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Love James Bond? Meet France's answer to 007 that you've probably never heard of but have to watch
The 1960s Fantômas series has everything: gadgets, stunts and a great sense of camp.
Gaumont
- Calum Baker
Published: Saturday, 20 June 2026 at 9:30 am
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The name’s Fantômas. Just… Fantômas. You may not have heard of these films, but of all the colourful capers to be made in the wake of the 1960s James Bond phenomenon, the French Fantômas trilogy (1964-67) stands as one of the most distinctive, and all on its own terms. If you like Bond — especially the series’ campier side — these manic Euro-romps will prove a delight: full of nonsensical plots, fun gizmos and exquisite stunts, as well as one of cinema’s most entertaining supervillains.
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Often considered a parody of the early 007 entries, the knockabout Fantômas flicks have a great deal more going on than that might imply. Based on a series of novels from the 1910s, these films are all about the bizarre and murderous exploits of the titular baddie. There’s no suave, crime-fighting hero as such; just a mischievous master of disguise who bests and humiliates his pursuers at every turn. At times, the impassive but wry Fantômas (“I kill people, but always with a smile”) gives off vibes not a million miles away from the fantastical campery of early Bond villains Dr No, Auric Goldfinger and From Russia with Love’s Rosa Klebb. And previous film adaptations of the books had even introduced a few pre-Bondian elements: secret lairs, fantastical science experiments and gangs of anonymous henchmen.
However, two key differences mark our guy and his oddball villainy from the 007 fan favourites: firstly, Fantômas always gets away, escaping the forces of order to wreak yet more havoc; secondly, and hilariously, he wears an ultra-smooth turquoise mask that makes him look as if Yul Brynner joined the Blue Man Group.
A blue-masked Jean Marais stars in Fantomas Gaumont
Sixty years on, these films feel quainter than ever; yet more compelling. The first entry, 1964’s Fantômas, is a gorgeous exercise in simple farce as the villain frames his two nemeses, using near-perfect masks of their faces to do so (star Jean Marais gets to enjoy wearing a series of elaborate make-up effects throughout the three films). There’s a great fistfight, a cracking extended car (then train, then boat) chase to close the story, and plenty of other fun business in between. The sequels offer roughly the same pleasures. Directed by adventure specialist André Hunebelle, they’re all very of their time and place, offering a blend of slick Euro-crime tropes, silly gags and, yes, cheerful attempts to cash in on a certain spy trend. And lurking within this superficial trendiness is a strangeness, as well as a sense of satire, that together give the trilogy its own enduring flavour.
The template of the 60s series sticks to the pattern that was established in 1911 by the character’s creators, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. In the films, as in the books, the villain’s enemies are newspaper reporter Jérôme Fandor (also played by Marais), his girlfriend Hélène (Mylène Demongeot) and the dogged Inspector Juve, played with manic energy by comedy star Louis de Funès. Certain finer points have been lost — Hélène, for instance, was originally Fantômas’s vengeful daughter rather than a mere love interest — but the smoother dynamic of these adaptations has real charm. The main change is a simple one: the once stolid, heroic Juve has been made bumbling to the point of total ineptitude. The films might have been influenced by the Bond craze, but the zany result is just as similar to the Pink Panther series.
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Our first glimpse of the “genius of crime” comes, naturally, via a clever disguise. Fantômas (1964) opens as an old man (with a suspiciously latex-y face) visits the Van Cleef & Arpels Boutique on Paris’s Place Vendôme — a deliberate choice by the film-makers, to situate the movie right in the heart of modern France, which was then in the midst of its postwar economic boom. The old man identifies himself as an English lord, purchases some expensive jewellery on his credit account, and leaves with the goods; then, the salesman glances at the business card he’s just been handed, only to see a word magically appearing: Fantômas! The store’s been swindled!
Yep, all of Paris is being terrorised by this phantom; but no evidence has been uncovered to definitively prove his existence. Fantômas spends the first act of the film framing Fandor for his crimes; then doing the same to Juve; eventually our heroes are lured away by the villain and, with Hélène in tow, end up chasing him across France and into the sea, where Fantômas escapes in a little submarine.
Things get still more farcical (and fantastical) in the 1965 sequel, Fantômas se déchaîne, or Fantômas Unleashed. Filmed in the wake of Goldfinger’s smash success, this takes another step towards Bond-lite sci-fi as the supervillain kidnaps leading scientists in the hope of developing a mind-control device and taking over the world. This time, he boasts a secret lair inside a volcano (two years before Blofeld did the same thing in You Only Live Twice!) and even a flying car. By the end of third film Fantômas v Scotland Yard (1967), which takes a more gothic tack and relocates the action to a Scottish castle — the screenwriters having presumably misunderstood what Scotland Yard refers to — Fantômas is extorting the world’s richest men before planning to flee Earth altogether. One question remains: what would he then do with all that money?... But of course, it doesn’t matter; spectacular nonsense is the order of the day around here.
Jean Marais (centre) and Louis de Funès as the heroes of the Fantomas trilogy Gaumont
Grand extortion, abduction and world domination: all very Blofeld. But though this is an irreverent take on the traditionally more serious Fantômas legend, the whackier ingredients had been there since the start. The 32 original Fantômas novels, published from 1911–13, had come out of France’s turn-of-the-century boom in serial mystery and adventure fiction. The often black-clad title character was dubbed the “master of terror” and he lived up to that nickname, with a series of outlandish and horrifying assaults, murders, kidnappings and identity thefts, not to mention some wild moments of large-scale destruction such as derailing the Orient Express and unleashing the bubonic plague upon a cruise ship. Moreover, his flair for disguise meant he could be anywhere, or anyone, at any time; he could be of any class and take any job; sometimes, he appears to have actually become one of his targets, inhabiting their life for some indeterminate amount of time. Plot holes were a symptom of Allain and Souvestre’s speedy writing methods; they were also half the fun.
