Modern writers severely exaggerate this film’s influence on the surrealists and the storytelling creaks at the joints like you’d expect for 1915, but if you’ve got a taste for pulp this ten-episode seven-hour French crime epic is worth the time. Its pace is impressively fast. It also boasts the fetching bohemian presence of Musidora as Irma Vep, the top lady thief in a gang called The Vampires. In true French fashion, she makes the crooks likable and romantic. Each chapter is a game of wits between them and a plucky Paris journalist (Édouard Mathé). Secret codes, faked deaths, exploding ships, poison ink pens, phony safes, thefts in the night, kidnappings through windows, rooftop escapes, forgery, hypnotism, suicide and other fun stuff follows.
My advice: Watch this in the prescribed installments. Take a few weeks. Do an episode a day. There are no cliffhangers to get you rabid for the next chapter. There is no great mystery slowly unveiled. There is no surprise ending. It’s a mere series of capers and thwartings. What it lacks in suspense, it makes up with cleverness and the feeling that the modern big city crime film is being invented here right before your eyes.