In short: Shadowman (1974)

Original title: Nuits rouges

A mysterious criminal mastermind who likes to either wear silly costumes or a red ski mask, and therefore goes by the moniker of Man Without a Face (Jacques Champreux) gets wind of a way to acquire the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. While attempting to find the treasure, he tortures the uncle of sailor and obvious protagonist Paul de Borrego (Ugo Pagliai) to death, making himself an enemy who will team up with a beleaguered cop (Gert Fröbe), a “poet detective” (Séraphin Beauminon) – because this is still a French movie - as well the sailor’s sort of girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) to get at the villain’s faceless hide.

Also rather cranky about some weirdo and his henchies murdering their members and trying to steal their shit are the Knights Templar themselves, who still exist in secret and are well able to stage a commando raid on a villain’s lair when need be.

Our villain isn’t helpless, though, for apart from his own man of a thousand faces shtick, he also has a huge number of masked henchpeople, the mandatory nameless, pretty, and pretty murderous woman as his number two (Gayle Hunnicutt), and a mad scientist tucked away in a cellar who turns normal people into pretty damn hilarious zombie killers. Among other things.

Despite carrying quite a few of the hallmarks of the genre, one really shouldn’t go into Georges Franju’s Nuits rouges expecting something on the lines of Eurospy or the more comics-styled Eurocrime films. They do share a lineage with one another, obviously, but this, as was Franju’s earlier Judex, is very much an homage to the serials of Louis Feuillade, full of attempts to consciously capture the peculiar surrealism and unexpected sense of off-beat poetry of things like Les Vampires.

Usually, trying to create the air of accidental surrealism or to artificially create the strangeness that just happens to some movies is a terrible idea. But more often than not, Nuits rouges achieves what Franju is aiming for, and has an air of individual peculiarity that’s more interested in inhabiting the strangeness of this sort of high pulp realm than in making it genuinely exciting as pulp. How much any given viewer will like this approach to the material is to a considerable degree a matter of personal taste, but if it doesn’t work, Franju’s the last one to blame, for he puts all of his considerable powers as a filmmaker into his project, caring little if anyone watching it might find it misguided. It’s difficult not to at least respect this. I, of course, found myself so charmed by the whole affair, I’m now trying to find the version of this Franju somehow got onto French TV as an eight part show.