There is, as the Good Book tells us, nothing new under the sun but old wine in new bottles occasionally has a lot going for it. In 1981 Spielberg let it be known he was harking back to the serials of his youth when he created Indiana Jones but Georges Franju beat him to it by almost twenty years when, in 1963, he remade Louis Feuillade's silent 12-episode Judex; nothing new squared. The story begins at a masked ball and the entire film is a ball for the viewer with a real magician, Channing Pollock, cast as the eponymous superhero, Robin Hood with a French accent whose life is one long crusade to right wrongs, to, as it were, take injustice from the wealthy and redistribute it as justice to the poor. The film is beautifully shot in black and white which allows for poetic effects hard to achieve in colour and cat-suited Francine Berg, who is also a mistress of disguise, makes a worthy opponent for Judex; the climactic roof-top fight with Sylva Koschina - a passing equestrienne - is ten times more effective in black and white than it would be in colour. Overall this is a wonderful nostalgic romp which helped see off the pretentious new wavelet once and for all and if that weren't enough (which it is) Judex is a superb and unmissable film in its own right.
Review of Judex
