1949 - LES SANG DES BETES or BLOOD OF THE BEASTS, a short documentary about a slaughterhouse

Franju's documentary about a couple of slaughterhouses in the suburbs of Paris is oddly intense and poetic.  Franju doesn't look away from the animal killings or the processing of the carcass by the workers in these factories.  The film acknowledges that if the human race wants to eat meat this is the manner in which we will get it, violent, gruesome and very messy.

Sheep are tipped over and placed on a table while workers walk along and slit their throats open one at a time.  The reflexive nerves of their bodies shake while the workers hold these creatures down to finish the job.  Calves get their heads cut off so as not to contaminate the meat with blood for veal. Horses at a rendering plant are stunned to death prior to be skinned and eviscerated.  I might have to rethink this meat eating thing.

I suppose Blood of the Beast could be making some allusions to The Holocaust or the World Wars with their massive destruction of human life, but what I came away with was the almost technical precision that the human race has achieved in killing any living creature.

20 minutes

1963 - JUDEX, strange, creepy, poetic, film remake from Franju.

Mysterious avenger Judex, attempts to bring a corrupt banker to justice and must match wits with master criminal Diane Monti and her gang in this remake of a 12 part serial originally filmed by Louis Feuillade in 1916.

Georges Franju and Feuillade's grandson Jacques Champreux adapted the original film and really caught the feeling for the old serial.  As someone who has tried to watch the original Feuillade serial and only made it to three chapters it's a slowly paced antique,  I prefer this version.

The film has a very interesting cast. Franju decided on casting a magician, Channing Pollock as Judex, Pollock was once labeled "the handsomest man alive".  He certainly makes a good looking hero and wears a cape very well.  The heroine is Edith Scob who was the woman without a face in Eyes Without A Face.  The actor Francine Berge is Judex's nemesis Diane Monti and does a good job of walking the line of campy villainy, one misstep in her performance and she could have ended up as a Batman villain.

Many filmmakers have attempted to revive old film genres.  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have made a career out of it.  Watching films like the original Star Wars and the Indiana Jones series can be  enjoyable but the filmmakers still adopt a kind of winking tone in their presentation letting the audience know that these old film genre cliches are not to be taken very seriously.

The success of Judex lies in the ability of Franju to take the old serial seriously and add an ability to transcend the genre corn and cliches into something approaching in this case a fairy tale like atmosphere in the storytelling.

The film has good photography and many strange scenes such as the party with the guests wearing weird bird costumes and an oddball climax involving a fight between Diane Monti and a circus performer.

103 minutes written by Jacques Champreux and Francis Lacassin.

1960 - EYES WITHOUT A FACE, classic French horror film is still pretty intense.

A plastic surgeon with a seriously disfigured daughter, experiments on beautiful young women by removing their faces and attempting to graft them onto his daughter's face. 

Expecting the worst with that subject matter, I was surprised that this turned out to be the horror classic everyone for years has claimed it to be.  All the archetypes are here, the mad scientist, the mad scientist's assistant, the beautiful women being experimented on.  Eyes Without a Face is really an old 1930's Universal horror film updated for the 1960's and given a very classy treatment by the director Georges Franju. 

Franju really walked the line between gruesome and tragic with his production team.  On the writing credits were Boileau-Narcejacv the writers than had worked with Clouzot on Les Diaboliques and had written the original story for Hitchock's Vertigo.  The cinematography was by Eugen Schüfftan who had worked on Lang's Metropolis.  Franju had some major talent backing him up when he made this film.  

Franju directs

Probably as influential as everyone says it is, this is an extremely well done film considering the subject matter.


88 minutes

1974 - NUITS ROUGE or Shadowman

Georges Franju took another shot at a far fetched master criminal thriller after he had filmed Judex. This film was considered a failure when it came out in 1974 the critics and the general public thought the whole thing was just to ridiculous. Watching the film this week it's clear that while Franju played it fairly straight, he did load the film up with a lot of subtle tongue in cheek humor.

Nuits Rouge is definitely a tribute to Fritz Lang and the Mabuse films. Franju even cast Gert Frobe who played the clueless German police inspector in The 1000 eyes of Dr. Mabuse to play the clueless French police inspector in Nuits Rouge.

Spielberg and Lucas with the Indiana Jones films and the producers of the James Bond films could take the old movie genres and rework them to show how clever they are, but it takes a lot of guts to play a larger then life crime thriller story fairly straight.

An interesting attempt to redo an old movie serial without the Mr. Smarty Pants humor.

 105 minutes.