LUPIN III: MISSED BY A DOLLAR (2000)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

MISSED BY A DOLLAR was the last Lupin TV special to be animated in the traditional fashion. More importantly, though, DOLLAR is much less dominated by the tropes of wild fantasy found in many Lupin stories of the period. Here the master thief and his gang oppose an evil financial cabal that seeks to manipulate world events, and the only metaphenomenal elements of DOLLAR are the rather low-level tricks Lupin uses to bamboozle Zenigata.

As usual the Lupin gang only oppose greater evils as a means of maintaining their freedom to commit generally harmless crimes. In fact, in the opening sequence the master thief begins the adventure in an apparently legal venue: participating in a New York auction (albeit in disguise) for a rare ring. However, another party outbids Lupin by a mere dollar, and on top of that, Zenigata arrives with a squad of New York cops to seize the master criminal. Never daunted, Lupin simply evades the cops and steals the ring, However, an enforcer working for the mystery bidder steals back the ring and tries to kill Lupin in the bargain. Of course all Lupin viewers know that this means war.

Lupin briefs his comrades in crime on his plans: the ring can guide one to a fabulous brooch, which in turn confers incredible luck upon its possessor. It's not entirely clear why Lupin wants the brooch. He natters a bit about a Lupin Empire, but somehow he convinces Jigen and Goemon that the brooch will lead to a big payoff. Fujiko isn't interested because she's become fascinated with the world of high finance, though she changes her tune when reversals decimate her wealth. Fujiko's attempt to transition from crook to high financier proves the reverse of Lupin's new enemy: Cynthia Craymov, already the head of a banking empire. Her father was the deposed tyrant of a small country, so Cynthia wants to rule an empire founded in high finance. She believes implicitly in the brooch's power to convey luck, though said power is never unilaterally proven. Her main enforcer is an ex-KGB killer with a penchant for knife-fighting, but Cynthia's cool resolve makes her the main opponent.

There's a subplot in which Lupin appears to fall to his death, in such a way that both his friends and Zenigata are convinced he's finished. The sequence is good for a laugh as Zenigata mourns his foe (or at least the impossibility of ever accomplishing his monomaniacal goal). There are some decent but workmanlike action-sequences, with Fujiko getting just one femme-formidable scene in which she shoots a guy menacing Goemon. In the end Cynthia's crimes are exposed and the brooch ends up in good hands, though for a change all four of the super-crooks end up temporarily broke. There are some acidulous comments on the financial mentality, but anyone wanting a critique of capitalism would need to look elsewhere.  

BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The standard legends about Amazons assert that the warrior-women lived apart from males, except when they raided neighboring villages and kidnapped men for temporary stud service. Alfonso Brescia's Italian trash-peplum gets that part right, but adds the idea that the Amazons ruled by Queen Eraglia (Lucretia Love) keeps some males as slaves.

BATTLE has a rushed look even for an exploitation flick, possibly because the Italians wanted to "mockbust" Terence Young's more expensive production, THE AMAZONS. That's probably why the three credited writers (one of whom was Bruno Corbucci) took the obvious tack of ripping off THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. After the women warriors kill the headman of one village, his daughter Valeria (Paola Tedesco) decides to oppose Amazon tyranny. She hires handsome bandit Zeno (Lincoln Park) and his fellow rogues to train her people to fight.

It's not an irredeemable sin to be unoriginal, but it is to be lazy. Though Valeria is not much of a heroine, most of the Glam-azons are good looking enough to provide the sort of spectacle the movie needs. But the battles, even when not performed by stuntmen in drag, are unexceptional. And since the script has no interest in examining Amazon society from any sort of feminist angle-- which, admittedly, would be very atypical for any Italian film of the sixties or seventies -- BATTLE becomes something of a slog, rather than a fun if mindless peplum.

In addition to the "weird societies" trope, BATTLE also employs "outre outfits" in that the Amazons sometimes fight wearing outsized masks, whose real purpose was to conceal the masculine nature of the ladies' stunt-doubles. Over twenty years later, the show XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS also made frequent use of masked Amazons, though I don't know if the producers did so for a similar reason, or if someone on staff saw BATTLE and thought that the mask-thing was cool-looking.    

SCANNERS III: THE TAKEDOWN (1992)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychology*

Despite having the same director and writer as SCANNERS: THE NEW ORDER, the second sequel to SCANNERS doesn't rise to the level of competent genre-material. It does give viewers many scenes of Scanners tossing people around with telekinesis, but it screws up the psychological motifs that could have made for a better film than the original.

It's still roughly 10 years from the time of the original film, and though I don't remember much about NEW ORDER, it seemed odd to me that the general public now knows what Scanners are and what they can do. Some time back Elton Monet, a scientist who's been researching the Scanner phenomenon, adopted and raised to maturity two European kids, Alex (Steve Parrish) and Helena (Liliana Komorowska). Both have the requisite psychic powers, but for some reason the script doesn't venture to explain, Alex suffers none of the usual side-effects of his in utero mutation. In fact, at a party whose attendees all know what Alex is, the partygoers ask Alex to perform a trick with his powers. The trick results in a friend's accidental death, so Alex goes off to a Thailand monastery to learn how to control his powers. A better script might have made more of Alex's search for spiritual clarity, but the Thai-trek is just a plot-point.

To be sure, Alex gets secondary status because Helena is the star of the show. The young woman-- who incidentally remains friends with Valerie, Alex's ex-girlfriend-- suffers migraines whether she uses her powers or not. Her adoptive father reveals a new project: chemical patches that may be capable, after adequate testing, of eradicating the Scanner side-effects. However, Helena steals the patches to anneal her suffering. In nearly no time, the untested tech unleashes Helena's "Miss Hyde." She kills her adoptive father and enlists a small army of institutionalized Scanners to become her agents, and one of the first things she does is to send her pawns to Thailand to kill Alex.

