By
Hank Reineke
It’s best to start this review by noting that Kino’s Blu
ray release of Claude Chabrol’s Bluebeard
is not a retelling of the centuries old French folk tale. The first published appearance of the grim fairy
tale was penned by Charles Perrault in 1697, but the oral folk tale actually dates
ages older. The Bluebeard of fable is a wealthy nobleman who has savagely
murdered and hidden the bodies of his six previous wives in a subterranean
chamber beneath his castle. But just as George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) would introduce the psychological manipulation of “gas
lighting” into our modern vernacular, Webster’s defines a “bluebeard” as a “man
who first marries and then murders one wife after another.” Which is not exactly the case in Chabrol’s film of 1963. Though this
bluebeard’s wife is involved in the imbroglio, she is not targeted by her
murdering husband. But otherwise the description
is close enough.
In fact, the French title of this French-language
production - based on a gruesome but series of true crimes - was not Bluebeard but simply Landru. The titular character referenced is Henri Désiré Landru (1869-1922), a
bald and thick-bearded Parisian dealer of antique furniture. The problem with Landru is that he’s chosen
to supplement his income by murdering a succession of wealthy dowagers,
spinsters and widows in the years of French involvement in World War I. Collecting the names of moneyed lonely hearts
from personal ads sent privately to a postal box, Landru’s modus operandi was
to charm and romance his intended victims, offering all a respite from Paris at
his countryside Villa rental near Gambais.
Once separated from their bank accounts and antiquities,
Landru coldly murdered the women, disposing of their bodies – and all evidence
of his crime - in a coal-fired kitchen stove. Landru was found out and arrested in the spring of 1919, charged with
the murder of eleven women – though authorities believed he was likely involved
in many other unsolved disappearances. The macabre and sensational circumstances surrounding the Landru case
brought with it attendant international press coverage and a circus atmosphere
to the courtroom proceedings. Landru was
ultimately found guilty of his crimes, despite the absence of bodies. He was executed by guillotine in the early
winter of 1922.
Such notoriety would bring Landru lasting infamy as one
of the modern world’s most legendary serial killers. Both the fairy tale of Bluebeard and the
real-life terror wrought by Landru would figure into a number of film and television
productions. Sinister waxen images of
Landru’s bluebeard would be cinematically present in practically every wax
museum’s rogue gallery of horror: House of Wax (1953), the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “The New Exhibit,”
and Terror in the Wax Museum (1973)
to name only a few. Charlie Chaplin, of
all people, would even revisit the Landru affair in his thinly-veiled dark
comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
So it was only proper that a French director and French writer
should assume ownership of the legend of Landru in this French-Italian
co-production. In late February of 1962,
Parisian cinema correspondents reported that Italian film producer Carlo Ponti
and Frenchman Georges De Beauregard, the latter president of Rome-Paris Films
and a champion of France’s “New Wave” cinema, were planning an Eastman color production
of Landru. The film was to be directed by Claude Chabrol
– already feted for such films as Le Beau
Serge (1958), The Cousins (1959)
and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960). The screenplay for Landru was to written by the popular French novelist Francoise
Sagan. Though this was to be Sagan’s
first effort at screenwriting, four of her novels had already been adapted for
the screen by French film studios. Earliest expectations were that Sagan’s script was to be one serious in
tone and unlike Charlie Chaplin’s comic-take of the serial killer’s spree.
Then, one month later, it was reported that Chabrol and
Sagan were in fact both crafting
elements of the screenplay, oddly semi-independent of one another: Chabrol was developing the film’s male
characters, Sagan charged to concentrate on the murderer’s female victims. Reports also noted that Chabrol himself might
play the role of Henri Désiré Landru should a suitable actor for the primary role
not be found. A more than suitable actor
was found in the person of Charles
Denner, an actor mostly unfamiliar-to-the-public at large. It’s Denner who really carries the film with a
masterful, emotionally casual performance.
In late March, Rome-Paris announced that a worldwide
distribution deal was in the works with United Artists, the studio having
agreed to “put up most of the coin” of production. Following their work together on Landru, Chabrol was promising to tackle
a film version of Sagan’s 1960 play Château en Suède. (That film would actually
be lensed and released in 1964 as a television production sans Chabrol’s
involvement). In any event, by
mid-summer of 1962, the deal with United Artists seems to have fallen
through. It was announced that Joseph E.
Levine’s Embassy Pictures had secured distribution rights; the deal was reportedly
struck when Levine was made privy to the preview rushes of the still unfinished
film. Lux Films was to handle domestic
distribution in France. With financing
and casting and a script in place, principal photography on Landru would wrap in September of 1962.
The film would enjoy – fittingly -a premiere in the city
of Paris in February of 1963. Though somewhat charmed by the film, a Variety critic attending a 5 February
screening floated the possibility that the production may not enjoy wide appeal
being an “unusual offbeater” and an “spirited if uneven pic.” There was also an
acknowledgment that Sagan’s script was curiously both “deft” and “repetitive” in its construction. These were fair criticisms, but by April’s
end, Landru had already drawn 306,767
paid admissions in France – not a bad box office total for an edgy filmmaker of
the “New Wave” school.
The film would be given a domestic publicity boost courtesy
of Mme. Fernande Segret. Segret, now age
seventy and a mistress of the real-life Landru, attempted to “enjoin” the
film’s release, concerned that the film sullied her reputation. Taking her case before the Tribunal of the
Seine, the French court dismissed Segret’s complaint, citing her relationship -
as a twenty-four-year-old - with the murderous Landru was already a “matter of
historical record” of which Sagan’s screenplay took no particular
liberties. Segret appealed, but as late
as 1967, her continuing attempt to bring suit against the filmmakers was again
dismissed.
