The Murderous Corpse (1913)

The Murderous Corpse (aka The Dead Man Who Killed), directed by Louis Feuillade (1913), 3 stars

This is the third film in the Fantômas series, and though I liked it, I also found it disjoint and a bit confusing. I attribute my difficulty in following some parts of the plot to the print:  It was missing the requisite opening montage featuring the characters in their various disguises. Without this foreshadowing of information, which was provided in both previous series entries (and presumably all of them—at least at one time), it was hard at times to figure out who was who and, as a result, what was what.

Like its predecessors, this film is divided into fairly distinct episodes, this time with Juve and Fandor acting separately to outwit Fantômas as his crime spree continues to grow otherwise unabated.  Miraculously, they have both managed to escape the explosion that ended the previous film, “Juve vs. Fantômas” (1913), though that is not immediate clear.  Fandor, bandaged and bedridden, his distraught as he reads that his colleague’s body was not recovered from the wreckage.  Juve presumed dead, but if the disguise montage had been included, I would have known immediately that this was not so.  He appears in the very next shot, but in disguise that makes him unrecognizable.  Impersonating a simple-minded tramp named, Cranajour, Juve has begun infiltrating the world of Fantômas by hiring himself on to a fence for stolen goods.  Meanwhile, Fantômas drugs painter Jacques Dollon in his study, and when the artist awakes, he finds a baroness dead in a nearby chair.  Unfortunately, things are fated to get even worse for Dollon.  After being locked up for the murder of the Baroness, he is strangled by a guard in his holding cell, vanishes, and then reemerges as the death-dealing character from whom the film derives its name.

A couple of things of minor note:  Before being led to his doom, Dollon is fingerprinted by the police.  I’m guessing that this was a process unfamiliar to the general public in 1913, because the camera painstakingly records each and every finger on both hands, and this takes quite a bit of time.  But Dollon’s fingerprints do figure prominently later in the film, so it may be that the Director also took his time because wanted to indelibly imprint this memory in the mind of the viewer in advance of the upcoming scenes.

Another interesting moment occurs when Cranajour (alias Juve) spies a fully recovered Fandor scaling a nearby rooftop.  What follows is an early use of the subjective camera. Cranajour grabs a pair of binoculars and points them in Fandor's direction.  At that point, the camera cuts back and forth between shots of Fandor in the distance, framed by a black, binocular-shaped mask, and Cranjour peering at him through the binoculars.  The editing is clearly meant to convey to the audience that we are, for a short time, observing Fandor through Cranajour’s eyes.  This type of cross-cutting is a common technique today, but it was not in 1913.  Nearly all early films were comprised of a series of static shots with the actors moving in front (and instead) of the camera--as in the rest of this film.

Finally, one last item I found mildly amusing: Poor Princess Danidoff, who falls victim to Fantômas within the opening minutes of the first film, is robbed of her jewelry yet again here.  Unlike lightening, this criminal is clearly capable of striking twice.