La huitième femme de Barbe-bleue

Years before pre-nuptial agreements became a regular thing, Ernest Lubitsch made a screen comedy on which they are the basis. Bluebeard's Eighth Wife involves Gary Cooper as a multi-millionaire living on the French Riviera who's been married seven times and now marries Claudette Colbert for number eight. But Cooper's a good sport about it, he always settles with his ex-wives for a $50,000.00 a year as per an agreement they sign before marrying him. Sounds like what we now call a pre-nuptial agreement.

Of course Claudette wants a lot more than that and she feels Cooper takes an entirely too business like approach to marriage. She'd like the real deal and is willing to go some considerable lengths to get it.

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife has some really funny moments, the original meeting of Cooper and Colbert in a men's store where Cooper is insisting he wants only pajama tops and Colbert looking for only bottoms. And of course my favorite is Colbert trailing and blackmailing the detective Cooper sends to spy on her. Herman Bing has the best supporting role in the film as that selfsame, flustered detective.

I've often wondered how back in the day Hollywood could get away with casting so many people who are non-French in a film like this. Of course Cooper is an American and Colbert of the cast is the only one actually of French background. Though David Niven is charming as always, having him be a Frenchman is ludicrous, he is sooooooo British.

Nevertheless Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is an enjoyable film and a great example of what was called 'the Lubitsch touch' back in the day.

When my colleague suggested watching this movie, she showed me the Shakespeare-reading scene. As I found it really amusing, I later watched the whole piece. And I didn't regret the time I spent! To say honestly, I'm not the old movie addict who knows all the history of American and European film industry back to black-and-white silent pictures and being woken up at night can list all the prominent actors and directors. I'm not into movies at all, which is the reason that my watching list is highly haphazard with British series followed up by French melodramas and historical documentaries. Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is a really nice piece featuring good-looking actors, jokes, funny without the slightest trace of vulgarity. The plot is a turned inside out ''Taming of the Shrew'', and no wonder it appears as a book the main hero reads, as I mentioned at the beginning of my review. However, it is common knowledge that not the plot itself, but its presentation matters, and in this case it does not undermine expectations. The naivety of the old times has a special charm, especially the good old happy end, so enjoy!

'Absolutely delightful' sounds a bit twee doesn't it? The mid-thirties were awash with so-called 'sophisticated comedies' all pretty bland and predictable. This however has something special about it. It's not quite a laugh out loud comedy but it's genuinely charming and guaranteed to leave you a happier person.

What makes this a class above most offerings from 1938 is that you can't help loving the characters. Clearly it's easy to fall in love with Claudette Colbert but Gary Cooper's millionaire is surprisingly endearing too. He was excellent in the brilliant comedy BALL OF FIRE with Barbara Stanwyck but because you associate Gary Cooper with stoic, serious roles, when he's in a comedy, a genuinely funny comedy and he is genuinely funny himself, it really makes an impression. He's still every inch, the man's man but also oblivious to the ways of the fairer sex. That he tries to learn about how to treat troublesome women by reading The Taming of the Shrew is a classic piece of comedy.

Lubitsch was the undisputed master at making a simple battle of the sexes movies witty, loading it with sexual frustration and innuendo whilst still making it utterly charming.....but this was no simple battle of the sexes movie - this was written by Charles Bracket and Billy Wilder so Lubitsch didn't have to try too hard. Like any good comedy, the humour comes from your belief in the realness of the characters and this is such a well crafted 'rom com' that you're completely drawn into this silly but lovely picture. When it ends, you are smiling and you feel like applauding!

And of course, Claudette Colbert looks like a goddess!