Perhaps the dumbest subplot involves Helena to get revenge upon a scientist at Elton's institute who tortured her when she was a young girl-- wait, what? What was Elton doing at the time, and how did the guy get away with such actions? I think the writer might have been evoking the old "good father's who's really a bad father" trope. But he lacked the guts to give Elton such a personality, so this nugatory scientist was used to provoke Helena to vengeful violence.

Naturally Alex and his girlfriend save the day from the bad sister. Since the FX scenes are only fair, the sole reason to watch TAKEOVER is to watch Komorowska pull out all stops as a psychic super-villain.        

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (2007)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

Given my poor rating for DEAD MAN'S CHEST-- which film was shot back-to-back with AT WORLD'S END-- I wasn't expecting to rate END highly. In fact, I remember watching the film in a theater in 2007 and being exasperated by its meandering plot, its over-indulgence in trump cards and double crosses, and its make-work mythology. However, watching END back-to-back with CHEST, I accrued a greater appreciation for some of the consistent myth-motifs in the 2007 production, even if they were surrounded by a lot of chaos. CHEST now appears to be a padded middle act that introduces a lot of connective tissue necessary for a stronger third act-- which, to be sure, does have a lot of messy stuff as well. 

END, after all, is noteworthy for providing a pleasing if poignant ending to the story-arc of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann (Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley), who share the spotlight with capricious captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). The 2017 DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES added a coda to the Will-Elizabeth arc, but the conclusion of END still works as one of two major myth-motifs: that of "lovers tragically separated over long intervals," like "The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl." This motif was probably derived from one of the ancillary versions of the Flying Dutchman, where the cursed captain was able to visit the human world from time to time, seeking true romance. The other major myth-motif-- that of a curse that is passed on from one victim to another-- may be extraneous to the major expressions of the Dutchman story, but END uses the motif to provide a reason why Will is forced to loosely duplicate his father's career as an absentee husband and father.

CHEST's strongest moment appeared toward the movie's conclusion, when the good-hearted Elizabeth unleashes her "inner pirate" and so betrays Jack Sparrow, so that he's consigned to the afterlife ruled by the predacious Davy Jones (Bill Nighy). CHEST also concluded with the mercenary Beckett, representative of the East India trading company, gaining the heart of Davy Jones. With this talisman, Beckett forces Jones and his Dutchman crew to serve as his enforcers in a campaign to eradicate all piracy. Here the script builds upon the first film's suggestion that piracy can be a counter-agent to the compromises of respectable society, and so END opens with a series of grotesque executions of everyone even suspected of associating with pirates. This one sequence might be the best scene ever directed by Gore Verbinski.

Will and Elizabeth, along with former enemy Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), plan to rescue Jack from perdition, in part to overthrow Beckett's tyranny. To accomplish this, the trio engage the help of a pirate brotherhood. These "pirate lords" add a fair amount of narrative confusion, but they seem necessary to expound on just how former human Davy Jones was transformed into a soul-collector by the goddess Calypso. The brotherhood also somehow forced the goddess to become human, though they don't know which human, and indeed one of the lords thinks Elizabeth is Calypso's reincarnation. Indeed, Calypso and Jones were lovers in antiquity, making them the precursors of the pattern that will consume Will and Elizabeth.         

                

Actually, because the script concentrates so much on the Will-Elizabeth arc-- and some minor ones involving Will's father and Elizabeth's former fiancee Norrington-- Jack Sparrow doesn't have that much to do. Indeed, one of the best scenes toward the big finish has Captain Barbossa marry Will and Elizabeth while all three of them are engaged in mortal combat. Davy Jones too gets closure to his arc, while END shows Jack and Barbossa still engaged in their perfidious but harmless pirate games-- as they still will be in the fourth installment. END has no end of flaws. But as far as putting across the message that we all need to embrace our inner pirates, this is the best of the Caribbean franchise.     

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST (2006)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

I'm sure Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer saved a ton of money by shooting this movie and its sequel back-to-back, and since audiences loved Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, both films made bank at the box office. But director Gore Verbinski and his team sure sacrificed the simple, elemental appeal of two good-hearted but conventional lovers who have their world turned upside down by a roguish pirate with a heart of fool's gold.

It's a year later since the events of the first film, and Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann (Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley) are due to be married soon. However, a Navy official named Beckett shows up at Port Royal, ordering the arrests of the two lovers for having aided the escape of wanted pirate Jack Sparrow (Depp). Beckett's also looking for former Naval officer Norrington, but this is merely a plot-device just to let the audience know that the character will show up later in the story. Beckett has zero need for Norrington, because his real plot is to use Elizabeth's captivity to blackmail Will into finding Jack Sparrow.

After the first hour, it becomes clear that the poor excuse for a plot is just a series of "go find something" tasks. The crude assemblages of goals put me in mind of the old kids' song "The Old Lady Who Swallowed the Fly:"

Will follows Jack Sparrow to find Jack's compass,

And they use the compass to find a key,

And the key they use to open Dead Man's Chest, 

And in the chest they find a heart

From another chest, that of Davy Jones,

And with that heart they can win their desires--

I understand that most pirate adventures owe a debt to TREASURE ISLAND, but all these different doodads become tedious, particularly since they're just there to pad the film's running-time. The supernatural being Davy Jones (Bill Nighy with an octopus-face), a former human transformed into a keeper of dead souls (and the captain of the Flying Dutchman), holds control of the seven seas. Anyone who can gain custody of Davy Jones' heart will also control the oceans-- which is Beckett's endgame.

After about an hours' worth of pointless stunts, Will does find Jack and reunites the querulous captain with his crew and his ship-- as well as new crewman Norrington, who nurses old grudges against both Will and Jack. While they head off to find the Flying Dutchman-- which is crewed by a bunch of fish-men-- Elizabeth wins free of prison and goes looking for Will.

The makeshift mythology here includes not only Davy Jones, but also a goddess called Calypso and a giant Kraken. I recall that these matters get a little more exposition in the third film, but I imagine the audience just rolled with it all while waiting for Johnny Depp to show up and be funny. Will has a subplot in which he meets his long-lost father, now a member of the Dutchman crew, and Elizabeth once more appears to be slightly tempted by Jack's chaotic charms. Elizabeth gets to swordfight this time, as well as handily tricking tricky Jack, while the best stunt in the film is a three-way blade-battle between Jack, Will, and Norrington. But there were also a lot more boring scenes that one should expect from a Jerry Bruckheimer production.

