EDITOR’S NOTE: Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 16, 1971 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, June 9, 1973 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, June 22, 1974 at 1:00 a.m.
This is a grand, cynical, deliciously cheap romp through the blood-soaked ledger of real-life French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru—a man who turned the lonely hearts ads of WWI-era Paris into a lucrative, deadly enterprise. Instead of Charlie Chaplin’s high-minded, darkly satirical spin on the same butcher (Monsieur Verdoux), director W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder’s brother, with about a tenth of the budget and none of the sentimentality) hands the bloodstained ledger to the ultimate velvet-voiced cynic: George Sanders.
Sanders plays Henri Landru, an art dealer who falls hopelessly in love with Odette (Corinne Calvet), a burlesque dancer with zero interest in him and an absolute penchant for milking him dry. When she invents a fake illness for her mother to fleece him for surgical cash, Landru sets out to secure the funds. After accidentally killing a young widow during an argument over vintage furniture—and realizing he can just quietly claim her estate and pocket the proceeds—Landru hits on a brilliant lightbulb moment: Why not make a full-time career out of wooing wealthy, lonely middle-aged women, marrying them under bogus aliases, drugging their drinks, stabbing them and selling off their heirlooms?
What makes this absurdly fun is how Sanders approaches serial murder like a weary accountant filing taxes. He doesn’t kill out of passion; he kills because the profit margins on estate liquidation are incredible. Forget driving for Uber or DoorDash—Landru’s side hustle is setting up fake names, wooing rich widows, slipping knock-out drops into their tea, popping them with a blade, and carting off their grandfather clocks. He works his way through a stacked lineup of British genre icons (Patricia Roc, Jean Kent, Greta Gynt, Maxine Audley) who show up just long enough to hand over their bank accounts and take a fatal nap.
The tragic irony? The entire bloodbath is financed just so he can keep his greedy stripper girlfriend dripping in ice. Naturally, the moment Landru catches Odette out on the town with her actual younger lover, he realizes he’s been played for a fool the whole time. Off to the villa she goes for the ultimate contract termination!
W. Lee Wilder shoots Paris via bleak Elstree Studios soundstages, giving the whole thing a claustrophobic, TV-movie grime. Sanders plays the role with his trademark, ice-cold apathy, exuding the exact same world-weary tone he brought to narrating Mondo shockers like Ecco. He looks bored out of his mind, yet he’s so inherently suave that watching him casually poison tea while wearing a bowler hat is pure joy. Add a nosy sister hot on his trail, a missing-persons investigation the police refuse to care about until the literal last minute, and a sudden drop of the guillotine blade to wrap up the running time in under 90 minutes, and you’ve got a movie.
