to hide in her room and rob her of 120,000 francs and a pearl necklace as she watches. He makes a fantastic escape. His next caper is the killing of Lord Beltham, since Fantomas has taken a liking to Lady Beltham. She is in on the crime and helps Fantomas to escape from prison when he is caught by Juve. The escape plan is complicated but amazing and works flawlessly.2. Juve vs. Fantomas: As the title suggest, Fantomas and Juve cross swords metaphorically several times in this part. Lady Beltham is apparently dead--a mangled corpse has identifying documents on it. The corpse was left at a doctor's house. He immediately reported it so as not to be a suspect. But he is in fact Fantomas. He's plotting an elaborate robbery of a wine merchant with help from Josephine (Yvette Andreyor), whom the film describes as "the strumpette!" She's part of his gang and successfully pulls off the robbery. Well, almost successfully--the merchant is carrying half the money from a deal he made, but literally half. All the bills are cut in two with the promise of the other half when the wine merchant's deal is closed. Fantomas goes after the rest of the money but is confronted by Juve, who barely escapes with his life. Meanwhile, Lady Beltham is at a nunnery and is summoned by Fantomas back to her old house for a rendezvous. Juve and Fandor find out and try to lay a trap on a subsequent visit. The trap almost works but Fantomas manages a crafty escape, then blows up the building, bidding the lawmen "farewell!"3. The Murderous Corpse: Fandor is badly injured and Juve has disappeared. A pile of corpses was found at the house, so he's presumed dead. Meanwhile, Fantomas sends a dead body to a sculptor's studio and the sculptor is accused of the murder. In jail, one of Fantomas's agents kills the sculptor, who is later discovered dead in the holding cell. The next day, the sculptor's body is gone. Fantomas continues his crime spree, now leaving clues behind--the fingerprints of the dead sculptor! Fortunately, Juve is not dead and has been infiltrating Fantomas's gang. He almost catches Fantomas literally red-handed, but the villain makes a fantastic escape (again!).4. Fantomas vs Fantomas: A theory makes the public rounds that Fantomas and Juve are the same person. That would explain Juve's inability to catch the master criminal. Fandor is outraged as Juve winds up in prison. Lady Beltham puts on a masquerade ball to raise money for the capture of the real Fantomas. Fandor decides to go as the Man in Black (one of Fantomas's identities), though one of the police inspectors makes the same choice. Naturally, Fantomas shows up in his own garb. He picks a fight with the police inspector version of himself. Later, Fandor finds the inspector dead. Fantomas has already escaped and moved on to other plans. He needs to settle things with his gang, who are also wondering if Juve and Fantomas are one and the same. Juve is kidnapped in broad daylight from police headquarters by the gang. They try to trick him into admitting he is Fantomas. Fandor is hiding out at their secret lair and turns the tables on them. The gang winds up captured but Fantomas eludes the police yet again.5. The False Magistrate: A marquis is in dire straits and needs money so he decides to sell his wife's jewelry to a gem merchant. Through some implausible contrivances, both the jewels and the cash to pay for them are stolen...but not by Fantomas! He's in a Belgian jail serving a life sentence. In order to get him, Juve hatches a fantastic plot. He will go to Belgium as an accomplice and help Fantomas escape from prison. The French police will pick Fantomas up at the border and the Belgians will be forced to release Juve when two Fantomases is clearly one too many. The plan fails when Fantomas dodges the officers following him and he assumes the identity of a magistrate. He then meets up with his gang who pulled off the marquis heist. Plot machinations continue from there as Juve and Fantomas try as many tricks as they can to win the day.Overall, the series has a lot to recommend itself. The plots are interesting, if not always plausible, and move along at a steady pace (though it's slower than modern film storytelling). The actors are good, especially at being in disguise. The story uses a lot of doubling, mirroring, and reversing of situations and characters. The first film starts with Fantomas taking on someone else's identity to make his escape; the film ends with him forcing someone else to take his identity so Fantomas can escape. While clever and daring, Fantomas is never really sympathetic--he's too rough on his victims and too duplicitous with his allies. Juve is a good foil for the villain, having many of the same skills but using them in the cause of justice, not selfishly. He depends on Fandor and is true to his allies. The restoration looks great (none of the graininess and choppiness of many silent films) and the musical score has a classical sound but is crisp and clean.I watched this series on Hoopla.Recommended.