          

XTERMINATOR AND THE AI APOCALYPSE (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

I know nothing about the origins of this low-budget CGI oddity. But just as a guess, it looks and sounds as if writer/director/voice-actor "BC Fourteen" started out trying to make a fan-film about the armored adversary from George Lucas' prequel STAR WARS series, General Grievous. Then he reworked his CGI model into a more skull-faced humanoid and dubbed hm "Xterminator," but kept the raspy, acerbic voice-characterization.

The setting is some futuristic sparse-opera-- my new term for a space-opera so sparse in details that it might as well be a western. Almost all we see of humanity are various armored soldiers, under the command of one Grace Sherwood, and her raison d'etre as a commander of Earth-forces is to play "Thunderbolt Ross" to the robotic villain Xterminator. He calls himself "X" for short, but he's an apocalyptic AI who despises humans as much as humans despise him. So who does Sherwood call upon when her creator obliges her to rip off "Escape from New York" and send someone to Mars to rescue a missing diplomat? That's riiiight...

While X is on his Mars mission, motivated by both carrot and stick, Sherwood decides to hedge her bets by unleashing an intelligent shark-monster. Megalodon, to ambush X. Why does Megalodon exist in this sparse-opera? Same reason Sherwood confers with an intelligent Bigfoot: a director's silly in-joke. because he worked on an early CGI junk-flick, BIGFOOT VS MEGALODON. For good measure, Sherwood also arranges a Martian jailbreak to add to X's headaches.

Though XATAA is never more than a junk-flick, I might have been slightly entertained if Fourteen had been able to deliver on all the promised action. But just as was the case with all the SYFY big-beast fests, action costs too much money for cheapie CGI movies. There's just barely enough violence for XATAA to qualify in my combative mode category. Yet while I can't recommend the film, it did make me a bit curious about Fourteen's half-dozen "Bigfoot" junk-flicks.   

    

DEADLY INHERITANCE (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Contrary to the creative poster illustration above, the "perilous psycho" of DEADLY INHERITANCE doesn't wear a mask, and both he and his fellow conspirator are very ordinary-looking. This early giallo-- probably the only one by director/co-writer Vittorio Sindoni, whose other credits I don't recognize-- doesn't offer any sadistic set-pieces like the slightly later works of Dario Argento, and in many ways, INHERITANCE seems like a lot of the 1960s versions of "old dark house" movies. Sindoni may have seen Bava's groundbreaking BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, because he places a lot of visual emphasis on good-looking women. But there's never any doubt that the motive of the mystery killer is largely pecuniary.

In a small French country-town, a rich old fellow dies and leaves a will that has the heirs up in arms. The late father left behind three beautiful daughters-- Simone, Rosalie and Collette-- and a quirky-looking adopted son, Janot. At the reading of the will, the heirs learn that none of them can collect their share of the bequest for the next three years, when Janot comes of age. Why the old guy couldn't just put Janot's share in a trust is not raised by anyone, and soon, a mystery killer starts knocking off possible heirs, starting with Janot. 

Normally, these "all heirs die but one" stories make no sense, because the remaining heir will inevitably fall under suspicion of the crimes. INHERITANCE does have a work-around of sorts, but I can't claim the killings are anything watchable. Of the three main actresses, I only knew Femi Benussi, while I'd seen the guy playing Janot in the later giallo TORSO. Sindoni keeps things percolating well enough, though, and never better than an early scene, prior to Janot's demise, when the aforementioned Janot peeks on his adoptive sister Simone (Benussi) while she's showering. This seeming throwaway nude-scene does figure into the denouement, though, and it adds a little spice to the generally routine story. If Sindoni had worked a little harder giving the victims even minor characterization, I might have upgraded this flick's mythicity to "fair."             

LUPIN III: LEGEND OF THE GOLD OF BABYLON (1985)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

LEGEND, the third feature-film centered upon the LUPIN III franchise, is yet another treasure-hunt tale, and like many of the 1980s iterations, LEGEND follows the goony-cartoony approach of the Monkey Punch comics rather than the more streamlined adventures of later years. At the same time, there are odd mythopoeic elements here that don't often turn up in either the original manga or in the 1960s gangland stories helmed by one of LEGEND's two credited directors, Seijun Suzuki. Of the two writers, one worked on one Suzuki crime-film and several "pink" movies, while the other seems to have been more invested in television animation projects.

So there's a treasure being hunted by the Lupin Gang (included their on-off ally Fujiko) and by the Mafia, while in turn Inspector Zenigata is on Lupin's trail. There's nothing unusual about the treasure being some remnant of humankind's earliest generations, this time being a fabulous golden trove from ancient Babylon. But the script gives the treasure-trove a grounding in archaic myth: to wit, that in some bygone age, the supreme god of the Babylonians ordered his worshippers to gather together all of their gold into a great mountain, which the deity-- usually just called "God"-- then attempted to lift into heaven. But "God" dropped the tower of gold so that it fell into the uninhabited wilderness of the New World and was buried far beneath the earth of what would much later become New York City. Centuries later, both Lupin and the Mafia learn from ancient cuneiform tablets the possible location of the treasure, and they begin vying to seize the gold. In fact, the first time the viewer sees "Fujiko" seeking to find out what Mafia don Marciano knows about the bounty, the "mountains of Fuji" turn out to be an inflatable disguise worn by none other than Lupin. 

Now it's impossible to conjure with the image of a Babylonian mountain of gold and not think of the Old Testament's account of the so-called Tower of Babel. I don't remember what the LEGEND script says about the Biblical Tower, if anything, but I'm sure we never hear the canonical story in toto:

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. -- Genesis 11: 4-9.

