Mad Chauvinist

BLUEBEARD

Directed by EDWARD DMYTRYK Screenplay by ENNIO Dl CONCINI, EDWARD DMYTRYK and MARIA PIA FUSCO

Richard Burton, once an actor, now performs mainly as a buffoon. In his latest exercise in melodrama, he even permits himself to be outfitted in a sort of jester's motley: outrageous mustard-colored blazer and lavender-trimmed evening clothes. His chin whiskers seem to have been dipped in a vat of Lady Clairol, so his blue beard is colored like a pair of muddy policeman's pants. All that is needed to complete the costume is cap and bells.

As Baron von Sepper, a World War I Austrian flying ace and an enthusiastic fascist, Burton feels a lugubrious vocation to dispatch a series of wives--Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon and several other international cupcakes. "They were all monsters," he explains. "They only looked human when they were dead." His eighth frau is an American, Joey Heatherton, who comes on like a refugee from a Tijuana specialty act. With good, home-grown American intuition, Joey discovers that the baron's problems are rooted in impotence and a rather baroque affection for his departed mother. The baron rewards this perception by imprisoning Joey in a freezing vault with the mutilated bodies of her seven predecessors.

Doggedly pursuing Von Sepper throughout his adventures is a young Jewish musician whose home and family were destroyed in a pogrom that the baron had initiated. Such an attempt at redeeming social significance is simply offensive, not only for its clumsiness and opportunism but because it uses the beginnings of genocide as the punch line in a campy dirty joke. J.C.

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