A deep, penetrating look onto Paris's life at the beginning of 20th century. An old print; but, when seeing into this: sometimes - when the older a movie gets, the more interesting it is to watch (when it's a good one).

If you love silent films or even serials this is a must have set for the Cinema Fanatic. This is a classic and is a well made fast moving series. The DVD has some rough moments but considering the age of this masterpiece it is easy to forgive.Louis Feuillade the director is brilliant in his vision of the serial and he has a masterpiece to show for it. I highly recommend this to any collector films.Fantomas is an excellent villain and this is an excellent introduction to the character.

Feuillade's first masterpiece is a fast-paced sequence of heist stories, murders, kidnappings, poisoning and impersonation, building on the exploits of the memorable antagonist created by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, and immortalised in a sprawling novel series written and released at breakneck pace.Fantômas is a character who murders without compunction, and tends to get away with it as his nemesis, the smart but unlucky Inspector Juve and his journalist friend Jerôme Fandor try to track him down but fail at crucial moments. These stories show little resemblance to the 1960s action comedies with Louis de Funes. The tone is significantly darker, although the series does not lack small flashes of dark humour. There is a lurid fascination with macabre death and grisly violence (chapters within individual films: The Bleeding Wall, The Murderous Corpse etc.).The interesting thing about Fantômas is that he is not just effectively faceless behind his hundred disguises, but he is without a backstory, or much of a psychological profile. We don't get to know much about him, and we don't need to, since he expresses himself through his improbable and horrible deeds. He is almost like an embodiment of crime, and he could be anyone, anywhere - a banker, a priest, a socialite, a street lowlife or a policeman (he is all of these and more in these episodes). The movies are full of anxiety; crime is triumphant, it pays, and Fantômas gets to delight in it. The surrealists loved it as the kind of accidental art that would emerge out of modern mass culture, and there is definitely something off about the atmosphere; the Paris of the early 1910s feels dreamlike, on the boundaries between the probable and improbable.As an interesting reversal from the novels, where disguises were only stripped away as a way of concluding a story arc, Feuillade shows them right at the beginning. Both Fantômas and Juve are shown in a series of dissolves, first as the actors, then the characters they impersonate. In a way, they are even mirror images of each other: to catch Fantômas, Juve and Fandor have to don fake personas, commit burglary, and withhold information from the authorities. At the beginning of one episode, Juve orchestrates a prison break for his nemesis, safely locked away in Belgium, anticipating that he will return to France where - the death penalty still in place - he can be guillotined. No wonder, then, that his improbable stories arouse official suspicion, and he is even suspected of being the master criminal himself.The cinematography is largely based on static shots, less advanced than it would be in Les Vampires two years later, but it is solid, and doesn't have the jangly quality of many silents. Actually, the acting feels real in the sense it is not over-coreagraphed; physical violence, when it occurs, feels creepily authentic. Unfortunately, parts of the last two episodes have been lost beyond recovery (the films themselves have only survived due to some kind of lucky accident before the stock was to be discarded as useless junk), and these parts are replaced by intertitles, and in one case, rerunning old footage. Sometimes, there is heavy damage on the stock. That said, the restored film looks as good as it can, and is well served by the score, ranging between hollow suspense and a dark dynamism.Almost a hundred years old, Fantômas remains compulsively watchable. As a critic has remarked, it is not really a puzzle but an intoxicant: full of uncertainty and menace, it has a strange, subversive beauty to it that still manages to delight and enthral viewers.

a masterpiece of the early silent cinema in a copy really perfect, necessary to study the effective modernity of the Feuillade contriibution to the history of cinema

The story is really good. You never know what will be happening next. It is very imaginative for the time. It is also interesting to see how life was in 1914.

Classic, was a great present for an expert in the field who was delighted to get it - everybody happy!