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L'affaire Barbe-bleue, envisioned by Claude Chabrol as Balzacian puppet show to contrast with Monsieur Verdoux's Swiftian severities. Landru (Charles Denner) is introduced dome first from the back, his pointy beard the kind Groucho once quipped might go off like a rifle. Newsreel glimpses of the Great War disrupt the Béraud colors of the Parisian Belle Époque, "a life of blood and terror" for the courtly bourgeois murderer who scans the newspapers for marriage offers. Danielle Darrieux is the first doomed Miss Lonelyhearts, whose last view (a close-up in freeze-frame that fades to black) is a particularly aching bit of paralysis for an actress associated with Ophülsian movement. Other Special Guest Victims pop up like an inventory of European beauties past and present: Michèle Morgan and Juliette Mayniel, Mary Marquet and Catherine Rouvel, dowager and nymph alike go into the stove and up the chimney. ("These French are so unhygienic," grouse the old British couple next door.) The German widow (Hildegard Knef) is barely saved by news of the Armistice, though the Final Girl turns out to be the chic mistress (Stéphane Audran) who enters like Joan Fontaine in Suspicion and receives Citizen Kane's singing lesson. "I love everything healthy and beautiful," proclaims Landru, no scabrous rebel against a beastly world but instead a comfortably conformist outgrowth of it. ("Equilibrium" is a pet word of the monstrous aesthete, a dutiful husband and father.) Chabrol's study is a jaundiced waltz, a poisoned heart under a perfumed surface, a rich Ealing vein richly mined. Faced with pile after pile of evidence of his crimes, the protagonist leans back in the courtroom and scratchily yet serenely declares himself innocent. For the killer as well as for the filmmaker scrutinizing him, human nature is finally "juste un petit secret" between you and the guillotine. Truffaut helps himself to Denner for the critique, The Man Who Loved Women. With Françoise Lugagne, Claude Mansard, Robert Burnier, Mario David, Jean-Louis Maury, and Jean-Pierre Melville.
--- Fernando F. Croce |