Shout! Factory sneakily released a Blu-ray of one of my favorite so-bad-it’s-good movies- Bluebeard starring Richard Burton and sex-kitten Joey Heatherton. I remember vividly seeing this 1972 stinker in a sparsely attended movie theater and had to jam my scarf down my throat to stifle the unintentional laughter that kept surging up. But to see it looking beautiful on Blu-ray is a joy indeed and watching it again after so many years I was relieved to find it still God-awful and still unbearably hilarious.
Richard Burton plays Baron Von Sepper, an ace flyboy and World War I war hero, who lives in a massive castle and is revered by the town elders. He also commands a group of crypto-Nazis raiding and decimating Jewish sections of town. He is also a literal lady-killer, wedding or wooing a series of women who are never seen alive again. And yes, his beard is actually blue!
His newest bride is a sexy American vaudeville star Anne (Joey Heatherton). Her musical number is laughably modern and ends in a split on stage and a wet-lipped sexy smile at the Baron who is instantly smitten. He weds her and in very Grimm’s fairy tale-mode gives her the keys to the castle but warns her that one gold key she can never ever use.
Joey Heatherton was an actress, singer and dancer and major sex symbol in the 60s and 70s. But it was her dubious movie career that I was obsessed with- mainly because the movies were so risibly trashy. Where Love Has Gone, based on the Harold Robbins novel based on the Lana Turner/Johnny Stompanato murder was a hoot. Or Twilight of Honor, a courtroom melodrama starring Richard Chamberlain which included a jaw-dropping scene where Joey Heatherton does a wild, lewd dance to a jukebox in a bar. Then there’s My Blood Runs Cold, a ludicrous thriller where she starred alongside 60s teen heartthrob Troy Donahue. And who can forget her Oscar-worthy performance in The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington? While Bluebeard is supposedly a period piece, Heatherton makes no attempt to look of that era with her short, trendy shag hairdo. In the film she finds life with her Baron husband frustrating. She swills champagne and complains to her former dance partner, “We still haven’t made love. Do you understand?” She also horrifyingly comes across the creepy old maid-servant in a room with his mother’s corpse, dutifully brushing her dead hair. The Baron calms Anne down and says he fired the maid and “Mother’s body has been put back in the crypt.” Well, that’s a relief. Later we see the maid’s corpse floating in a wooden wine keg in the basement.
The Baron delights in taking sexy photographs of Anne in a revealing see-through black lace outfit, but still hasn’t consummated their marriage.
Anne’s curiosity finally gets the best of her and she finds the hidden room the gold key opens and it’s a deep freeze filled with all of her husband’s dead female victims. The Baron catches her and she tries to placate him by making a favorite American dish of Jello! But he wearily says he will have to kill her anyway for discovering his deadly secret. She decides to stretch for time by making him recount the reasons for his kills and then we get to watch back stories of the doomed women in his life. There’s Virna Lisi as a woman who can’t keep flitting around in a pink boa and annoyingly bursting into songs like “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” (Jazz legend Annie Ross was the uncredited singing voice!) There’s Raquel Welch as a nun who can’t stop recounting the names of all her former lovers. It does go on, with dollops of female nudity to wake up any horny male moviegoers who dispiritedly stumbled into a theater to see this.
Burton wearily seems to sleepwalk through the film. Wearing lavender tuxedos, playing the organ with a hawk on his shoulder, or even gazing with disbelief at his sex-kitten bride. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review of the film, “There is no longer any novelty in watching the sad disintegration of Richard Burton’s acting career.”
In his autobiography, director Edward Dmytryk blamed the disaster on Richard Burton’s round-the-clock drinking, but there’s plenty of blame to go around. The film plays like it’s supposed to be a black comedy but all the laughs are unintentional. Thank God for Joey Heatherton who seems beamed in from another universe. One where she is always ready to burst into a glitzy song and dance and show off her perky breasts with pouty abandon. If you’ve never seen this movie you need to snap it up from Shout! Factory before this limited edition goes out-of-print.
This movie rivals Valley of the Dolls for laughs.
And didn’t Joey Heatherton hawk Serta Perfect Sleepers on TV back in the 70s?