Now, I'll concede that all the twaddle about the Babylonian God-- actually some sort of alien entity-- picking up the gold-mountain and dropping it was first and foremost a writer's means of getting the treasure from the Old World to the New. However, the basic idea of a deity taking some person or object into heaven follows the pattern of humans sacrificing goods to their deities. The original Tower of Babel story follows a parallel but opposing course: mortals are building a great tower that seems to reach to the heavens. God seems vaguely threatened by the project and confuses the languages of the builders so that the tower is never finished. (Some later retellings added the elaboration of the tower being cast down.)

However, the LEGEND script has an extra ET-fillip to add to its "was God an astronaut" concept. During Lupin's peregrinations he keeps encountering a wizened old woman, Rosetta, who makes weird claims about having lived for centuries while simultaneously offering her body to the flustered master thief. No viewer will be surprised to learn that Rosetta isn't just a crazed Earthwoman, and that she's really an ET who's been stranded on Earth since the age of Babylon. The script is never clear about how Rosetta got marooned-- though it would be logical if she was somehow compromised by the same difficulty that caused the gold-mountain to fall back to Earth. It's also never clear why the ET-ship left behind both Rosetta and the mountain and only visited the planet Earth at specific intervals; intervals that Lupin coordinates with the re-appearance of Halley's Comet. Maybe the basic idea was that the ET-ship was entirely automated. This might account for why it kept returning in mechanical fashion, and maybe for why Rosetta needs Lupin's help to gain access to the ship again. In the big climax, Rosetta transforms back into her natural form-- a space-babe, of course-- and she also tries to spirit away the golden treasure (with no mention as to why her people wanted the mineral). However, though Rosetta is able to return to her people (implicitly), she loses control of the treasure, which spills back down upon Earth. I think the script meant to imply that the gold was up for grabs to whoever could get it, so that this time, the Lupin Gang doesn't make an exceptional score.

The obsessed Zenigata furnishes some good laughs. After the inspector bungles catching Lupin in New York at the film's opening, his superior not only takes him off the Lupin case, he forces Zenigata to provide security for a New York beauty contest. Then, by a really weird conceit even for a cartoon movie, the superior gets in trouble for allegedly fixing the contest, so he placates the five runners-up by... talking them into becoming policewomen who help Zenigata track down Lupin again? The young women seem to get into their mission despite being saddled with the inept inspector, and a Chinese kung-fu beauty named Qing briefly tries to conquer Goemon, though she makes more impact on the samurai's heart than on his body. In fact, Lupin gets most of the good LEGEND scenes, with Fujiko and Jigen getting short shrift, while Goemon's most memorable scene has him dueling with a bolt of lightning. Clearly the writers were less beguiled with the regular Lupin gags than with their ambitious story of an astronaut/"god" who manages to leave behind a buried sacrificial treasure and its custodian, who looks like a "loathly lady" until she's reunited with her "dragon-hoard." But while LEGEND doesn't achieve the mythic concrescence of the better Lupin movies, unpredictable Lupin is always better than the predictable kind.                                      

           

THE MYSTERIOUS MAGICIAN (1964)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Opinions seem divided as to where DER HEXER, the "krimi" adaptation of Edgar Wallace's 1925 book THE RINGER, stands. Some reviews call it one of the worst of its ilk, others, one of the best. My take is somewhere in the middle: MAGICIAN is an enjoyable romp without a lot of substance.

A young woman is gruesomely murdered and her body gets tossed in the Thames. When Scotland Yard investigates, it's discovered that the victim possesses an indirect celebrity: she's the sister of a professional assassin, the Ringer-- whose name in German became "hexer," meaning magician or wizard. (The English dub uses the latter term, even though the movie's title uses the former.) He's called the Ringer because he's got an uncanny ability to assume many disguises in order to knock off his targets. The movie's vague about what the Yard knows about the Ringer: on one hand, they have the info that he was somehow exiled from Britain, yet no one knows what he looks like sans disguises. Perhaps the book's more consistent on that point.

I would guess that the book doesn't inject as many allusions to sex as MAGICIAN does. For instance, from Goodreads reviews I know that though the book-version of the story has the sister killed for discovering some skullduggery, MAGICIAN has her find out that her employer's involved in white slavery. Similarly, I'll bet the main character of the book isn't as much of a "player" as Joachim Fuchsberger's Inspector Higgins-- for all that the cop's engaged to a pert young miss named Elise (Sophie Hardy). The overall sexiness of the film stands in contrast to the comparatively higher quotient of violence in many krimis: only the opening murder and the Ringer's killing of the big boss-- with a sword-cane through his heart-- caught my attention.  

Edgar Wallace created a fair number of oddly named masterminds in his career, but the Ringer's only an "uncanny villain" by virtue of his power of disguise-mastery. It's suggested that the cops covertly admire the assassin because he's only targeted other criminals, and indeed the Ringer is really the star of the story, more than any of his pursuers. I can't speak for the book, but the movie ends with the assassin escaping after killing the last of the white slavers. I don't think Wallace usually resurrected his criminals for any encores, but Goodreads also informs me that the author also published a collection of stories, ALIAS THE RINGER.        

LUPIN III: STEAL NAPOLEON'S DICTIONARY! (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

For a LUPIN III TV special, DICTIONARY certainly has an interesting angle. It's one thing to begin with the premise that the family of Lupin has rumored to have hidden away some fabulous lost treasure. From this notion stems the inventive development that several world powers decide that they're going to hijack the treasure to solve their fiscal problems. (The dialogue doesn't mention that this is a reversal of the usual situation, where the Lupin gang is usually stealing from the powerful and the prosperous.) And the key to finding the rumored bounty is Napoleon's dictionary, which only became a part of history because the ruler supposedly said, "The word 'impossible' is not in my dictionary."

