The eighth film by Claude Chabrol, one of the founders of the French “New Wave,” was this perversely elegant 1963 take on the career of notorious serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, who was convicted of eleven murders at his 1921 trial but was probably guilty of many more, and executed shortly thereafter, never confessing his guilt.
In the script by noted French writer Françoise Sagan (Bonjour Tristesse), Landru (Charles Denner)—the original title of the film, altered to the more generalized Bluebeard for the international market—is portrayed as a strangely formal little man of impeccable manners whose business of selling second-hand furniture does not bring in sufficient funds to support his large family—a wife and four children—as well as his nubile mistress (Stéphane Audran).
To supplement his inadequate income, he romances women whom he courts through newspaper advertisements using pseudonyms. After a stroll in the park where he meets them on a bench beside the bandstand, he takes the women to a villa outside Paris to murder and burn their dismembered bodies after gaining control of their bank accounts, causing the neighbors to comment on the awful smell but do nothing about it.
The police, presented as a sadly incompetent bunch, have little luck in tracking him down until many women have disappeared, and as a counterpoint to the highly stylized treatment of his methodical homicidal work—notable for its fastidious set and costume design and gorgeous cinematography by François Rabier—Chabrol periodically inserts black-and-white footage of the far greater carnage occurring simultaneously on the Western Front. (The contrast is part of the film’s scathingly satirical view of the bourgeois “respectability” of the time—a common theme running through Chabrol’s oeuvre.)
The actresses playing Landru’s victims—including such grandes dames of French cinema as Michèle Morgan and Danielle Darrieux—are given little to do but wear their period dresses with aplomb and smile wistfully at the attention their duplicitous suitor showers on them; the film belongs unquestionably to Denner, who exudes creepy cunning as a most physically unlikely ladies’ man, as well as righteous indignation as he responds contemptuously to the charges against him in the long final act covering his trial.
A welcome complement to Chaplin’s 1947 Monsieur Verdoux, another black comedy inspired by the Landru case. The sole extra, apart from a selection of trailers, is an audio commentary by film historian Kat Ellinger. Recommended, especially to collections in French cinema.