With Chabrol’s Landru
racking up decent reviews and box office returns in France, an opportunistic distributor
chose this moment to reissue the director’s previously moribund effort Ophelia, an “updating of the Shakespeare
opus.” In the meantime, a U.S. premiere of the French-language, English
subtitled Landru was set for April 9,
1963, at Manhattan’s arthouse Cinema I/Cinema II Studio on Broadway near
Lincoln Center. It was announced that Francoise
Sagan would be in attendance.
Following that U.S. debut Box Office was impressed, acknowledging Landru held “several exploitative angles to attract art house
regulars” as well as devotees of “the bizarre and macabre.” But not every critic was as enamored with the
film’s promise. The New York Times suggested that Chabrol’s employ of genuine transcript
excerpts from the Landru trial were “more entertaining than those Mlle. Sagan
found for him.” The famously venomous stage
and screen critic John Simon, wrote witheringly that Sagan’s attempt to
“compete with Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux
takes a good deal of arrogance, but in that area both Chabrol and Sagan are
amply endowed.”
In an interview with New York City’s Film Journal, Chabrol confessed that many of his films examined
matters of criminality, morality, and the often misused scales of justice, from
different angles. “In Landru the problem was to be faithful to
the legend and to be funny with it.” Which was an odd angle to tell the story of a serial murderer whose
crimes were heinous.
The French actress Michele Morgan, who played Landru’s
victim Célestine Buisson, advised prior to the film’s release that
Chabrol’s picture was to be “ironic and comic, with each victim ending as a
puff of smoke from the chimney.” Chabrol
borrowed this smoke billowing visual image from Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, but unfortunately uses this device to the point
of near-ridiculous repetition. Despite
this being a film being centered on one of the 20th century’s most
notorious figures there’s virtually no on-screen violence – only the suggestion
of such.
It was a curious decision. Not allowing audiences to actually see Landru
committing his terrible crimes, Chabrol allows the character as written to
retain a semblance of evasive humor and an anti-hero aura. Perhaps more tiresome than Chabrol’s multiple
cuts to the numerous chimney immolations are the appending comic bits where
Landru’s neighbors wilt from the odors of flesh incineration. The only images tying Landru to the brutal
murders are brief passing shots of the Villa’s fiery stove, coal bins and a
butcher block table with attached meat grinder.
Though a great fan of American films and the work of
Alfred Hitchcock – even co-authoring (with Erich Rohmer) an early book-length
study Hitchcock (Editions
Universitaires, Paris, 1957) – Chabrol’s filmography and interests were more
varied than that of his hero. It was
also, perhaps, the reason Chabrol’s mystery thrillers are less suspenseful in their
construction. Hitchcock once famously
wrote, “The mass [film] audience has had no education in technique of cinema,
as they frequently have in art and music, from their school days. They think only of story.”
Chabrol approach to film is different. It would be unfair to suggest that Chabrol
was a visual artist first, a storyteller second. But it’s clear that Chabrol’s work differs
from that of Hitchcock, the latter choosing to work with diligence from prepared
story boards and fully formed scripts. Chabrol’s film seems more freewheeling in construction, less plotted. I suppose Landru
might have been partly influenced by the mixing of black comedy with the macabre
as seen in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with
Harry (1955).
For my taste, the Chabrol film goes on too long – the
running time lasts a single tick under two hours but seems much longer. Choosing to lens the tale of Landru as a
darkly sardonic, serio-comic drama was not new – Chaplin already had fun tweaking
the public’s morbid interest in the case – but too often the murders and
subsequent courtroom drama seem to unspool in real time. With the romancing, the murders, the winking
comedy, the inter-cutting of grim black and white WWI newsreel footage, the
courtroom proceedings… the layering all becomes too much.
Similarly to Chaplin, Chabrol tries to weave an
undercurrent of politically-motivated shenanigans behind the prurient
international interest of Landru’s celebrity notoriety. Though involved in negotiating the Treaty of
Versailles - which formally brought the WW I to its end - French Prime Minister
George Clemenceau was despairing of its outcome – as were the French public who
would vote him out of office in 1920. As
imagined by self-described communist Chabrol, Clemenceau’s ploy was an attempt
to redirect the discontent of the French public by shepherding the press to
devote their efforts on the concurrent - and far more titillating - murder
trial of Henri Désiré Landru. He may
very well have been right about that.
This Kino Lorber Studio Classic edition of Bluebeard offers a stunning and color
saturated 4K restoration from the original camera negative. The film is presented in an aspect ratio of
1.66:1 in 1920x1080p and DTS audio. The release
comes with its original French language soundtrack and removable English
sub-titles. There is an audio commentary
courtesy of film historian Kat Ellinger, the editor of Diabolique magazine and self-described Instagram “loudmouthed
hysterical feminist.”
Ellinger provides an excellent commentary throughout,
describing Landru as the “strangest
and most frustrating” films of Chabrol’s 1960s oeuvre. She also notes the politically left director
also staged Landru as a cynical
commentary of the mores of the petite
bourgeoisie class – an element that’s insufferably
present throughout.
There are no alternate scenes included on this set. But while there is only the briefest flash of
topless nudity present in his finished cut, Chabrol later intimated that
producer Ponti insisted he also photograph a number of “undressed” scenes, presumably
for European distribution. If indeed
there is a continental version of Landru
floating about, I have not seen it. The
set also includes five trailers, including Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders, as well as such French productions as Le Doulos, Alphaville, Diabolically Yours and
Max and the Junkman.
Click here to order from Kino Lorber.