There is something about seeing a movie in a good, old-fashioned movie house that adds enormous appeal to every picture. I, fortunately enough, was able to see at Film Forum in New York City a pair of Ernst Lubitsch comedies during their three week tribute to the legendary director. The double feature I attended was a screening of Lubitsch's 1938 comedy Bluebeard's Eighth Wife and the pre-Code classic Design for Living, neither of which I had seen before. Everything I read of Design for Living praised the film, but I could not find a good review anywhere for Bluebeard's Eighth Wife. Leonard Maltin disliked it.VideoHound, too, gave the comedy a low rating.its IMDB score was not complimentary.and Pauline Kael (not a great surprise) blasted the film in her scathing review. So, when I went into the city that day I was expecting to enjoy Bluebeard's Eighth Wife only slightly and love Design for Living completely. Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (which was showing first) began, as the eccentrics who populate the cinema took their seats and the thirties music subsided. `Adolph Zukor presents Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper in Ernst Lubitsch's Bluebeard's Eighth Wife,' the title card read. Then the picture opened with a hilarious scene: Cooper wants to buy a pair of pajama tops, but he doesn't want any part of the bottoms! He gets into a squabble with the clerk, who seeks the help of his higher bosses, and their seems to be no end to the argument. Enter Claudette Colbert, one of thirties cinema's most beautiful, charming, and talented personalities. `I'll take the bottom,' she kindly intercedes. And there you have perhaps screwball comedies finest `meet cute' ever. The film kept my interest wonderfully.I found myself laughing almost constantly. When Colbert discovers, just before a family portrait is taken, that her groom-to-be has been married seven times, the entire theatre broke into histerics. When she bargains for money immediately after she gets over her shock, the laughs (which still haven't ceased) intensify. And Edward Everett Horton milked some hilarious reactions out of the script as well. When Cooper takes inspiration from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in disciplining his wife by slapping her in the face, I could not control my laughter when she slapped him back. And the drunk scene with the scallions is one of Claudette Colbert's funniest comic scenes. The greatest comic moment of the film came when Colbert highers a boxer to `teach her husband a lesson.' In pure screwball fashion, he knocks out the wrong man, instead putting her friend David Niven into a cold sleep. He awakes as Cooper is arriving. In order to cover up the situation, Colbert herself, in a moment of strong sexiness, puts her fist up to Niven, asks: `Where did that man hit you? Here? Right here? Right here?' and then BAM! knocks him out again! The film was wonderful, from beginning to end it was a perfect delight. I loved Design for Living, too, though I dare say I think for sheer laughs and entertainment Bluebeard's Eighth Wife was the better and more enjoyable film. There is some charm of seeing a vintage film on the large screen. And in the presence of others laughing, one feels more comfortable doing so himself. That is, perhaps, why I felt the way I did about Bluebeard's Eighth Wife.

Oh Lubitsch how we needed you. Others could elicit fiery performances from actors, captivate with riveting story or lavish us with sets and camera magic. These usually require to be propped up with some effort, but what Lubitsch does simply requires letting go of, in particular letting go of our need to prop up fiction a certain way.

Usually understood as a gift for wit, his famed 'Lubitsch touch' is actually a mastery of something else, spontaneous illogicality. I have written about him in a few other posts so will not bore you here. It's the continuous shift of context, the dismantling of our expectation that story plays out a certain way.

The story could be anything, here a man and woman court each other while vacationing in the French Riviera. He's the blustering American type who won't take no and won't tiptoe around European niceties. She's elegant and smart but will not stoop to be wowed by money like her shyster father.

In the usual mode, they would brush and bounce off each other whilst trying to top each other for control over the story. This as hardwon love that surprises. That's fine, plenty of enjoyable films were being made in this time, what we now know as screwball. For me it's all a matter of how we brush, how much narrative space the players create by pushing and pulling, in which self can take shape, actual visible shape, as the story we watch. Capra has a very agile touch in It Happened One Night. I happen to find His Girl Friday coarse, par the course for Hawks.

In Lubitsch's world, we shift and shift again in a jazz merry-go-round of elusive self. Here's some of it. They meet as strangers in a store, cooperating over trying to buy pyjamas. He decides he's smitten, but uses money to come close to her. So what happens? She agrees to be bought as a wife but gives him a thankless marriage for it, although in love herself.

This is lovely work, clean, vibrant. Some if are just gags, like having married seven times before her. But quite a bit of it is that wondrous surprise where emotions express themselves in paradoxical ways.