Fantomas
Starring: Rene Navarre, Edmund Breon,
Georges Melchior
Director: Louis Feuillade
The film: Lauded by critic David Thomson in
his long-running New Biographical Dictionary of Film as 'the first great movie experience', the Fantomas films of 1913 and 1914 were based on selections from a series of 32 French pulp- fiction, novel-length magazines published about the same time.
There were five films in all - In the Shadow of the Guillotine, Juve versus Fantomas, The Murderous Corpse, Fantomas versus Fantomas and The False Magistrate - and they all appear on this two-disc DVD set from Artificial Eye. Ranging in duration from 50 to 90 minutes, they were filmed mostly in Paris, often on the street and sometimes onboard trams and trains, and these location scenes bring a high degree of realism and drama that's often lacking in the more traditional drawing-room sets of other films of the period.