In between appearances in Hollywood’s famed monster collective, John Carradine managed to find time to star in Edgar Ulmer’s Bluebeard, a film very loosely based on Charles Perrault’s 17th century serial killer fable, itself rumored to be the literary transcription of real life murderer Gilles de Rais. As far as Poverty Row productions are concerned, Ulmer was a master of implementing understatement in place of the flare an unlimited budget would provide. What results is–next to his masterpiece Black Cat (which Bluebeard was slated to be a sequel to)–is Ulmer’s all-too-brief, yet highly rewarding, effort.
In 19th century Paris, a barrage of murdered women are discovered in the Seine. The baffled police have no leads to the criminal they have dubbed Bluebeard. However, after Lucille (Jean Parker) makes the acquaintance of Baston Morrell (John Carradine), the latter becomes infatuated with the young blonde amid his attempts to sever himself from his career as a painter in order to more readily pursue his hobbyhorse, puppeteering. As a last resort, the Parisian police solicit Lucille’s younger sister, Francine (Teala Loring), to play the role of patsy in order to lure what they believe to be a reclusive painter into the open in order to ascertain whether one of his portraits, which contains the face of Bluebeard’s fourth victim, is mere coincidence or an incriminating piece of evidence.
Ulmer’s film is a patient work which cleverly poses as a murder mystery, permitting its revelatory, horrific plot twist to pounce upon its viewer (even after the film’s crux seems to have been prematurely exhausted in the admission of the killer’s identity midway through the production). Never gratuitous (Ulmer didn’t have the budget for such luxuries as he was forced to hone all of his creativity capacities in order to produce a seventy-minute feature), once disclosed, the murder’s impetus for killing is not rooted in overt maliciousness (as the witty foreshadowing suggests early in the film as one of Gaston’s puppets, Mephistopheles, is disclosed as being modeled after his manager, Jean Lamarte, played by Ludwig Stössel) as was–and still is–the easily, and all-too-commonly painted black-and-white scenario with a horror film’s antagonist. Rather, the character’s motive is issued sympathetically via psychological imprinting and regression, which is all the more remarkable, not only for the filmmakers’ efforts, but for their daring given the time, alongside the tyrannical demands that audience expectation be fulfilled.
I only have two complaints in regards to this otherwise delightful sleeper of a film. One, which is implicitly complimentary, is that Ulmer wasn’t able to garner a larger budget in order to expound and extend the work, perhaps depicting more of Bluebeard’s victims during the film proper. Instead, he is forced to condense his narrative by merely showing fear and apprehension suffocating the Parisian streets at the mere presence of an unfamiliar face in the opening scenes. Second, Baston’s preoccupation with his puppets is overly distracting in that it is such an odd occupation that it should have served greater metaphorical value (as it does in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich). As it stands, puppeteering is merely posited as a segue for Baston to move from painting into another field by which to keep his mind engaged atop merely suggesting the dominating influence upon a particular character’s actions, that is, the murderous culprit’s bloodthirsty drive.
All in all, Edgar Ulmer’s Bluebeard is one of the greatest works in the Poverty Row canon. Instead of succumbing to his financial constraints, the director utilizes his restrictive circumstances as he directs John Carradine to one of his best (and rumored favorite) performances, the actor succinctly engaging the all-too-challenging technique of understatement that he acquired from his days in Shakespearian theater to optimum effect as his role more than compensates for the lack of visual bells and whistles as the risqué, daring script attempts to challenge the viewer, unlike many of the big budget affairs of Hollywood, then as well as now.
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