Self-proclaimed preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum, memorable) murders widows, taking their money and orphaning their children in this gothic Depression fable. A “false prophet” fond of quoting scripture in his rural travels, he embodies the risk to children during hard times. Correlative to this is a predatory universe, Nature “red in tooth and claw.” We […]
Daily Archives: April 6, 2008
Although just as beautiful, perhaps more so, Georges Franju’s remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1916 Judex is as different from the original as is night from day. It is slower and graver; it is also more darkly magical (Judex, this time, is a magician—a touch here of Fritz Lang’s 1921 Destiny?); its world isn’t ours, as […]
Wealthy Jacques de Tremeuse has an alternate identity: the caped avenger Judex—Latin, for Justice. He kidnaps and imprisons Favraux in a secret dungeon, leaving everyone to believe the Parisian banker is dead, after Favraux mistreats his elderly secretary, Vallières, and refuses to give half his ill-gotten fortune to the poor. But Judex has another, more […]
