Period Pop

Judex adds a subtle, sophisticated and endearing chapter to the swollen literature of cinematic pop art. In homage to French Movie Pioneer Louis Feuillade, Director Georges Franju tenderly resurrects Judex, a formidable mass hero whose dime-novel adventures burgeoned on the silent screens of France between 1916 and 1918, decades before Superman got off the ground as a force for good. Happily, Franju never yields to the temptation of playing a soggy old classic for easy laughs as a smart-alecky spoof. Instead he celebrates it with sound, as a nostalgic song of innocence, an ode to an era when all the battles that Virtue waged against Vice were won without tricky compromise.

Wearing a black cloak and several delicious disguises, Channing Pollock portrays Judex with the stubborn, single-minded intensity of a reformed Dracula. The plot that roils around him is mostly post-Victorian gimcrackery, carried out in a pure period style that offers everything from mad little chases in vintage jalopies to the acrobatics of human flies, from reunions of long-lost sons and ruined fathers to the machinations of a rascally banker whose ill-gotten capital gains keep Judex awake nights. So does the banker's daughter (Edith Scob), a lovely wisp of a heroine. All crumpled organdy and helplessness yet clearly indestructible, she is drugged, chloroformed, kidnaped, nearly impaled on a hatpin, and at one point must be pulled out of the river after a prolonged dunking that would have drowned a plainer girl. Most of her woes are devised by a supple archvillainess (Francine Berge) who revels in evil for its own sake, keeps slipping out of her period gowns to dart away in tights, only to reappear moments later as an apache dancer or murderous nun.

Judex has too much low-key charm and seriousness to be wildly funny, but Director Franju seems content to woo a minority taste. He affectionately thumbs through an album of thrills remembered from boyhood, shrewdly heightening the original and sometimes shading in his own touches of nightmarish reality--most strikingly at an eerie masked ball where all the guests are feathered out as birds, again in a cell where a rotter confronts his festering conscience in a mirror that swivels to catch his every move. The spare, clever background music by Composer Maurice Jarre is a pleasurable bonus in a movie that does not just dwell on the past but feelingly rediscovers it.

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