Director Andre Hunebelle is no familiar name to me and, according to the IMDB report on him, he was "an odd job" man, doing everything from thrillers to swashbucklers, to comedies, and possibly a great deal more that I have not watched... and, on the strength of this film, I doubt I will look forward to watching more of his work.
Jean Marais is entrusted with not one but two roles, those of Fantomas and of the "Point du Jour" reporter/journalist Fandor covering Fantomas as he steals things from under everyone's nose. He does more than that, too: as Fantomas, he sabotages the brakes of the car in which Marais and Demongeot wake up, so they can die - and what follows is a ridiculous ride down and up mountains, with a supposedly brakeless vehicle actually heard applying brakes, among other impossibilities!
That's not all! Fantomas' master stroke: he copies French Police Commissar Juve (Louis de Funès') mug! And it takes a facial reconstruction exercise at the Police HQ for Juve to realize that Fantomas is impersonating him! I wonder if Hunebelle and the screenwriters watched Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in THE PINK PANTHER one year earlier. If they did, pity de Funès did not act with the same restraint as the British comedian!
The 1960s decade opened with a new fetiche: that of rubber masks to change your identity. You saw it in TV productions like THE FUGITIVE, spy-spoofing GET SMART, in the intro to James Bond's FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963), in John Huston's THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963), so FANTOMAS just picked up the fad and extended it (Fantomas' mask is quite good in its bluish, ghoulish way).
Other than that, the curvaceous Mylène Demongeot, and the slapstick, unfunny de Funés, continually repeating "faster, faster, faster" ("vite, plus vite") wherever he might be and whatever he might be traveling on.
I first saw FANTOMAS as a kid in 1967, and it left me with a vague sense of fear and fascination, prompted by the mask, the man's evil... now, nearly 60 years on, I had to force myself to watch it to the end to try to rediscover that magic - but found none.
Out of respect for what I saw as a child, I give it an undeserved 6/10.
Jean Marais is entrusted with not one but two roles, those of Fantomas and of the "Point du Jour" reporter/journalist Fandor covering Fantomas as he steals things from under everyone's nose. He does more than that, too: as Fantomas, he sabotages the brakes of the car in which Marais and Demongeot wake up, so they can die - and what follows is a ridiculous ride down and up mountains, with a supposedly brakeless vehicle actually heard applying brakes, among other impossibilities!
That's not all! Fantomas' master stroke: he copies French Police Commissar Juve (Louis de Funès') mug! And it takes a facial reconstruction exercise at the Police HQ for Juve to realize that Fantomas is impersonating him! I wonder if Hunebelle and the screenwriters watched Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in THE PINK PANTHER one year earlier. If they did, pity de Funès did not act with the same restraint as the British comedian!
The 1960s decade opened with a new fetiche: that of rubber masks to change your identity. You saw it in TV productions like THE FUGITIVE, spy-spoofing GET SMART, in the intro to James Bond's FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963), in John Huston's THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963), so FANTOMAS just picked up the fad and extended it (Fantomas' mask is quite good in its bluish, ghoulish way).
Other than that, the curvaceous Mylène Demongeot, and the slapstick, unfunny de Funés, continually repeating "faster, faster, faster" ("vite, plus vite") wherever he might be and whatever he might be traveling on.
I first saw FANTOMAS as a kid in 1967, and it left me with a vague sense of fear and fascination, prompted by the mask, the man's evil... now, nearly 60 years on, I had to force myself to watch it to the end to try to rediscover that magic - but found none.
Out of respect for what I saw as a child, I give it an undeserved 6/10.