Bluebeard

 Bluebeard (1942) directed by Edgar Ulmer has a strong critical reputation.  Despite it's Poverty Row attributes, the movie is said to be well-directed and features a strong performance by John Carradine.  Ulmer made an earlier version of the Bluebeard story in his 1932 The Black Cat, an eccentric if brilliant horror film starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.  Unfortunately, Ulmer's 1942 film seems to me to be pretty much of a dud.  Perhaps, my criticisms of the film are a bit unfair -- the movie seems to exist in only severely degraded forms and it's hard to watch.  But, I think, the movie, despite some effective sequences, was never very good and recent re-evaluations of Ulmer's work (he is often a very interesting director) have encouraged critics to think Bluebeard is better than it is.

"Bluebeard" is used in the film as a general term for a serial killer of young women.  Carradine's Gaston Morel, accordingly, is called by police authorities "the Bluebeard".  Viewers hoping to find in the film the content of the famous Grimm's fairy tale  or the more famous and elaborate version of the tale by Charles Perrault will be disappointed. Someone is strangling young women in Paris and dumping their bodies in the Seine.  Upon our first view of John Carradine, as Gaston Morel, there's no doubt as to the culprit.  Morel is running a marionette theater and performing Gounod's Faust for onlookers.  He is intrigued by a young woman who takes an interest in the show.  She's a seamstress and Morel engages her to sew new costumes for a puppet ballet that he intends to stage.  Morel's girlfriend, who has been singing the role of Marguerite, becomes jealous and so he strangles her -- there's a hidden staircase behind bookshelves in his Atelier and he carries her down to the sewers where the corpse is dropped in water that flows into the Seine.  Before becoming a puppet-theater entrepreneur, Morel was a painter and had the unfortunate habit of murdering his models after portraying them on canvas.  One of his incriminating pictures has come up for sale, offered to the public by a sinister art dealer.  The picture shows one of the dead women posed against a decadent backdrop that features naked women -- it's never shown in any detail due to its erotic subject matter but the images look like women drawn by Felicien Rops.  An inspector summons all of Paris' prostitutes to court and interrogates them as to whether they know the identity of the painter.  They are uncooperative and ribaldly rebuff efforts to question them.  Meanwhile, Lucille, the seamstress, goes to visit Morel and finds a cravat that he used to strangle his girlfriend -- it's torn and the woman offers to stitch it back together.  Lucille's sister, who looks just like her, appears in Paris.  She's the girlfriend of the inspector who is trying to track down the murderer.  She agrees to serve as bait for the murderer and the gendarms offer a lot of money to the artist who will agree to paint her.  Morel needs the money and so he invites the girl to his studio and, when she recognizes him (she's previously seen him with her sister) strangles her and also kills the art dealer who is in cahoots with him.  There's a pointless flashback in which Morel reveals that one of his paintings was defamed by a prostitute who served as his subject and this has induced him to work to purify the city by killing whores.  (We don't need this information at this late stage in the film.)  Lucille learns that the ligature used to kill her sister was repaired by being stitched-up.  She decides to confront Morel about his murder of her sister.  Morel strangles her until she is unconscious, but the cops have trailed her to his Atelier and, after Morel escapes through a transom, there is a chase across the rooftops of Paris that involves several cops getting manhandled but ends with Morel plunging into the Seine from an eaves trough that breaks underfoot.  We see an eerily slow-motion white splash in the black water and the titles tells us that this is "The End".

The movie contains all sorts of stuff -- an extended opera scene involving the uncanny-looking marionettes, satire as to corrupt art dealers, bawdy comedy involving the prostitutes, long and pointless dialogue scenes, and various tours of the cardboard sewers, troughs of water with panels above them painted as archways with weird highlights of unmotivated light.  The fight on the rooftops might be impressive if you could see it, but the version that I watched was completely illegible shadows jumping around on black rooftops -- it looks like scenes from Dr. Caligari, angular gables with figures creeping around on them, intercut with lurid close-ups of cops in agony.  The murder scenes are most managed with sound -- we hear a grunt, get a close-up of Carradine's eyes glaring, and, then, hear something heavy falling to the floor.  The whole thing is only 72 minutes long but, like many pictures of this sort, it actually drags and some of the extensive and pointless dialogue scenes bring the picture to a complete halt.  The bargain-basement sets are cleverly lit to conceal their poverty.  In the first half of the movie, there are some clever sequences and the extremely quick cutting, undertaken to conceal problems with the lighting or sets (if we looked longer and harder, the shots would look very theatrical, staged, and fake), moves the film along with lightning speed until Ulmer thinks that he has to stage a dialogue sequence, parts of the movie that completely static.  Carradine is very handsome in a sinister way -- his face is shaped like an inverted triangle and seems mostly impassive; like a silent star, he acts with his eyes. The soundtrack is Gounod or traces of Mussorgsky -- the Baba Yaga and Great Gate of Kiev music from Pictures at an Exhibition.  In some of the final scenes, the hanging marionettes make weird patterns of shadows on the walls and there's some suggestion that Morel is killing the women to turn them into versions of his puppets -- this is an interesting theme that never, however, develops.  The photography is all very dark with chiaroscuro effects -- the characters traipse around with candles and people's faces are shadowy, with strange highlights at their eyes or across the brow.  (Backgrounds are out of focus, probably to hide that they are empty, and some of the effects are like a poor man's Josef von Sternberg.)  Although the movie has its interesting moments, it doesn't add up to anything worth watching.