Meet Channing Pollock..
By Glenn Kenny for the Criterion Collection.
When I was in high school in the late ’70s, one of my closest pals was a semiprofessional magician. A top-flight pianist as well, Charles was making some tidy sums as an entertainer in restaurants and clubs around North Jersey and New York well before he turned eighteen.Over the years, we lost touch, but we reconnected about a decade ago via Facebook, as one will. In one of our catch-up e-mail conversations, he asked me if I knew of what he called an “obscure” movie named Judex. Well, I responded glibly, I knew not one but two films with that title, the first a seminal serial from 1914 directed by Louis Feuillade, the second an early-’60s homage to the serial directed by Georges Franju, the French maestro behind such distinctive, disturbing works as Le sang des bêtes and Eyes Without a Face.
My friend Charles’s interest wasn’t entirely cinephilic, if at all. No, he was more keen on tracking down celluloid record of Channing Pollock, the American illusionist who plays the title role in Franju’s 1963 movie..