Beauty and the bastard

I've always wondered why Disney never made an animated version of "Bluebeard." Written in the late 17th century by Charles Perrault — the venerable and really kind of pervy creator of "Sleeping Beauty," "Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood" — it's a fairy tale like any other, full of castles and whimsy and magical social mobility. Then again, it also teaches young girls everywhere that if they get uppity, their husbands will murder them and hang them in a closet.

Far from being a pirate, Bluebeard is a nobleman known for having (and somehow losing) many wives. His charm and wealth overcome his reputation, so when he approaches two local girls and asks for one of their hands in marriage — he's not choosy — it doesn't take long for one of them to agree. One day, he leaves town, entrusting his new wife with the keys to several treasure chambers. One of them, like the Tree of Knowledge, is expressly forbidden. And of course she opens it. Inside are the bloody bodies of all his previous wives, rotting in gruesome testament to the sin of female curiosity. Fortunately, she ends up living, but not before killing Bluebeard.

"Bluebeard on Film," this week's series at Anthology Film Archives, is all about how the story has been translated by filmmakers with different perspectives. Fritz Lang? Gothic melodrama. Ernst Lubitsch? Screwball comedy. Feminist French director Catherine Breillat, whose "Bluebeard" is opening later in March? Depressingly literal adaptation. Everyone has a different take.

And then there's Charlie Chaplin, whose "Bluebeard" adaptation is the nuttiest of them all. Subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947) was ahead of its time and also the first film in which he ditched the Tramp character for something completely different. As Henri Verdoux, a French banker hit hard by recessionomics, he spends the movie conning women out of their life savings and then murdering them in order to support his real family.

Chaplin looks like Steve Martin in the new "Pink Panther" movies and speaks with clipped upper-class diction. He glides through the movie with caffeinated grace, charming old ladies with an abbreviated spiel and counting his francs with impossibly speedy fingers. When he kills his victims, he does so off-screen, in an orderly fashion, left alone by a camera that always seems to be his accomplice.

The film is wonderfully, deliriously deranged. It's the farthest thing from an adaptation of "Bluebeard" in which you could imagine Kristen Stewart sulking around. (That honor belongs to Breillat's film, which is like "Beauty and the Beast" with a morbidly insecure Belle.)

It's also unabashedly political. Everyone besides Chaplin sounds American in the most stupid, abrasive way possible. And when he's finally on trial for his crimes, he says outright that a few personal murders are nothing compared to the war effort.

I guess it's not a particularly faithful "Bluebeard" adaptation, but it suggests, perhaps, that this fairy tale is best left swimming around in the background as a template or a cultural pretext for other, more sophisticated forms of uxoricidal ridiculousness. Even Breillat's film, through two little girls that read the story and comment upon the action, seems to acknowledge that it's not the most enriching or uplifting fairy tale on Earth.

Girl 1: "You never laugh reading 'Bluebeard!'"
Girl 2: "I laugh inside my head."

"Bluebeard on Film" is playing March 3-7 at Anthology Film Archives. "Monsieur Verdoux" plays March 7.