This film has a lot of neat ideas, some beautiful women, and Burton as world-weary Baron with a campy, phony, middle-European accent. The script is clever and the sets are lavish, with Bluebeard's estate evoking E. A. Poe's Prince Prospero's: a different color dominating each separate room.
Only Dmytryk fails as a director. The material frankly begs for someone like a Roger Vadim or even Roger Corman. BLUEBEARD should have been more fun, more intelligent than the Vincent Price movies of the time (such as THEATRE OF BLOOD) or even those of Roger Vadim (such as PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW), and yet it isn't. The script demands macabre humor and erotica, and Dmytryk couldn't deliver either, even in his heyday (and this film was made at the end of his slow, sad artistic decline).
However, I personally enjoy this movie more for what it could have been than what it is. Unlike Chaplin's MONSUIER VERDOUX, and other "Bluebeard" movies directed by various people (from Edgar G. Ulmer to Claude Chabral) this is one film not inspired by the true story of Landru. It much more hearkens back to the original Perrault fairytale, only done in the modern times with Burton's Bluebeard as a proto-Nazi. It's not a bad idea for a film, but someone more hip, with more energy, was needed to pull it off.
Only Dmytryk fails as a director. The material frankly begs for someone like a Roger Vadim or even Roger Corman. BLUEBEARD should have been more fun, more intelligent than the Vincent Price movies of the time (such as THEATRE OF BLOOD) or even those of Roger Vadim (such as PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW), and yet it isn't. The script demands macabre humor and erotica, and Dmytryk couldn't deliver either, even in his heyday (and this film was made at the end of his slow, sad artistic decline).
However, I personally enjoy this movie more for what it could have been than what it is. Unlike Chaplin's MONSUIER VERDOUX, and other "Bluebeard" movies directed by various people (from Edgar G. Ulmer to Claude Chabral) this is one film not inspired by the true story of Landru. It much more hearkens back to the original Perrault fairytale, only done in the modern times with Burton's Bluebeard as a proto-Nazi. It's not a bad idea for a film, but someone more hip, with more energy, was needed to pull it off.