Signé Furax (1981)
Directed by Marc Simenon

Film Review

Marc Simenon has three indisputable claims to fame: (a) he was the son of Belgium's most prolific crime writer Georges Simenon, (b) he was married to the actress Mylène Demongeot, and (c) he directed Signé Furax, one of the craziest French film comedies of the 1980s.  Signé Furax was actually the last of a handful of films that Simenon Jr directed for the cinema; he subsequently devoted himself to making films for French television, up until his tragic death in a train accident in 1999.  Marc Simenon may not have been a particularly distinguished filmmaker but the mere fact that he helmed a film linked to one of the most important cultural phenomena in France of the 1950s, namely the Furax fad, has conferred on him a certain immortality.  The next best thing to directing a critically acclaimed masterpiece is to put your name to a cult classic.

Furax started out as a radio programme, first broadcast in France in 1951.  Created by comedy legends Pierre Dac and Francis Blanche, the series ran to over a thousand episodes (of up to ten minutes in duration) over five series, aired between 1951 and 1960.  The villainous central protagonist was an obvious cross-between two of the modest enduring characters in French crime fiction, Arsène Lupin and Fantômas, and the plots resemble a distillation of all those popular fantasy-thriller TV shows of the 1960s - a saucy parody of conventional thriller intrigue pepped up with comicbook-style fantasy-sci-fi elements, a sort of Benny Hill take on The Avengers and Department S.  The popularity of the radio show was such that Furax spilled into other media - novels and comic books - and even featured in a daily comic strip in the newspaper France Soir.

It would be another twenty years before Furax finally managed to make it onto the big screen, as an adaptation based on the second series of the original radio programme.  By this time, the series' creators, Dac and Blanche, had both quit this mortal sphere, and so the task of bringing Furax back from the dead and up to date fell to director Marc Simenon and his co-writer Xavier Gélin (son of the actor Daniel Gélin, who appears in the film).  The results are, to say the least mixed, and like other, more recent cinematic attempts to reboot fictional icons of past decades - Belphégor (2001), Arsène Lupin (2004) - more than mildly disappointing.  The convoluted narrative is barely discernible, let alone comprehensible, amidst the non-stop barrage of unsubtle humour that gets hurled at the spectator.   Signé Furax is muddled and messy, but somehow the scattergun comedy pays off in the end, beating its audience into submission with a relentless stream of visual and scripted gags, a fair proportion of which are side-splittingly funny.

With its lunatic plot, flamboyantly cartoonesque characters and over-generous ensemble of acting talent, Signé Furax is very much the precursor of  the mainstream comedy that has become depressingly prevalent in French cinema in recent years.  It's a pretty feeble recipe for success but this film gets away with it through sheer exuberance, not to mention the comedy gold mine that it had at its disposal, namely the scripts of the original radio series.  Looking like a super-strength Gallic version of Mike Myers' Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), Signé Furax is sporadically brilliant as a parody of 1960s television fantasy but it spends most of its time getting tangled up in its madcap silliness.  It may not be a patch on the radio series that inspired it but this rib-tickling overdose of zany French comedy has more than a few things going for it, not least of which are Mylène Demongeot at her most seductive, an hilarious incursion by comedy giant Coluche, possibly the best French sausage gag in history and a reggae-dancing Space Invader who is so 1980s you could weep.

Film Synopsis

One by one, the great historic monuments of Paris are being stolen and replaced with cheap imitations. These crimes against France's cultural heritage are all signed by the criminal mastermind Furax.  But how is this possible?  Furax is dead, or at least that is what the police think.  Can it be that France's Public Enemy Number One has cheated death and is now embarking on the greatest criminal enterprise in history?  Two men are determined to resolve the mystery, police commissioner Socrate and Fouvreaux, the head of a special security division that has been set up to deal with incidents such as this.  A pair of private detectives, Black and White, discover that the real villain is not Furax but a mysterious sect of bearded men known as the Babus.  Led by the totally evil Klakmuf, the Babus dress up as Father Christmas and venerate the sacred black sausage as their plans to take over the world near fruition.  Only one man can thwart this dastardly scheme - Furax himself!