Is Killing Women Bad?

Landru. The New Wave, which surf-boarded French Moviemaker Claude Chabrol to fame in Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, is receding, and the beach is littered with reels of cinematic flotsam. A fair sample is this Chabrol film based on the macabre amours of Henri Desire Lan dru, a French antique dealer, who whiled away World War I by having affairs with 283 women, only 273 of whom survived.

The screenplay and dialogue are by Franc,oise Sagan; she and Chabrol started out to do a picture about the life of George Sand, but became bored with the idea and switched from blue story to Bluebeard in mid-project. The film is mean to ladies in more ways than murder. Its closeups of fading Film Queens Danielle Darrieux and Michele Morgan constitute a photographic invasion of privacy. One corpulent beldam, a doomed weekend guest at Landru's Art Nouveau rookery near Paris, eats raspberries from Landru's hand and ends up with jam dribbling wretchedly down her chins.

How the baldheaded, spade-bearded little Lothario killed ten women is not shown, but his method of disposing of their remains is made clear: in the kitchen is a long black table, a meat grinder, and a small black stove. One victim sees the coal scuttles for her own cremation, and noxious black smoke puffing from Landru's chimney*hints at similar fates for others. Each smoke signal cues a clip from a World War I newsreel showing doughboys going over the top to their death. Chabrol thus seems to justify his Landru (to whom he and Sagan are lavishly sympathetic throughout the film) by suggesting that killing is killing, whether it happens at Verdun or in Landru's kitchen.

* As Charlie Chaplin did in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), based on the Landru legend.

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