Given how many times Richard Burton eventually married before his death (five!), more than a little irony exists in viewing Bluebeard today. From Superman producer Alexander Salkind and The Caine Mutiny director Edward Dmytryk, the film version of France’s felonious folktale casts Burton as cerulean chin-bristled World War I hero Baron Kurt Von Sepper, returning from aerial battle to only wage the war of the sexes on the ground by marrying — and killing — one beautiful woman after the other.
Bluebeard the movie’s first victim is Bluebeard the character’s sixth wife (Karin Schubert, The Panther Squad), felled by a bullet in an hunting “accident.” Before long, Bluebeard finds himself entranced by flapper girl Anne (future Happy Hooker Joey Heatherton). Despite all the red flags surrounding the guy — a one-eyed cat, a cobweb-strewn castle, a crazy old woman combing the hair of his mother’s corpse — Anne happily becomes Wife No. 7, the Jell-O to his jam.
When she finds his … let’s just call it a “scrapbook” of past wives, he confesses everything to her chronologically, doomed spouse by doomed spouse. Buckle in, viewers, because the result is an all-star panoply of acts of uxoricide, with Burton’s master of misogyny wearing more shades of purple than the Joker and Prince would find tasteful. Virna Lisi (The Statue) is seduced into a guillotine; Marilù Tolo (My Dear Killer) is drowned; and Agostina Belli (The Night of the Devils) takes a falcon to the face.
Most amusingly, Raquel Welch (The Last of Sheila) plays against type as a nun whose inventory of global dalliances angers Bluebeard into such a rage, he locks her in a coffin. Genuinely funny is how increasingly annoying he finds the gorgeous Nathalie Delon (Le Samouraï) for her endless baby talk and for naming her breasts “Jasmine” and “Sicumin.” When she hires a prostitute (Sybil Danning, Chained Heat) over to give her husband-satisfying whore lessons, Bluebeard catches them au naturel and penetrates them both … with a pointy-tusk chandelier, so get your mind outta the gutter.
If “prestige Eurosleaze” exists, Dmytryk’s Bluebeard is the default example, with Burton at his most bombastic. The Gothic gaslighter pops with color and delights with a campy tone, trashy sequences and an Ennio Morricone score that positively fucks. Bluebeard will tickle you pink, if you let it. —Rod Lott