I don't remember how the world powers learn that the dictionary contains a treasure-clue, but even Lupin III doesn't know where it is, until a novelty car-race offers the item as a first prize. Since all the cars in the race have to be antique restorations, Lupin promptly rigs up an old flivver with special technology-- including the power of flight-- and takes part in the race, accompanied by a reluctant Jigen and later, a Goemon who unleashes his super-samurai skills in the name of "duty." (Duty as a thief?) The dogged Zenigata knows that Lupin will seek to win the race, so he too acquires an old car to participate, accompanied by Chieko Kido, a pretty young Japanese intelligence agent. Also joining the race is flirtatious Fujiko, though initially she seemed more concerned with seducing a handsome young millionaire racer-- at least until she decides she might make more dough by cutting in on Lupin's big score. Assorted agents of the world powers make the scene, though they don't join the race and seem to act erratically, sometimes trying to capture Lupin to pick his brain, sometimes trying to kill him. One such effort involves the Americans sending a tracker-missile to wipe out Lupin and Jigen, which the crooks only escape thanks to Lupin converting his car into a submarine and hiding from the missile in a lake.

The covetous agents are not particularly strong villains, but this allows the story to devote a lot more time to the comically obsessed Zenigata. He briefly captures his quarry, but disguise-master Lupin not only assumes the cop's likeness but makes up Zenigata to look like himself. This eventuates in one comic scene where the beleaguered cop has to pretend to be Lupin while in the company of Lupin's gang-members, and also an interlude in which "Zenigata" spends time in the company of Chieko. Unlike Zenigata, who's totally devoted to his quest for capturing super-thieves, Chieko has begun to have doubts about her dedication to serving a faceless intelligence agency. By the movie's end, Chieko does decide, with Lupin's help, to give up law enforcement, which decision stands in contrast to Goemon's dedication to peerless lawbreaking.

Goemon's big sword-feat here involves being attacked by several small tracker-missiles, which he carves up like sashimi. This LUPIN emphasizes comedy more than adventure, particularly in the revelation of the nature of the "treasure."

                                    

LUPIN III: TACTICS OF ANGELS (2005)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

I'm by no means a Lupin III expert, even where the animated films are concerned. But it's pretty evident to most of the feature films/TV specials usually involve three groups in conflict. The primary conflict is most often the Lupin Gang of superlative thieves with some other criminal gang, who are always more ignoble and destructive than the "honest thieves," and there's a secondary conflict in which Inspector Zenigata, accompanied by whatever law-enforcement agents he can draft, pursues the Lupin Gang but has to be satisfied with the defeated villains Lupin has left behind. It's a corollary tendency that if Fujiko Mine sees any advantage in betraying the gang to the villains, she usually will, but she always gets welcomed back to the fold when the evil guys seek to off her.

TACTICS starts out like a lot of Lupin adventures (though overall this TV special has better comedic elements than many of the others). Zenigata has received a challenge from Lupin to the effect that the master thief's going to raid the US installation Area 51. As Zenigata learns from head scientist Emily, the installation holds a bonafide alien artifact, a sphere called "The Original Metal," apparently because it's so hard nothing can cut it. Lupin and his associates succeed swimmingly. Jigen and Goemon are disgusted, however, when Lupin informs that he didn't steal the artifact in order to fence it and make a lot of cash. He plans to turn the metal of the sphere into a unique finger-ring for Fujiko, the better to steal her heart. Unfortunately for Lupin, not even Goemon's peerless samurai blade can cut the metal, and Goemon must leave to seek some way to repair his chipped sword. So then Lupin begins trying to figure out some way to penetrate the metal-- though even at the movie's end, it's not a sure thing that Lupin really intended just to make the Original Metal into a ring for Fujiko.

But other forces also want the Metal. The viewer meets "The Bloody Angels" before the Lupin Gang does, as this all-female fighting force practices for the coming conflict by killing four fighters dressed up like Lupin's people. The four Angels are Lady Jo (a kung fu expert who usually dresses up as a man), Poison Sophie (a poisons expert), Bomber Lily (an expert in both explosives and stage magic), and Kaoru (a samurai whose skills are a close match to Goemon's). The Bloody Angels (whose name always sounds like that of the "Lovely Angels" of the DIRTY PAIR franchise) seek to find out which of the gang has the metal sphere. But clever Lupin has made copies, so that not even devious Fujiko can be sure of stealing the right object when she tries to sell it to Lady Jo, who almost kills Fujiko.

The four main Angels, who are the forefront of an all-female army, provide the gang with good opposition, but the best comes from Kaoru, whose sword Goemon believed to be "cursed." It's not certain whether this is the case or not, but if so it would be a very rare instance of the supernatural existing in Lupin's sci-fi world. Because Goemon's sword was chipped by contact with Original Metal, he even has to flee Kaoru in the first encounter, though of course the second face-off turns out very differently. Lupin is faced with an intriguing puzzle: if no Earthly force can scrape off a shard of the sphere, what good is it to the Angels, or to any foreign government they might sell it to? As it happens, there is a good solution to this puzzle, which involves using the sphere in conjunction with something else to create a death-ray that no government should be trusted with.

Though the Angels are initially portrayed as terrorists, one of them, Sophie, claims to have an altruistic reason to want the sphere. Since she becomes somewhat simpatico with Lupin during their clashes, she reveals to Lupin that she carries a major grudge against the US due to having lost her brother, a member of the US military forces, due to incompetent commanders. It's rare for stories in the LUPIN canon to be very critical specifically of US practices, given that America is a big market for the franchise. At the same time, Sophie's grudge is loosely demonstrated to be sophistry in that she believes she can built a new, better country out of the ashes of devastation-- something Lupin opposes for purely practical reasons. Then Sophie is killed by one of her own, and the gang has no further sympathies for the other three angels or their small army of lady soldiers.

TACTICS is certainly one of the bloodiest productions in this franchise that I've seen, with lots of characters getting shot or sliced up. The animators don't linger upon the after-effects of the violence, but the carnage is a real factor in giving TACTICS a harder edge than many similar works-- though, oddly, it's also one of the funniest LUPINs in my experience. The viewer never learns anything about the ET science that formed the sphere, and no aliens make the scene. But there's a stronger sociological theme here than in most LUPINs. (Also, Fujiko does get a chance to be more of an action-girl than in many other productions.)

