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About a year after Fantomas' (Marcel Herrand) disappearance, his
daughter Hélène (Simone Signoret), who has long renounced her father,
marries Fandor (André Le Gall), sidekick of Fantomas' chief nemesis
inspector Juve (Alexandre Rignault). Fantomas though is far from dead, and
left fuming by his daughter's death, so much so that he assumes the role
of the mayor and performs the wedding in his stead - which is then of
course rendered invalid because, well, only the real mayor is allowed to
perform weddings. The Fantomas tries to kidnap Hélène and Fandor, too,
but Juve manages to save the young lovers. Fantomas retaliates by
poisoning an entire dinner party, then he flies over Paris in his
helicopter (then still a novelty) dangerously low, dropping thousands of
leaflets threatening to poison half the population. He claims to blackmail
the city out of a fortune to drop his plans, but his real intentions are
of another nature altogether: You see, Fantomas has a girlfriend, Lady
Beltham (Lucienne Le Marchand), and he knows she won't let him poison half
of Paris just like that - so she uses her as an unwitting bait for both
Fandor and Juve ... and it works, too. He hasn't taken into account that
his daughter is quite a tough cookie (naturally, since she's the daughter
of a supervillain), and thus she leads an effort to free Juve and Fandor -
even if she falls into one of his traps and becomes his captive in the
process. While Fantomas prepares to destroy Paris as retaliation,
Hélène tries to get on the good side of Lady Beltham to aide her in her
getaway (quite successfully so, too), and both individually and with each
other, Juve and Fandor make attempts to trail down Fantomas, defeat him
and free Hélène. At one point, Juve even masquerades as Fantomas ... Ultimately,
it's Hélène who destroys all of Fantomas' equipment needed to destroy
Paris, but Paris gives the police a slip with Hélène as hostage and a
death ray gun mounted to his truck ... but of course, everything ends
happily (for the good guys), and Fantomas is blown up while crossing a
bridge ... or indeed is he? What should have been a likeable
collection of pulp motives of the sci-fi and supervillain variety is a
rather dull affair - mainly because the whole thing lacks proper narrative
buildup, fails to properly introduce any of its characters (mainly upone
the premise that most of them might have been known to a contemporary
French audience anyhow), and remains very shallow even for a
one-dimensional supervillain flick of its ilk. So despite of all the fun
elements this film has to offer, it's a very boring rendition of a very
colourful superbaddie.
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