Bluebeard

Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard (1944) is a horror picture of barely 72 minutes, built upon a familiar fairy-tale premise, a modest handful of sets and the sort of resource constraints that characterised much of Ulmer’s work. Yet, like so many of his films, it proves considerably more interesting once one looks beyond its limitations. Starring the wonderfully sinister John Carradine as Gaston Morrell, Bluebeard transforms the familiar legend into a dark tale of murder, artistic obsession and pathological desire, set against the shadowy streets of nineteenth-century Paris.

Beneath its lurid premise, however, lies something considerably more intriguing: a meditation on artistic obsession, frustrated desire, beauty, rejection and the perilous consequences of confusing art with possession. The film is also an early and fascinating hybrid of Gothic horror and what would soon become film noir, arriving at a moment when the visual and psychological vocabulary of noir was only beginning to crystallise.

Ulmer transposes Charles Perrault’s legendary Bluebeard into nineteenth-century Paris, but with a significant transformation. His Bluebeard is not a wealthy aristocrat who murders his wives, but Gaston Morrell, a portrait painter and puppeteer who initially presents himself as a cultivated, sensitive and rather mysterious artist. Paris is being terrorised by a murderer who strangles women and disposes of their bodies in the Seine. Morrell, meanwhile, continues to paint portraits of women, apparently captivated by their beauty. He is also involved with an open-air puppet theatre, where his miniature performances provide some of the film’s most memorable and suggestive imagery.

Morrell becomes acquainted with Lucille, a young dressmaker played by Jean Parker, who agrees to design costumes for his puppets. An attraction develops between them almost immediately. Yet Lucille, without realising it, has entered the orbit of a murderer. Morrell’s former lover, Renee, becomes jealous of Lucille and consequently meets a fatal end. An art dealer, Jean Lamarte, has his own reasons for protecting Morrell, since the paintings of the murdered women possess considerable value. Meanwhile, Inspector Lefevre, played by Nils Asther, attempts to connect the increasingly mysterious murders with the enigmatic artist.

The film belongs, above all, to John Carradine. His Gaston Morrell is considerably more interesting than the conventional horror-film psychopath. Carradine does not portray him as a ranting, grotesque monster. Morrell is cultured, articulate and aesthetically obsessed; he moves through the film with an almost mournful elegance. His horror derives precisely from the contradiction between his outward refinement and the violence concealed beneath it. There is something particularly unsettling about the manner in which Carradine combines gentleness with menace. He can appear genuinely enthralled by beauty one moment and become terrifyingly cold the next. His long, angular face and unmistakable voice contribute enormously to the character’s otherworldly presence.

Bluebeard becomes considerably more interesting than its title might suggest. Morrell is an artist whose creative process has become grotesquely inseparable from destruction. He paints women, becomes obsessed with them, and then kills them. The film consequently constructs an unsettling equation: to paint is to possess; to possess is to destroy.

Perhaps the film’s most inspired conceit is making Morrell a puppeteer as well as a painter. The puppets are not merely decorative curiosities. They create a miniature theatrical universe in which human beings become objects manipulated by unseen hands. The extended puppet performance of Faust is particularly striking. The symbolism may be almost painfully obvious, but it is nevertheless effective.

Morrell manipulates his puppets while attempting to manipulate the people around him. He constructs artificial worlds in which beauty, desire and death can be controlled. Yet his own existence gradually becomes another puppet drama, with his obsessions pulling the strings. The distinction between performer, artist and murderer consequently begins to dissolve. The puppet theatre also gives Ulmer an opportunity to externalise Morrell’s psychology. Rather than merely narrating his pathology, the film creates a miniature stage upon which his obsessions can be projected.

And Ulmer is perhaps the real reason to watch Bluebeard today. He was one of cinema’s great practitioners of making something out of almost nothing. Working with limited resources, he nevertheless manages to create a remarkably convincing Gothic atmosphere. His Paris may not be particularly persuasive as a literal recreation of nineteenth-century France, but geographical realism is hardly his concern. This is an expressionistic Paris of narrow streets, shadowy interiors, theatrical spaces and mysterious workshops — a psychological landscape rather than a geographical one. For this particular story, that is far more appropriate.

The cinematography provides another reason for the film’s enduring interest. Eugen Schüfftan was involved with the photography, and the visual style bears unmistakable traces of German Expressionism. Darkness frequently overwhelms the frame; characters appear imprisoned within cramped interiors; shadows acquire an almost tangible physicality. The camera occasionally moves or tilts in ways that make an apparently solid world seem subtly unstable. Reality itself appears to have been infected by Morrell’s diseased imagination.

To call Bluebeard a film noir is not entirely straightforward, since the term and its conventions were still evolving in 1944. Nevertheless, the film unmistakably anticipates noir. It contains the morally compromised protagonist, the nocturnal urban environment, the obsessive male psyche, the fatalistic atmosphere, the chiaroscuro photography and, above all, the sense that desire is inexorably drawing its protagonists towards destruction. Gothic horror and noir here seem less like separate genres than two shadows cast by the same psychological darkness.

Jean Parker’s Lucille is important because she provides the film with something Morrell conspicuously lacks: a connection with ordinary human existence. Initially attracted to Morrell’s artistic personality, she becomes fascinated by his puppets and is gradually drawn into his peculiar world. Yet, unlike his previous victims, Lucille begins to recognise the danger surrounding her.

Her sister Francine, played by Teala Loring, is associated with the police and becomes instrumental in the attempt to expose Morrell. Having encountered him briefly at Lucille’s apartment, she participates in a scheme to have Morrell paint her portrait. The stratagem brings her dangerously close to the murderer and ultimately helps reveal the identity of the elusive Bluebeard.

Ludwig Stössel’s Jean Lamarte provides another intriguing dimension. He knows that Morrell is dangerous, yet his interest in the paintings makes him willing to overlook the murders. The film thereby introduces, albeit somewhat tentatively, another theme: the commodification of art. Morrell produces paintings through murder; Lamarte transforms those paintings into money. Artist and dealer thus become two participants in the same morally compromised economy. 

What makes Bluebeard particularly interesting today is its rudimentary but fascinating psychological portrait of a serial killer: a man consumed by rejection, aesthetic idealisation and an apparently uncontrollable compulsion to kill every woman whose beauty he attempts to capture on canvas. Ulmer does not simply tell a story about a murderer; he constructs a strange cinematic world in which artistic creation and annihilation become disturbingly intertwined.

The film may be modest in scale, occasionally constrained by its budget and unmistakably rooted in the conventions of its era. Yet Ulmer transcends many of these limitations through atmosphere, visual imagination and psychological suggestion. Expressionistic shadows, claustrophobic spaces, sinister puppetry and the recurring imagery of artistic creation give the film a resonance far beyond its modest production values.

Above all, John Carradine gives Bluebeard its extraordinary centre. His Morrell is cultured, melancholic, seductive and horrifying in almost equal measure. He is not merely a monster lurking in the shadows; he is a man who has transformed his wounded conception of beauty into an instrument of death. And perhaps that is the film’s most disturbing idea: that the impulse to create, when corrupted by the desire to possess, can become indistinguishable from the impulse to destroy.

Bluebeard is one of Edgar G. Ulmer’s fascinating films  — a compact, atmospheric and psychologically suggestive piece of Gothic cinema that stands at an intriguing crossroads between German Expressionism, horror and the emerging language of film noir.