                    

THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING (1971)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

After the passing of Claudia Cardinale in September, I reviewed one of her only films with mild fantasy content, BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER. In that essay, I mentioned that I didn't know if I'd ever review Cardinale's 1971 collaboration with the then-living Brigitte Bardot, THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING. Then Le Bardot passed this month, so I decided to watch FRENCHIE, like Bardot says in one line, "for the hell of it." To my mild surprise, there was also a smidgen of fantasy content in FRENCHIE as well: the villain of the story gets injured early-on, and he's kept out of the main action while a Chinese man uses an uncanny form of acupuncture to gradually restore him to health.     

Said villain, name of Doc Miller, exists only to set up the action. He commissions some geology expert to predict that there's oil on a deserted ranch, near a town, Bougerville. inhabited mostly by French emigrees. Miller then kills the expert, as if he's a pirate protecting forbidden treasure. and apparently buys the land legally, by wiring money through the venue of the telegraph. He takes his title with him on his way to claim his prize, but his train is held up by five bandits, the black-clad Frenchie King gang. Miller is injured and out of the picture for a long time, while the King gang reaches its hideout and reveals the audience that they're all young women, the daughters (by five separate mothers) of their bandit father, now deceased. While four of the sisters (Emma Cohen, Patty Shepard, Teresa Gimpera and France Dougnac) complain about the hard life of outlawry, Frenchie, aka Louise (Bardot) finds Miller's title. They don girls' clothes and journey to Bougerville, in their company of their Black servant. (Maybe the girls went west from Louisiana?)

However, Bougerville already has a reigning "queen:" Maria Sarrazin (Cardinale), who lords it over her four brothers (named for the Apostles) and over the ineffectual marshal, Jeffords (Michael J. Pollard). Though Maria and her bros are rowdy types, they're basically law-abiding horse-breeders-- until Maria learns from a separate soure that the "Little P" ranch holds oil reserves. She and her four brothers meet Frenchie and her four sisters, where Frenchie assumes the identity of "Doc Miller." When Maria forcefully offers to buy Frenchie out, the lady bandit knows that there's more to the "Little P" than is apparent.

 Afterward, the rest of the film is devoted to episodic encounters between the two "queens," with the "manly" Maria trying to intimidate the "womanly" Doc Miller, or alternately, to get Jeffords to invalidate the ranch-sale. To his credit, though Jeffords is the comedy relief, having zero chance with either of the starring beauties, he does stick to the law, and even hazily suspects that Doc Miller might be the bandit Frenchie, generally thought to be a man. All of the contentions between Maria and Frenchie-- as well as those between the four sisters and four brothers, who end up marrying one another-- lead up to a splashy, climactic fistfight between the dueling dominatrixes. It's easily one of the best catights in all cinema, and seems loosely patterned on the climactic fight between John Wayne and Randolph Scott in 1942's THE SPOILERS. After the girls settle their differences in a tie, they team up to rescue their siblings from the law. Implicitly the Sarrazins leave behind lawful activities and join the King Sisters in a life of happy outlawry.

FRENCHIE will win no awards for its very simple plot, and it's only a "feminist western" in a loose, non-didactic manner. Devotees of feminism ought to love the fact that even though Frenchie's four sisters are wed in holy matrimony (the multiple marriages reminding me of the Greek myth of the Danaids), both Maria and Frenchie remain completely uncompromised by romantic attachments-- and I suppose a "queer studies" resding would insist that they must be warm for one another's forms, though there's nothing in the US cut to support that theory. They're just two domineering women who, as Frenchie says following their big battle, would have fought for the hell of it even without the conflict over hidden treasure. The original director was one Guy Casaril, who apparently (according to IMDB) also contributed to the script, but he was replaced by Christian-Jaque. Like other French comedies, the humor tends to be droll rather than laugh-out-loud funny. This is seen in the closing shot of the Kings and the Sarrazins riding on the outlaw trail together, with the former group all clad in black and the latter all in white-- a clear shot at the stereotype of the white-clad good guy and the "black hat" villain. A few bits of slapstick happen for no reason: after the villain shows up to claim the ranch, where an oil gusher has spouted, he exults in the shower, which then explodes for no reason but to kill off the bad guy. Bardot and Cardinale play off one another well, despite rumors of contumely on the set, and just before the closing scene. Jeffords gives up marshaling, because the West's no longer a place for a man. (And he didn't even experience 21st-century feminism, which doesn't even offer hot babes.)

               

SWORDSMAN III: THE EAST IS RED (1993)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I assume that if the subtitle "east is red" is accurate with respect to the Chinese original, there's some pun involved on the name of the villain, Invincible Dawn, because he/she unleashes so much bloody carnage.

The third and last of the SWORDSMAN films dispenses with the starring characters of Ling and Kiddo from the first two films. In SWORDSMAN, both of them were young practitioners of a particular kung-fu school and they became involved in the battles of other schools to obtain a world-conquering manual of martial arts. I criticized that film for not really establishing the ethos of the main characters, but SWORDSMAN II did much better, in that Ling and Kiddo attempt to flee the fractious kung-fu world and appear to succeed by film's end. Taking their place here is a new viewpoint character, a court official named Ku (Yu Rongguang of IRON MONKEY), but he's not the central figure. That honor goes to the aforementioned male-turned-female kung-fu master Invincible Dawn (Brigitte Lin, returning to reprise her role from the second film). 

As EAST begins, it's been some years since Dawn appeared to perish at the end of SWORDSMAN II. The various martial clans lack a strong leader, and perhaps this lack encourages another attack of Japanese forces on the Ming rulership. It's possible that the Ming court seeks an alliance with Spain, for when we first see Ku, he's escorting a contingent of Spanish sailors to the last known location of a sunken Spanish ship from the second movie. (It was said to be Dutch in that movie's subtitles, but whatever.) Ku guides the Spaniards to the area where the ship was lost, which (in this film at least) is also the location where Dawn appeared to perish. 

