The False Magistrate (1914)

The False Magistrate (1914), directed by Louis Feuillade, 3 stars

 “The False Magistrate” is the fifth and final film in Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas series, but as [possible spoiler] the criminal mastermind makes his by now anticipated escape at the end, one may well wonder whether or not the filmmaker really intended this to be the elusive villain’s last screen appearance.

The film begins with a prologue during which a financial transaction goes terribly wrong.  The Marquis de Tergall’s current financial difficulties necessitate that he sell his wife’s jewelry.  The Marquis expects a cash transaction, but the buyer brings a check instead.  The buyer agrees to be locked inside a hotel room with the jewels while the Marquis leaves to cash the check.  When the Marquis returns, the buyer opens the bureau where the jewels should be, and, voila, they’re gone.  When the police arrive, they move the bureau and discover a hole in the wall leading to the adjoining room.

Meanwhile, Fantômas is serving a life sentence in a Belgian prison (which looks remarkably like the French prison where he and others did time in earlier films).  His arch rival, Inspector Juve, is not happy about this.  Not only is he chagrined by the fact that the Belgian police have done between films what he hasn’t been able to accomplish in the preceding four, he wants Fantômas executed, not merely imprisoned.  To address both his humiliation and his sense of justice, Juve devises an unusual plan to help Fantômas escape.  The plan works, but once set free, Fantômas quickly eludes the French police who are tailing him.  Soon after, he has a chance encounter with a man in a boxcar.  Fantômas kills him, rummages through his wallet, and learns that the man is a magistrate.  More mayhem and dastardly deeds follow as the master of disguise assumes the identity of the dead man (hence, the film’s title), with no one, including those who knew the man, any the wiser.

I include more narrative elements here than I typically do to emphasize once again the motifs that recur throughout Fantômas series.  The plots defy logic and stretch probability to the limit.  Who could have predicted that the buyer of the Marquis’ jewels would bring a check or store the jewels in the bureau, much less at the exact spot the hole had already been punched through?  What are the odds that Fantômas would encounter a magistrate in a boxcar and, stealing his identity, be able to pass for him even among those who knew the man?  In the world of Fantômas, these things just happen; the whys and wherefores are irrelevant.

Unlike the other films, this is the only one in the series that focuses almost exclusively on Fantômas.  I don't think this works very well.  Fantômas needs a nemesis.  Without Juve or Fandor or someone in hot pursuit, there is no sense of danger; no wondering whether what Fantômas has planned will come to pass.  With no one to pit his wits against, his actions are almost effortless.  No one challenges him.  Although he is quite capable of killing, most of what Fantômas is able to achieve occurs merely by the force of his personality.  Seasoned criminals bear their souls to him.  Aristocratic women tremble in his presence.

The most noteworthy aspect of this film is its bell-tower sequence, which struck me as so remarkable that I feel compelled to describe it shot by shot.  For a few minutes, it actually feels as if we’re watching footage produced by a completely different filmmaker for a completely different film.  The jewels stolen in the film’s prologue are hidden in a bell, a good 20 feet above the highest floor in a church steeple.  The platform extends only to about a third of the horizontal space.  Below the bell, there is no flooring. While Fantômas tilts the bell and holds it at an angle, his accomplice lifts a long ladder precariously onto a small crate.  The top of the ladder extends into the inner body of the bell.  At first, the two men appear in a medium long shot working together with rope and ladder.  Next, we see the full view in an extreme longshot.  The two sides of the screen are black, and in the middle third of the frame, the two men now appear almost as miniature figures at the bottom left.  High above them, we can now see the bell, which is canted toward them with the top of the ladder being maneuvered carefully until it rests within the inner lip of the bell.

The camera remains there as Fantômas’ accomplice begins his climb.  It then cuts back to a long shot of the man climbing.  As he ascends, the camera ascends with him on an unseen elevator, rising until the man’s upper body disappears into the bell.  This is truly a marvelous shot, and it underscores the precariousness inherent in the climb. The camera then cuts back to the framed extreme long shot showing a very small Fantômas holding the rope and ladder at the lower left corner of the frame and his accomplice at the top of the frame standing on the ladder with only his lower body visible.  This stunt is for real.  The camera cuts once more to a long shot of the man in the bell, this time extracting the jewel case and dropping it on the platform.  

In the final shot, once again from an extreme distance, Fantômas picks up the jewel case and lets the ladder fall, leaving the man’s legs dangling from the bell and the man (we imagine) holding on for dear life to the clapper.  (A little later, we actually see him doing this in a medium, extreme low-angle shot in which he is very plainly wearing a safety harness.)  This is the best directed, best edited, and most exciting sequence in the entire series.


Unfortunately, several sequences in "The False Magistrate" are lost—at least at present.  The version I saw of the film is from “Fantômas, The Complete Saga,” a three-DVD set distributed by Kino, which does a reasonable job of making up for the gaps by using newly inserted intertitles to summarize the missing footage.


Now that I’ve seen all of the Fantômas films in the series, I’m actually a bit sad that I have no more to look forward to.  I guess I liked them better than I thought.  The good news is that there are two commentary tracks by David Kalat on the DVD set that I haven’t listened to yet.  I can still look forward to them.  Also, I just stumbled across the Fantômas Lives site as well as David Bordwell’s appreciation of the series.  And, of course, there are still 30 plus  Fantômas novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain to read.