Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
Bluebeard
A Paris puppeteer paints the women he strangles, and the police are looking at his portraits.
PRC was the poorest studio on Poverty Row, and Ulmer made it look like the Left Bank. Eugen Schüfftan, the man behind the effects of Metropolis, designed the gaslit Paris out of painted skies and a few streets, and the film never feels cheap where it counts. John Carradine plays the strangler as an artist who hates what his hands do, the gentlest performance of his career. Watch the marionette Faust early on: Ulmer stages a whole opera on a tabletop, and the puppets are lit with more care than most stars that year.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Edgar G. Ulmer
- Photographed by
- Eugen Schüfftan
- With
- Ludwig Stössel · George Irving · John Carradine · Jean Parker · Nils Asther · Henry Kolker
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.