It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Austrian aristocrat Kurt Von Sepper (Richard Burton) is a celebrated WWI pilot with a striking blue beard and connections to the fledgling neo-Nazis. He's a real ladykiller. He meets and marries American vaudeville performer Anne (Joey Heatherton). After moving into his castle, she makes disturbing discoveries including his seeming inability to consummate their marriage. He gives her the keys to the castle with a golden key which leads to a freezer filled with his murdered former wives. He recounts to her the story of each wive and their faults which led to him murdering them. Anne plots her escape as she listens to his tales of horror.This is sold as an erotic thriller with an international cast of beauties such as Raquel Welch. Joey Heatherton has a sincere bouncy cuteness which fits the sincere vaudeville role. However, she is not the best of actresses. She has to be both inwardly horrified and outwardly placating the crazed killer. Her inconsistencies only add to the camp of this movie. Richard Burton is still a powerful actor but the material is strictly B-level. There are some very memorable kill scenes like the elephant tusk chandelier and the hawk. The erotic thrills are fleeting and the horror is old style weak. Most of it is in flashbacks which takes away any intensity. It is still a memorable camp classic.

Based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale which was written in the seventeenth century.This story was itself based on the life and times of Gilles De Rais,one of Joan of Ark's brothers in arms,who didn't kill women but children ,mainly young boys. Edward Dmytryk ,whose great movies ("Cross Fire" "The Juggler" "The sniper" "the Caine Mutiny" ) were a thing of long ago in 1972 ,only keeps the forbidden door from the original fairy tale and he replaced the bloody key by a photograph.Why not?One should note that the last wife is called Anne,like the famous sister of the story,herself replaced by a violinist . Perrault's heroine had no name."Blue Beard" was closer to the thriller (Blue Beard was a serial killer after all) than to Perrault's other tales and the screenwriters did not make any mistake when they made it a thriller.Christian-Jaque did the same in his own version featuring Pierre Brasseur and Cecile Aubry in 1951:it was a big failure.So is Dmytryk's movie.Most of the actresses were told to overplay and most of them (particularly the generally reliable Virna Lisi) are unbearable ,some of them even try lesbianism (Nathalie Delon,Alain's wife) or art or feminism.Their roles are what you can call "guest stars" ,so to speak .Dmytryk tried to combine Blue Beard with Nazism,but it is not convincing at all :the Crystal Night (November 1938) is sheer bad taste in this context.Richard Burton was an ideal Barbe Bleue and had he been well directed ,he could have been brilliant in and really frightening .But enough is enough and even the cold room episode fails to impress.

Enjoyable, campy fun featuring a number of beautiful women, most of whom go nude, a seductive score by Ennio Morricone, good old fashioned direction from Edward Dmytryk that stresses atmosphere and setting, and that uses the flashback structure to good effect. Burton is an amusing Bluebeard and he's a lot more enjoyable here than he was in The ExorcistII(77), and Joey Heatherton who worked with Dmytryk in Where Love Has Gone(64)is well cast as the only American and the film's only likable character. Though Heatherton's look is not period, her charm and appeal to Burton's Bluebeard is believable, especially since most of Bluebeard's other wives are depicted somewhat unflatteringly. Though the film's treatment and attitude towards women is largely exploitive, and the film could be better paced, it's nonetheless diverting trash and thanks to a clever ad campaign and trailer it was a hit when released in theaters in 1972. The theatrical trailer is featured on Anchor Bay's DVD.

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.