Jacqueline (Édith Scob) is abducted in the dead of night by Morales (Théo Sarapo), lover of the evil Diana Monti.
costumed avenger with a disguised alias, both of whom have been created solely to deal with a single villain (even if more eventually present themselves). By stripping away all Judex’s background, even the brother, Franju distills the enigmatic essence of the character. Despite Pollock’s skill as a prestidigitator, Franju keeps the overt magic to a minimum, a poetic decision in itself. Morales is revealed to be Kerjean’s lost son and has to recapture his own villainy by tracking down Favraux. (Judex’s main adversaries are sub- ject to repeated transformation, as figures are in dreams.) Diana’s final lair is at the boundary of a small deserted town, in a building at the edge of a wasteland like an omen of the imminent war. When Cocantin finds the façade impossible to climb, his dream solution shows up—Daisy (Sylva Koscina) and her circus. Scarcely has she scaled the house when Judex’s party follows, in an ascent as authentic as any in Feuillade. (In several ways, the finale of Chabrol’s NADA might be a cynical yet poignant reminiscence of such scenes.) Diana sends Favraux to bed and tells Morales “He’s lucky he can sleep”—a yearning for dream? The final struggle between Diana and Daisy on
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the roof is accompanied by electronic music— like the wasteland, a portent of things to come. Diana dangles against a nocturnal industrial landscape reduced to pure abstraction, and while her death is lamented by a circus trumpeter and a small boy’s tear, these two images are inter- rupted by a shot of a man asleep. She dies star- ing, as if confronted by reality at last. We hardly need the title after the brief coda to remind us that the intentions of the film are elegiac. In Feuillade’s version, Judex dreams (signified by the only dissolves in the film) of Jacqueline and her child. Perhaps Franju’s film is his continu- ing dream—his attempt to recapture that age of innocence when car chases progressed at little more than walking pace and the pursuer was visible in the mirror.
The Eureka set also contains Franju’s Nuits
Rouges (“Red Nights,” US: SHADOWMAN, 1977) on a second disc. The 1.66:1 anamorphic trans- fer of Judex is fine but is missing some minor incidental footage—a total of seven trims amount- ing to roughly two minutes, cut from general the- atrical release prints yet included in Sinister Cinema’s 16mm sourced copy.
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