For some reason Ku also guides the foreigners to the reputed gravesite of Dawn, where they all encounter a mysterious old man. At this point, the Spanish leader reveals that he wants to plunder the grave and steal the martial-arts manual, which he assumes was buried with the evil kung-fu master. I don't know how a bunch of Europeans with no kung-fu training could possibly have harnessed the book's powers, but anyway Ku takes exception to profaning the grave of a deceased master. However, Ku finds a new ally in the old man, who turns out to be Dawn in disguise, and who kills all the Spaniards.

Ku seems thrilled to see Dawn alive again, though he's not thrilled at his penchant for wholesale murder. Ku has some harebrained of enlisting Dawn to straighten out the chaos of the kung-fu world, for almost the first words out of his mouth is the news that a lot of martial masters are assuming the identity of Invincible Dawn in order to gain prominence. Indeed, we later find out that one of Dawn's courtiers, name of Xue (Joey Wong), has taken on Dawn's mantle.

After that setup, the rest of the film devolves into just one magical battle after another, with Dawn vanquishing nearly everyone with her special wuxia skills. Ku is more or less the guy who uncorks the genie but can't control it, but he doesn't seem to be conscious of his mistake, possibly because he's such a flat character. Ku also gets into some fights with the only slightly less powerful Xue, and in the background there's some indication that the Spaniards and Japanese have become allies against China. But from that point on, the filmmakers' only desire is to overawe the audience with a few dozen wuxia wonders. In the end Dawn regrets all of his misdeeds and retires from the kung-fu world-- which might disappoint some fans who felt some more exacting punishment was due.

While EAST is more interesting than the first movie by virtue of showing the near-impossibility of reining in such superhuman fighters, it's still not that impressive even in comparison to the better "chopwackies" of the 1970s and 1980s.

   
            

     

FILIBUS (1915)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

FILIBUS is billed as the first film in history with a "female supervillain." Given that the titular villainess appears about four years after the first FANTOMAS book, and she has three separate identities, it's likely that someone involved in this Italian production sought to emulate the success of the French supercriminal. The movie, running about 80 minutes, seems not to have been a financial success, but since it's true that there weren't a ton of starring female villains in the early 20th century, even in other media, FILIBUS has attracted some attention in feminist circles.

At the movie's opening, Filibus is lauded as an elusive "sky pirate," who preys on her victims with an airship and a small crew of henchmen, who alone know that Filibus is both a woman and a prominent social figure, name of Baroness Troixmonde (Valeria Creti). If anyone thought that FILIBUS was going to be a rousing Vernian story about airship battles, though, the low budget of the film shows itself in the fact that one barely gets a look at the ship, except for static shots of the crew leaning on the railings. It's not even clear how the damn thing operates, be it by balloon-power or by powered flight.

Filibus sets her cap to swiping a pair of fabulous diamonds, and since she knows that renowned detective Kutt-Hendy is protecting the gems, she launches a plan to frame him for the theft. She assumes the identity of a male count and cozies up to Kutt-Hendy's sister Leonora so that she can monitor the detective's plans. At one point Filibus' henchmen use a sort of metal cab lowered from their airship in order to expose the sleuth to sleep gas. Then they take his handprint with a copying process, so that they can make him look guilty of collusion later.

In addition to being cheap, the film is fairly slow and plodding, even though the two principals are good. Kutt-Henry, after getting framed, worries that he might be schizophrenic. Eventually he works things out and sets a trap for Filibus, and manages to both capture her and learn her identity. However, the wily crook gets free and escapes in her airship. Perhaps the producers hoped that the film would be popular enough to garner a sequel, but it wasn't in the cards.

FILIBUS, though significant for the gender of the villain, is not a combative work; it's just a heist tale starring the heist artist, possibly more like Arsene Lupin than Fantomas. It's also not any sort of monument to Lesbianism or "genderfluidity," any more than Conan Doyle's only Irene Adler story. Modern activists could probably conjure more of these phantoms from multiple readings of TWELFTH NIGHT than they ever could from FILIBUS.           

SWEET, SWEET RACHEL (1971)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

I'm not sure what's so "sweet" about Rachel Stanton (Stefanie Powers). She's certainly as victimized as any of the most persecuted heroines of Gothic tales, and in almost every scene her torment is torqued up to Warp Eleven. But there's nothing especially "sweet" about her. 

Rachel's torments start out with a bravura opening that's better than the rest of the movie. On the second floor of a manor house, a man, Paul Stanton, sits playing some sort of game with a deck of non-standard Tarot cards. He seems to see and hear his wife Rachel coming toward him, calling his name. He rushes to her, no longer seeing his real surroundings, and crashes through a window, falling to his death. The real Rachel arrives in the room moments afterward, aghast at Paul's catastrophe. The phone on Paul's desk rings, Rachel answers it, and a voice recites the images on the five Tarot cards Paul had just dealt himself.

Viewers never learn just what sort of occult beliefs the late Paul Stanton nurtured, but Rachel did not share them. However, the outre circumstances of Paul's death make her desire to know if she just concocted her impressions out of a psychotic episode, or if there's really supernatural hanky-panky going on. Fortunately, Rachel happens to live in or near a city with a functioning psychic research facility. From this source come the story's heroes: former surgeon Dr Darrow (Alex Drier) and his aide Johnson (Chris Robinson), a blind man who has developed psychic senses in compensation for his affliction. 

The pool of suspects is not a deep one, for RACHEL only has three other significant characters: Rachel's aunt Lillian Piper (Louise Latham), her husband Arthur (Pat Hingle), and their daughter Nora (Brenda Scott). Early in the film Lillian claims that she was indeed engaged in some sort of occult game with Paul, and that she was the voice on the other end of the line, though this confession removes none of Rachel's feelings of guilt. The husband Arthur is perhaps a little too invisible in early scenes, while Nora loudly reviles Rachel, claiming that she Nora was Paul's true love. This is fairly weak story-scaffolding, as the script never expounds on how the two cousins interacted before Paul married Rachel.

