Bluebeard (1972)

I love this movie so much

the audience applauded

So much average

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Goodness knows what possessed Richard Burton to appear in rubbish like "Bluebeard." The above film, like "Hammersmith is Out," "Absolution," "The Assassination of Trotsky" and "The Exorcist 2: The Heretic," did no favours for Burton's career whatsoever. The attempts by "Bluebeard" to be humorous are embarrassingly poor. The whole thing has a low quality in every department and it's no wonder that the film quickly vanished without trace. The script is hardly worthy of Richard Burton or Raquel Welch, they being the only people in the cast remotely well known.

This stinker barely played in theaters, at least in Chicago, then was trimmed for late night TV, before vanishing until the days of DVD. The movie is caught somewhere between "what were they thinking?" and "Meh". Burton gives a few of the sketches his best shot, but the movie never more than scrapes up against funny. Burton would sink to even greater depths, and also come back for a few good moments. The big story here is tragic sexpot Joey Heatherton, who gives it her all in what would be, really, her only shot at breaking into features. I'm almost sure She also did an early low budget feature IMDb somehow missed. A stunning beauty hampered perhaps by a chipmunkish voice, She looks stunning and hangs in there in shot after shot. Her amazing nude scene probably destroyed her chances of being taken seriously, but it does not rob her of her dignity. Showbiz is not for sissies, and She deserved a better break. The movie redeems itself in the scenes where it really attempts to work as farce, it simply always falls a little short. Perhaps the bright colors and costumes actually work against it a little.

Serta sleeper poster girl Joey Heatherton stars along with a brazenly slumming Richard Burton in this exercise in low rent film making.Joey and Raquel Welch along with a gaggle of European actress of different levels of renown play the various wives of Burton, wearing a ridiculous transparently fake blue beard. Top billed Raquel shows up as a nun with quite a past and wisely stays for under ten minutes. Other than her beauty she adds nothing to her part, not that there is much depth in hers or any role to explore.Of the other ladies Virna Lisi is probably the best known and therefore gets to retain her clothes for her brief role. She was an extremely beautiful woman when she was young but you would never know it from her appearance here. She's tarted up with an atrocious wig and some of the most retina burning day-glo lingerie ever created. She eventually became a well respected character actress in Europe but this was made during her sex bomb period and her role is as vapid as all the rest.As for the other actresses none really make an impression but all manage to lose at least their tops in order to pander to the audience. Which brings us to Miss Heatherton, she offers a non performance of such staggering ineptitude that in its way it becomes enjoyable. Blank faced no matter what horror presents itself and with a flat expressionless voice she comes across as a third rate showgirl who wandered onto the set in error. In a way she is, she gets no assist from Burton nor does anyone else. Of all the great actors who squandered their talent his did so the most willingly. His bored, strictly for the paycheck performance is an affront to the paying audience.That leaves only two points of the film to discuss. One is the unseemly and unnecessary violence to both the women and animals. The rough treatment of the women is part of the story since Bluebeard is a serial killer but the shooting of various animals is unimportant to the story and could have been deleted.The other facet is the incredibly bad, and cheap, production design. While the castle which is the setting of the film is beautiful outside what the rooms look like inside is enough to upset your stomach for days. Red flocked wallpaper, electric blue velvet wall coverings and other nauseating geometric patterns abound causing the viewer eye strain, perhaps it was to distract them from the idiotic plot! Even worse are the cheap-jack effects: spiderwebs that looks like cotton candy, ice in a walk in freezer which looks like nothing more than white shag carpeting the list could go on and on. It's dreadful and funny at the same time. The film is valueless by any measure of good film making but if you are a fan of bad movies there are things that will amuse you. Anyone else watch out!

