IDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 44 minutes rated 7.0 by 8882.
Genre: Pastiche.
Verdict: Whoosh!
Fantômas is a supervillain with a vast criminal organisation headquartered in an underground lair equipped with all mod villainy cons of 1964: intercoms, sliding doors, closed circuit TV, ear-popping elevators, hot and cold-running thugs, a dungeon, and the mandatory femme fatale. He only leaves home to pull off spectacular heists. Oh, he is also a man of a thousand faces, but when relaxing at home torturing victims he looks like a bald, blue alien. That look is never explained.
Fantômas is very concerned about his public image and beats up a journalist whose reports on his doings have been disrespectful. Ouch. He doubles down on Journalist by kidnapping his girlfriend and committing an audacious crime disguised as Journalist. Energetic Inspector Clouseau puts un et une together and pursues Journalist because he IS Fantômas. The last hour is all chase.
In the end Journalist is exonerated and girlfriend rescued, but Fantômas gets away. In an explicit parody of the last scene in Dr No (1962) Journalist and Inspector are floating away in a rubber raft bickering with each other.
Jean Marais stars as both Journalist and beneath the make-up Fantômas. By train, motorbike, helicopter, automobile, submarine, speed boat he pursues himself who is always one step ahead of him. Is this post-modern or what?
The End.
It is high octane and totally silly as they zoom around Paris, the Ile France, and the Med. The humour is broader than in Dr No and the pace is faster.
I also watched Fantômas Unleashed (1965) and Fantômas against Scotland Yard (1967). More slapstick, more chase, and ever more make-up.
Prior to World War I two journalists, Marcel Alain and Pierre Souvestre, cranked out thirty-two books featuring the ruthless, murderous, diabolical arch-villain Fantômas. They were snapped up by the nascent film industry and rendered as Gothic horror films wherein Fantômas was portrayed as a shadowy figure with arms stretched overhead about to swoop on a victim. Both the books and the films were very popular. They are much darker and more macabre than these 1960s films.
Marais was a writer, sculptor, stuntman, and actor who was Beast in Jean Cocteau’s ethereal Beauty and the Beast (1946). He is completely without ego in his willingness to act in concealing make-up as Beast or Fantômas. No Hollywood A-lister would have done that.