Further, the psychic assassin is still in play, taking exception to Darrow and Johnson trying to solve the mystery. In two separate scenes, Darrow is made to hallucinate in ways that might have caused the deaths of both investigators. Then about halfway through the flick, Aunt Lillian gets killed. Did Rachel go berserk and take her aunt's life?

I'll say one thing for screenwriter Anthony Lawrence-- who also co-wrote the underrated pilot for the PHOENIX TV show-- he doesn't dole out a lot of clues, but he does play fair by spotlighting a suspicious encounter between Arthur and his daughter Nora, one that carries a sexual vibe. (To be sure, one IMDB review asserts that RACHEL was based on a book, though the IMDB page for the telefilm does not mention this.) Anyway, Darrow devises a way to trap the psychic schemers-- one that gives Johnson his first real role in the story-- and the duo soon learn that Nora, not the late Lillian, is the one with real mental talents. The motive, supplied by Nasty Arthur, has something to do with the uncle inheriting Rachel's fortune if she gets put away, though technically no one in the movie raises the possibility of committing the heiress. There's a struggle between Nora and the father who cajoled her into killing Nora's true love, and Nora "accidentally" kills her oppressor. Rachel's ghosts, so to speak, are laid to rest, while Darrow and Johnson stand ready to bust more ghosts in the TV show that followed this unofficial pilot--

--Except that when that show debuted under the new title THE SIXTH SENSE, Dreier and Robinson were out and the more telegenic Gary Collins became the sole investigator for SENSE's two seasons, on whose episodes Lawrence enjoyed a "created by" credit. I have not watched any full SENSE episodes since the show's initial run, and re-screening might uncover some gems. However, my dominant memory was that the episodes were dull and lacked any of the visual verve that director Sutton Roley brought to RACHEL. Roley and Lawrence were both essentially journeymen talents in the world of episodic TV, and I didn't see too much of distinction in either man's repertoire, except for the previously mentioned PHOENIX credit for Lawrence.  RACHEL by itself is a cut or two above the average Gothic-thriller telefilm from this period, but nothing more.           

THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Given that great title, and QUEEN's ability to spotlight the charms (albeit never naked ones) of Barbara Bouchet, I wanted this film to reach the heights of the classic giallos. But the second and last giallo-movie of director Emilio Miraglia doesn't have anything underlying all the pretty pictures-- and to understand why, I have to do my usual thing of talking about the ending. 

Part of QUEEN's problem lies in the "family curse" with which the story begins, in that said curse never seems like anything but a laundry list of plot-points. We see Bouchet's character Kitty as a child, quarreling with her similarly aged sister Evelyn. They take their quarrel to their rich grandfather, who just happens to have a grotesque painting on the wall of his study. This painting depicts two sisters from some medieval portion of the family tree, with one, the Black Queen, stabbing her nasty sister The Red Queen to death. Grandpa not only keeps this testament to sibling hatred out in the open, he tells the two girls an involved story about how the Red Queen came back to life, killed six innocents, and then murdered her sister as well. Also, the Red Queen supposedly repeats this curse in subsequent generations. Wow, it's a medieval legend that sounds just like the plot of a giallo!

Fast forward to the siblings' teen years: they quarrel again, fight by the side of a river, and when Kitty knocks Evelyn into the water, she's swept away and never seen again. To spare Kitty, her cousin Franziska (Marina Malfatti) and her husband concoct a story for the public: that Evelyn simply emigrated to the US. Kitty feels very guilty but gets on with her life, working for a fashion house that allows the writers to bring in many more hot women, not least Sybil Danning (who does have a really cool nude scene). Then Kitty's grandpa dies, and the question of inheritance comes up. And it's only then that a red-cloaked female killer starts randomly attacking the friends of Kitty and of her boyfriend Martin.

Once the motive of inheritance comes up, though, no one's going to believe that Evelyn is back, fulfilling the Red Queen curse by knocking off random innocents while building up to the main target. Of course's it's a hoax designed to put the whole inheritance in the hands of Franziska and her husband. The hoariness of the plot would be excusable if the characters had been interesting within the bounds of a hyperbolic murder mystery. But despite all the potential psychological conflicts that can arise from sibling rivalry, QUEEN comes off as just a bunch of random characters going through the motions. And though the violence quotient is high, the menace of The Red Queen doesn't come close to the visual impact of the most memorable giallo grotesques.   

     

FANTOMAS (1932)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* 

This French movie is apparently the first sound outing for the mysterious criminal Fantomas. It starred a French cast and was directed by a Hungarian, Pal Fajos, who'd made a couple of Hollywood films prior to working on this project. I don't know what if any of his non-American oeuvre might be metaphenomenal in nature but, as other reviewers have said, the first half-hour of FANTOMAS feels like a better-photographed version of one of the silent "old dark house" movies of the period. 

I reviewed the first FANTOMAS novel in 2018 and liked it well enough. However, I didn't make that many notes about the plot of the novel, so I guess the parts of the novel involving the mysterious villain's crimes didn't do much for me. Though I'm not a Fantomas fan, I give the character props as an important transitional figure within the superhero idiom. Bur since I remember little about the crimes of the novel, I can't say if the 1932 movie is adapting them accurately. All I can say is that Fajos works well with the French actors, particularly in the opening scenes, making them seem reasonably alive despite their being bare plot-functions. The movie does get across the inscrutable nature of this perhaps-uncatchable fiend, and unlike the book, there's a scene in which the villain dons an all-black catsuit with a black cowl, in which garb he strangles a woman to death. Later he wears another "costume" of sorts, attending a party in a tuxedo but donning a domino mask when he attacks a potential witness. I assume that actor Jean Galland portrays the murderous thief in all his disguised personas.

One omission I did note was that the character of Charles (rechristened "Fandor" in the novel) is downgraded to just the assistant to Juve, the inspector in charge of pursuing the elusive criminal. So here Charles has no real backstory, but he does-- in contrast to the novel-- get to face off with the disguised Fantomas in a climactic brawl. In contrast to the practice of later sound serials, the two combatants more time whaling on one another with lamps and chairs than with bare fists. But before the viewer gets there, one has to forge through a lot of dull mystery scenes.