Judex "1963 redux" has been produced as a homage to Louis Feuillade's original serial. The production values are very much aligned with that endeavour, so you can't blame Franju's work for a shortage of faithfulness, let alone dissecting it to pinpoint some lack of respect or understanding of the source material.
The point is the movie works as a homage, and then what? You can't tell a story in 1963 the same way it was told in 1916. At the time there was a developing medium, silent and with static setups, yet a medium Feuillade helped transition away from the filmed stage by making it closer to the action-packed serial pulp fictions.
So Franju adds nothing. This would be OK if it was the first shot at features from a naive cinema student, but here lacks something closer to a real movie, a movie with its own rhythm, its own structure and real suspenseful action not silent action designed to fit a frame.
It is true that Franju was more interested in remaking Fantomas. How would he have succeeded in doing this any better, i.e. matching the original popular success of fascination for a frightful villain? That takes much more work than a nice little artsy homage to the movies of yore.
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