Am I making too much of it? Perhaps. It is hard to be objective in these matters. It's just that certain actresses have a tactile and cuddly quality that can be fascinating even in the worst of movies. Mae West had this quality. People always talk about Mae West's one-liners, but I have just come back from the Venice Film Festival, where they showed every one of Mae West's films except "Myra Breckinridge" (God was good to the Venice Film Festival), and I don't think the one-liners have that much to do with it.
Mae West was acutely aware of the physical presence of other actors, and of the space separating them from her. When she did dialog with Cary Grant, she didn't just stand there and talk at him. Her eyes moved, and her body moved, and she always seemed to be in the midst of an appraisal. Joey Heatherton is something like this. She isn't self-conscious about her body, but she is conscious of it, and of her face and particularly of her mouth.
When she allows her lips to part, ever so slowly, she is making herself seem young and vulnerable. A person with a closed mouth is a person with a closed presence; the set of the jaw implies objectivity, sophistication and self-confidence. "Bluebeard" is a little over two hours long, and in all that time I do not believe Joey Heatherton has her mouth closed for much more than 25 seconds.
Joey Heatherton does something else in "Bluebeard" that is interesting. Let me set the stage. She is the seventh wife of the evil Count Bluebeard (Richard Burton), who is a crypto-Nazi who keeps his first six wives and a hapless prostitute in a deep-freeze hidden in his castle. They are dead, of course. He killed them because he is sadistic and impotent. So much for the movie's Freudian head scratching.
Anyway, Joey Heatherton plays a third-rate American vaudeville entertainer who becomes fascinated by Bluebeard's cold steel gaze, and she marries him. Then she discovers the deep-freeze - not entirely by accident. Bluebeard had left her the keys to the castle, you see, with a special warning not to use the golden key. Ha. Now Bluebeard must kill her. But first he tells her about his first seven victims, and we get a lot of flashbacks showing them drowning, suffocating, being skewered by rhinoceros horns, shot in hunting accidents, decapitated and attacked by trained hunting eagles. Bluebeard does not repeat himself.
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