It's funny, but I always thought the Bluebeard character was based on a real-life historical figure, much as Vlad the Impaler had been the inspiration for Dracula, and Gilles de Rais inspired Paul Naschy's Alaric de Marnac, and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory was the obvious basis for Delphine Seyrig's vampiric Countess Bathory in "Daughters of Darkness." But a little research reveals that Bluebeard was rather the creation of French author Charles Perrault, and first appeared in a collection of the author's fairy tales in 1697. The basis for no less than six cinematic treatments, the character appeared in 1972's "Bluebeard" in a top-notch production with a terrific cast; a film that was, strangely enough, almost universally scorned by the critics of the time. It has taken me a full 40 years to finally catch up with this one, and now I cannot help wondering what all the negative comments were about. The film strikes me as a woefully underrated, black comedy/horror gem, and a tremendously entertaining one, to boot. In the film, Richard Burton plays the title character, also known as the Baron Kurt von Sepper. The survivor of a WW1 dogfight crash landing, von Sepper's face is now somewhat scarred and covered with a neatly trimmed beard that, due to some chemical admixture in that crash, is now decidedly bluish in tint. A wealthy landowner, the Baron lives in a sprawling castle in what the viewer must infer is Nazi Germany; a lover of beauty, he has already gone through six wives by the time the film begins in earnest. Unfortunately, all six of his previous wives were, for one reason or another, "monsters" in the Baron's eyes, and he was compelled to slay the entire bunch, keep them preserved in his hidden refrigerator room, and then paint abstract portraits of them (a la Humphrey Bogart in 1947's "The Two Mrs. Carrolls") for his gallery. And now wife #7, an American entertainer named Anne (surprisingly well played by '60s sexpot Joey Heatherton), has just moved in....Unlike Henry VIII, who only killed two out of his six wives (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard), von Sepper here is a much more consistent chap! Burton is quite excellent in his portrayal, and I really cannot explain all the harsh criticism regarding his performance. The film boasts some incredibly handsome sets, solid direction from Hollywood vet Edward Dmytryk (this was his extra-penultimate film), and yet another wonderful score from the maestro, Ennio Morricone; a creepy/lovely score that will likely stay with you for days. (As I've said elsewhere, I'm just in awe at how many superb film scores this genius has come up with!) Joey, very much the female lead here, not only looks smashing, but also does quite well in the acting department, too (although she does not FULLY convince us that she's a 1920s flapper, with her decidedly limited acting range); she also gets to do some high-kicking dance numbers here, of the sort that wowed viewers of "The Dean Martin Show" in the mid-'60s. "Bluebeard"'s structure is a fairly interesting one, jumping about in time as it does. During the film's numerous flashbacks, we get to see von Sepper's six previous wives, and learn just how and why he did away with them. And what a bevy of international pulchritude is on display for the viewer here! We meet wife #1, a singer who just wouldn't stop singing, and played by the gorgeous Italian actress Virna Lisi; wife #2, Erika, a baby-talking nitwit played by the luscious French actress Nathalie Delon, who goes to a prostitute (played by Austrian cult actress Sybil Danning) for lovemaking advice; wife #3, a lapsed nun with a rather licentious past, played by THE American sex goddess of the era, Raquel Welch (though second billed, Racky only gets seven minutes of screen time in the film); wife #4, Brigitt, a feminist turned masochist, and played by steamy Italian beauty Marilu Tolo; wife #5, Caroline, a very young and indolent layabout, portrayed by supersexy Italian actress Agostina Belli; and wife #6, the increasingly randy Greta, played by German (future porno) actress Karin Schubert. All these fabulous babes give wonderful comedic performances, helping to make "Bluebeard" a black comedy to relish. But the horror elements are present in abundance, too; besides the six grisly murders, the film dishes out a mute female servant, underground crypts, a mother's preserved corpse (one that is just as hideous as "Psycho"'s Mrs. Bates), a cobwebbed castle, an electric chair and on and on. Perhaps most horrifying, for this viewer, however, was the spectacle of all manner of wildlife--rabbits, deer, fowl, a fox, a boar--being shot and killed during one of the Baron's hunting parties. No animal should be needlessly slaughtered to make a motion picture, I feel, so I am deducting some points for this gratuitous nastiness. But other than this scene, the film works splendidly, and is really grade-A entertainment. This is a story that can be recast and remade every generation, it seems to me, using the top female sex symbols of the day. I can almost envision a 2013 version, starring Salma Hayek, Michelle Pfeiffer, Megan Fox, Scarlett Johansson....