At the end of each story, Fantômas would give his nemesis, Juve, the slip and live to fight another day. It was his particular combination of elusiveness and creative cruelty that stood him out from similar pulp fiction thieves and villains (such as Arsène Lupin) and that made him such a tantalising rejoinder to serialised heroes like Joseph Rouletabille, Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes. It was a pleasure to root for this inventive and utterly fluid villain who spread anarchy and chaos wherever he weaselled himself. Readers across western Europe were hooked, while a whole generation of avant-garde artists applauded Fantômas as an icon of surrealist subversion.
A typically surreal scenario from the influential Fantomas serial (1913) Gaumont
If the book series was popular and influential, its first film adaptation was something else entirely. Writer/director Louis Feuillade, then best known for his light comedies, was persuaded by his boss Léon Gaumont to start adapting these novels into what would become a five-part silent movie serial, released from 1913 to 1914. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this basically birthed the crime film genre. Feuillade’s hit films, which came at a time when cinema was shifting from short-movie bills to feature-length presentations, visualised the lurid and unsettling world of the Fantômas novels with a deadpan acuity that only made the dreamlike madness of the scenarios more potent. A bleeding wall; a deadly python; creepy nooks and crannies, and a man swinging manically from a church bell as he is squished by the ringing clapper — Feuillade’s beautiful imagery, so shady and poised, influenced artists and film-makers alike, with German directors taking his cue for their own work in the 1920s, in turn influencing the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and, consequently, so much of what we still recognise in crime, thriller, horror and indeed spy film-making.
What’s remarkable, then, about the relationship between 60s “Bond-itis” and the contemporary Fantômas revival is that Fantômas never needed 007 in the first place. Quite the contrary: Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale (published 1953), was pipped to the post by a French equivalent, the debonair international spy OSS 117, who was introduced by author Jean Bruce in 1949. The latter’s first film appearance was in 1956; years before cinema audiences were treated to Sean Connery uttering the immortal introduction, “the name’s Bond. James Bond.” OSS, moreover, appeared in a pair of films directed by André Hunebelle and co-written by Pierre Foucaud, before the two then started work on — you guessed it — the Fantômas series.
Yet, it was still the box-office success and cultural impact of Dr No that pushed Hunebelle, Foucaud and their co-writer, Jean Halain, into the pop-art approach that marks their striking, supervillain-style take on the character. Fantômas had been adapted several times since the days of Feuillade: as an American serial in 1920, then separate French productions in 1932 and 1946, the latter followed by a sort-of sequel in 1949. All of these were, the occasional gag aside, straitlaced mystery tales. After a postwar revival of the Feuillade serial (it was literally rescued from the bin), directors Georges Franju and Claude Chabrol, as well as one-time surrealist René Clair, went sniffing around the Fantômas property; but it was Hunebelle’s more irreverent pitch that would win him the assignment from Gaumont studios. His idea was simple: replace the staid old bumps in the night and black-and-white terror with something fresh, fun and modern that could truly compete at the box office; that could reflect the prosperity of France and its studio system (he even approached Connery to star, before turning to Marais). To the delight of the film-makers, the studio and de Funès — who would become, partly off the back of Fantômas, one of France’s all-time biggest movie stars — it worked a treat.
Inspector Juve (Louis de Funès) in 1965's Fantomas Unleashed Gaumont
The comic had been developing his gurning style for about 20 years on stage and screen, but the 1964 releases of Fantômas and Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez (which also kicked off a popular series) made him a superstar, at least in his own country. His Juve is smug and officious, yet equally apt to miss the point entirely and work himself into a manic rage. It’s the masterstroke that ties the films together; for Fantômas’s mischief only works if he has a suitable foil. The ultra-modern, Bond-style visuals of the movies were one thing; but it’s these, combined with de Funès’s crazed presence as the bumbling, dyspeptic Juve, and the opportunity for farce that he brings, that defines the whole dynamic of the trilogy.
After his breakout, de Funès was bumped up to co-lead for the second film, and his increased presence makes it the best — or at least the most furiously funny — of the three. Fantômas Unleashed opens with Juve demonstrating to his force that the only way to defeat the villain is with an increased use of gizmos. A false arm and a deadly cigar provide de Funès with ample ridiculous showcases throughout the film, each more satisfying than the last.
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It was the tussle over screen time and paycheques that eventually killed the series, as well as the outrage of surviving creator Marcel Allain, who won an intellectual property case over the way Hunebelle and co. had muddled his vision. This may have been for the best — who knows if the planned fourth film, Fantômas in Moscow, would’ve been any good? — but the satirical bent and the delight in anarchy expressed by Hunebelle’s trilogy remain, in their own way, just as subversive for the 1960s as the original stories were in the 1910s. If the Bond series offered escapist, globe-trotting fun as their hero worked to bring down villains and restore balance, the Fantômas trilogy flipped this on its perfectly coiffed head in deliriously oddball style. You won’t exactly be shaken by its frivolous antics, but you’ll certainly be stirred.
Authors
Calum Baker
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