Bluebeard’s Castle (1963)

In 1960 Peeping Tom ended Michael Powell’s career as a film director in Britain. After that he took work where he could get it. Bluebeard’s Castle is a low-budget German TV-movie and in anyone else’s career it would be an oddity. But Powell’s career was full of oddities.

The project was conceived by Norman Foster, who was the producer and star, and production designer Hein Heckroth. Heckroth had worked with Powell and decided he’d be the ideal choice to direct. So this was not a Michael Powell project from the outset.

It was intended for television broadcast but shot in colour so as to allow for a possible theatrical release as well. It was completed and then pretty much sank without trace until its rediscovery in the late 70s.

It’s a filmed version of Bartók’s very obscure 1911 opera.

It is obviously based on the fairy tale.

The libretto by Béla Balázs strips the fairy tale’s plot down to almost nothing. It becomes a psychological exploration.

In the film Bluebeard’s eighth wife Judith arrives at his castle to find that there are seven locked rooms. She insists on having the seven doors opened.

It’s all heavily symbolic. The doors don’t really lead to rooms in the castle, they lead to compartments of Bluebeard’s mind. Judith hopes that she will learn what makes her husband tick. What she finds is lots of darkness. But she finds no explanations. Neither Judith nor the audience has any idea why Bluebeard’s other wives met such unpleasant ends.

In the accompanying interview film critic Ian Christie suggests that it’s all rather Freudian and very very Jungian. It probably is. There are lots of elements that are symbolic of something although I have no idea what. The weaknesses of the film are undoubtedly inherent in Balázs’s libretto so Powell cannot be blamed.

The production design is all full-blown artistic modernism (and artistic modernism is one of my least favourite things in all the world). The visuals are extraordinary and wildly imaginative although also extremely ugly. Some of the visuals are effectively startling and memorable but some just seem overdone. But they are interesting and if you have more of a taste for modernism in art than I have you’ll enjoy them more than I did.

The ugliness was no doubt intentional - to represent the ugliness inside Bluebeard’s mind but since we have no idea of the reasons for his inner darkness the impact is not all it should be.

I’m also not particularly a Bartók fan which probably didn’t help.

This movie was a logical step for Powell. Powell and Pressburger had had a huge artistic and commercial success with their ballet movie The Red Shoes. They had followed it up with the even more ambitious The Tales of Hoffmann which combines ballet, opera and cinematic magic in a breathtaking way. It was not, alas, a commercial hit. Bluebeard’s Castle was done much more cheaply on a much smaller scale but it’s no surprise that Powell was delighted to get the directing gig and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

There are only two cast members. Ana Raquel Satre looks striking and is very good as the bewildered but adoring wife.

I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked this movie. I didn’t love it as much as I had hoped to but it is breathtakingly daring and visually extreme and in 1963 it was wild wild stuff. And it’s impossible not to admire Powell’s ambition. And its visual outrageousness is undiminished.

Bluebeard’s Castle is recommended as a unique slice of cinematic folie de grandeur.

The BFI Blu-Ray looks superb and there are some extras. This release includes the movie on DVD as well.