Bluebeard
USA, 1972
Directed by Edward Dmytryk, Luciano Sacripanti
Written by Ennio De Concini, Edward Dmytryk, Maria Pia Fusco
Produced by Alexander Salkind, Ilya Salkind, Pierre Spengler
Cast: Richard Burton, Joey Heatherton, Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi
Genre: Thriller, Drama, Comedy
Rating: 14A
DVD Distributor: Maple Pictures
Website: Buy it here
Running Time: 125 minutes

I’ve always wondered why Richard Burton has been elevated to pantheon of great English actors. Firmly based in the Shakespearean tradition, he’s of the school that believes staring slightly up and to the right while bellowing over-written dialogue is somehow akin to a convincing performance. But here, in Bluebeard, none of that matters, because Burton is joined by every cinematic element in aiming straight for the cheap seats in this gloriously trashy epic.

It’s unclear whether or not the filmmakers intended Bluebeard to be a comedy, or if they just became overcome with their own hyperbole in some kind of ergot-inspired mass hysteria. It doesn’t really matter, because regardless of the intentions of director Edward Dmytryk, the film is a true joy from start to finish. Based upon the fairy tale in which a nobleman murders a string of wives, the film sets the story in post-WWI Germany. Burton plays Baron von Sepper, an aristocratic war hero whose face was scarred in a plane crash, an accident that somehow also caused his beard to turn blue. Essentially, Bluebeard is a lengthy excuse for Burton to dispatch various European beauties in grisly ways, nearly all of which involve them taking their shirts off at some point. Joey Heatherton, who rose to fame as a USO dancer in the 1960s before people realized that was ridiculous, plays von Sepper’s most recent wife, who discovers his crimes and brings him to justice while still finding excuses to bare her chest like a breast-feeding nymphomaniac. Heatherton’s performance is surprisingly likeable, and she holds her own against Raquel Welsh and Sybil Danning, though this film did little for her career.

Bluebeard is neither bloody nor, despite my over-reliance on hormonal breast jokes, graphically sexual. But it is infused with brooding gothic camp, as if the visuals from every Hammer Horror film ever made somehow leaked into a nearby projector screening the Roger Corman Poe cycle. Burton is gloriously over the top, the castles and secret passageways and guillotines are lush, and there’s an underlying crassness that gently echoes the excess of 70s exploitation without providing any sort of concrete explicitness. All in all, the film is a lost wonder that deserves a new life on DVD, where every seat is a cheap seat.

Rating: 9 on 10

alkratina@comicbookbin.com