The Sunday Intertitle: The Judex Files: The Liquorice File

Episode Six of JUDEX is a little less action-packed than the hectic onslaught of revelations in Five, but only slightly.

Scheming vamp Diana Monti, bounteously embodied by Musidora, recruits the services of honest private eye Cocantin (the beaky MArcel Levesque). She also recruits a new sidekick, an unworthy marquis. Their object is to rescue Favraux, the crooked banker, from his captor Judex, and they reason that kidnapping the kid’s grandson, le petite Jean,  will bring Judex to the rescue. In what seems like a really uninspired set-up for a flat-sharing sitcom, the little Favraux tot is housed with the P.I. while they await the caped crusader’s intervention.

Since Cocantin is a lovely chap really, he is soon overcome with paternal warmth (but wait, isn’t he also a child abductor?). Meanwhile Judex sends in his brother Robert, the boy wonder, and the Liquorice Kid to stage a daring rescue. It’s an episode for sidekicks, apparently.

This rescue is not exactly high-tech — little Jean jumps off a balcony and the Judex Bros catch him in a blanket. The Liquorice Kid is then left in his captors’ hands, which seems like a lousy plan, but Cocantin, that fickle father, feels even more paternal towards his new waif hostage than he did for Jean. Problem solved.

The passionate, seemingly romantic friendship between the two little boys continues to be eyebrow-raising, though it may have something to do with the fact that Jean is played by Olinda Mano, a girl.

Robert proves himself as dashing a hero as Judex by returning Jean to his mother four seconds after she’s read about him being kidnapped.

The Judex-Files: Prologue

Time I did another serial here. Opted to do a GOOD one. Louis Feuillade’s JUDEX somehow escaped getting watched by me previously, maybe because Georges Franju somewhat dissed it by saying he preferred FANTOMAS and only made his own remake of the mysterious crime-fighter’s adventures because he couldn’t get the rights to those if the mysterious crime-commiter. But then, he DID choose to remake it, so he must have liked it a bit, yes?

Anyway, I’m 100 years late to the party, as usual, but here goes…

But JUDEX has all the charm you’d expect from its maker, with colossal old jalopies, elegant theatrical blocking, and Musidora skulking about under assumed names. Plus it has a slightly less episodic approach, with slow-burn plotlines set up in an elaborate prologue like a Victorian novel. A slightly daft Victorian novel, possibly, but a very constructed one, unlike the near-independent chapters of FANTOMAS and sequels.

Part one details the misdeeds of a nasty banker, who has a nice daughter and grandson. We meet various aggrieved parties, are introduced to the mystery of the old jailbird’s missing son, and the banker starts getting threatening letters, signed JUDEX. He hires a detective with an amusing comedy face and an un-amusing comedy sidekick. And then he drops dead of an apparent embolism.

“Where is this going?” 1916 audiences may have asked. And I did too, but none of us could stop watching…

Star of the prologue is undoubtedly consulting detective Marcel Levesque. The banker is drawn to an ad in the paper representing a super-sleuth combining the best features of Auguste Dupin, Mandrake the Magician and Tarzan. But what he gets is this weedy figure reminiscent of James Finlayson, only without the machismo. I warmed to Levesque at once, even as he presides, as bodyguard, over the immediate death of his client. I’m sure his success rate will improve as the show goes on…

To be continued…