The hilariously inept Commissioner Juve may never be able to foil Fantomas the villain, but he handily steals Fantomas the series away from him and everyone else. Though a defining presence in the series with his happenin’ turtlenecks and sculpted coif, Jean Marais’s Fandor doesn’t make much of an impression. Her role basically requires her to sometimes be glamorous, look concerned, and be Fandor’s attractive sounding board. Also along for all three films is French starlet Myléne Demongeot as Hélène, though she’s given far less to do. These are his increasingly bumbling primary protagonists, French Police Commissioner Juve (Louis de Funés) and the big-boned intrepid-to-a-fault journalist Fandor (Jean Marais, conspicuously doing double time as Fantômas himself). Expressionless and lizard-like, trilogy director André Hunebelle (juggling this with the straighter-faced OSS-117 spy adventure series) back-burners Fantômas in terms of screen time, focusing instead on two others. In this very mid-1960s permutation, the unstoppable baddie that French people love to hate is reimagined as a blue-masked menace with endless resources and a flair for mod Bond-villain lairs. In every case, though, Fantômas himself remains the slippery-smart crooked crook of all time, the villain so effective that his trademark is the fact that almost every story ends with him escaping to stealthily plunder another day. Created in 1911 by created by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, he’s had an epic run across media platforms and even genres. The French fiend with the blue head is now loose on Blu-ray! And who is responsible for his return? None other than Kino Lorber Studio Classics, having released the prototypical super villain three times over, and all at once.Ī long running pulp villain, Fantomâs had been prolific for decades throughout books and films.

Fantomas 1911