General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Bluebeard (1963 film)

Bluebeard (French: Landru) is a 1963 French-Italian crime drama directed by Claude Chabrol, based on the true story of the French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, who was convicted of murdering eleven women at his 1921 trial and executed shortly afterward without ever confessing.¹ Written by Chabrol with the novelist Françoise Sagan, it stars Charles Denner as Landru, with Michèle Morgan, Danielle Darrieux, Hildegard Knef, and Stéphane Audran in supporting roles.² The film was released in France on 25 January 1963 under its original title, Landru, which was changed to the more general Bluebeard for the international market.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original / English title	Landru / Bluebeard²
Director and writers	Claude Chabrol (direction, scenario, dialogue); co-scenarist and co-dialoguist Françoise Sagan³
Release	25 January 1963 (France)³
Runtime	115 minutes (other listings give 112 to 119 minutes)⁴^•⁵
Technical format	Color, aspect ratio 1.66:1⁵
Key crew	Producers Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti; cinematographer Jean Rabier; editor Jacques Gaillard; composer Pierre Jansen⁶
Historical basis	Henri Désiré Landru, convicted of eleven murders in 1921 and executed shortly thereafter¹

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in Paris during the First World War. Landru, a seemingly respectable dealer in second-hand furniture, cannot earn enough to support his wife and four children, so he places advertisements in the lonely-hearts columns of newspapers under various assumed names.⁶^•³ He charms a succession of wealthy, middle-aged, and often solitary women, lures them to a rented villa at Gambais outside Paris, persuades them to sign over their possessions, murders them, and burns their bodies in his stove.⁶^•³

His downfall comes through a detail of his own meticulousness: the sister of one victim files a missing-person complaint and comes face to face with him, and police reconstructing his expense book notice that on each trip to Gambais he bought two single tickets but only one return.³ Arrested at his mistress's home, Landru is tried for his life before the Assizes of Versailles, where he denies the evidence, proclaims his innocence, and goes to the scaffold carrying his secret.³

Production

Chabrol made the film after a run of commercial failures with his challenging early New Wave pictures such as L'Oeil du malin and Les Bonnes femmes, and Landru marked a deliberate move toward the commercial mainstream: a costume drama set during the First World War, co-written with a popular novelist and starring established names like Michèle Morgan and Danielle Darrieux.⁶ A 1962 French television report on the shooting recorded Chabrol explaining that he and Sagan had chosen to bring the serial killer's story to the screen rather than a planned project on George Sand, and that he had selected Charles Denner for his physical resemblance to Landru.⁷

The cast mixes established stars with character actors and cameo appearances by cultural figures: the writer Raymond Queneau plays Georges Clemenceau, and the director Jean-Pierre Melville appears as Clemenceau's aide.⁸ During the shoot, producer Carlo Ponti objected to Stéphane Audran's performance, and Chabrol, already engaged to her, slapped him; the director and the actress married the following year.²

Style

A film without murders. In contrast to the black-and-white realism of Chabrol's Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, Landru is overtly theatrical, with pale pastel color and flat, stage-set-like scenery that the New Wave Film Encyclopedia describes as more influenced by silent cinema than by the neo-realism behind his earlier work.⁶ Chabrol deliberately withholds suspense and never shows Landru committing his crimes; instead the narrative proceeds by repetition and ellipsis, following the killer as he places advertisements, courts his respondents, and takes them to the villa, after which a dreamy close-up of each smiling victim is followed by a shot of smoke pouring from the chimney.⁶

The film intercuts this core narrative with newsreel footage of the war, domestic scenes with Landru's family, and nights at the opera. Chabrol juxtaposes the murders with the industrial-scale slaughter of the war, and comic touches, such as the elderly British neighbors complaining about the smell from the chimney, keep the viewer at a distance from the violence.⁶ The Torino Film Festival's synopsis describes the film as a sarcastic study of crime as an "artisan occupation" set against the war's genocide on an industrial scale, and as a tribute to silent cinema in its acting, fixed frontal framing, and theatrical settings.⁹

Landru himself is played as a contradictory figure, part dandy and part bourgeois, coldly calculating yet charming, and Chabrol keeps his motives opaque: money is suggested at first, but he also kills a poor maidservant played by Catherine Rouvel, and he shows no remorse even at the guillotine.⁶ Sagan herself said the intention was a "tender film, barely touched now and then by corpse-like emanations," explicitly not a horror film, though critics such as Stanley Kauffmann's reviewer found it neither gay nor essentially tender, and compared it with Charlie Chaplin's satirical treatment of the same story, Monsieur Verdoux (1947).¹⁰

Reception and legal dispute

The film premiered in Paris in February 1963. A Variety critic at a 5 February screening called it an "unusual offbeater" and a "spirited if uneven pic," while acknowledging that Sagan's script was both "deft" and "repetitive."¹¹ By the end of April it had drawn 306,767 paid admissions in France, a solid total for a New Wave filmmaker.¹¹

The release drew a real-world objection from Fernande Segret, the real Landru's mistress, then aged seventy, who tried to enjoin the film on the ground that it sullied her reputation. The Tribunal of the Seine dismissed her complaint, ruling that her relationship with Landru, begun when she was twenty-four, was already a matter of historical record that Sagan's screenplay took no particular liberties with; her appeals were dismissed again as late as 1967.¹¹

Later assessments have been mixed. The film holds a 6.4/10 rating on IMDb from about 1,400 users,² and Rotten Tomatoes lists a 64% Tomatometer from two reviews.¹² Slant Magazine's Budd Wilkins placed it in a period when Chabrol was moving away from the naturalism of his early New Wave films,¹² and the New Wave Film Encyclopedia calls it, in the context of the director's career, "an ornate, highly-crafted but eccentric objet d'art, as enigmatic and strange as Landru himself."⁶

Home video

Kino Lorber released the film on Blu-ray and DVD in 2021 under the title Bluebeard aka Landru, using a 4K restoration from the original camera negative, with an audio commentary by film historian Kat Ellinger and trailers; the disc presents the film at 1.66:1 with the original French soundtrack and removable English subtitles.⁵^•¹¹ In the United States the film has also been available for streaming on Kanopy.¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026