There's a lot of commentary about why this first collaboration between director Ernst Lubitsch and the writers Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder doesn't quite work, and a lot of it has to do with the casting of Gary Cooper as a millionaire who keeps marrying women that catch his fancy. I'm not sure that's right. The idea that Cooper was miscast as a womanizer seems silly to me. He seemed to have been in the middle of a slow and steady change in image from his earlier, more obviously sexual idea into something a bit more homebody and innocent as in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. However, blaming a film's awkwardness on casting often feels like an easy critical out. I think the problem here is the writing. The script was apparently being worked on for a solid year before it went before cameras, and the over-writing feels obvious to the point where the actual creative team was so suffused in the material for so long that they ended up taking for granted how it would play to someone walking into the movie without having been familiar with the source material by Alfred Savoir.
Lubitsch was obviously trying to find his footing in this new era ruled by the Hays Office, and, after the straight drama that was Angel, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is an attempt to bring Lubitsch's comedic sensibilities into that new era. I would say that the comedy largely works, but the actual laying out of the plotting is off. There's an opaqueness to what's going on that prevents our investment in characters, the sort of thing that even in farce is usually pretty easy to figure out.
Anyway, Cooper plays Michael Brandon, a rich speculator and industrialist on vacation in the French Riviera. He has a problem, though. He needs a new pajama shirt, and he refuses to purchase the bottom half of the set. In walks Nicole (Claudette Colbert) who is out looking for just the bottoms for another man. Michael is smitten with her immediately, and she, not really knowing who he is, is somewhat dismissive of him. She remains on his mind though, even through his sleepless nights where he tries to apply her sleeping aid of spelling Czechoslovakia backwards. He cannot sleep in this place, and he demands a room change, leading him to barge into a new room where the deadbeat Marquis de Loiselle (Edward Everett Horton) is still in bed, wearing the bottom half of the pajamas that Michael purchased. This is Nicole's father, and in order to help him win Nicole's heart, Michael agrees to purchase a bathtub that was supposedly owned by Louis XIV as well as accepting the Marquis' business proposal. It works, and Nicole is in his arms. Upon their engagement announcement party, though, Nicole learns the torrid truth that Michael has been married seven times before, each ex-wife receiving a $50,000 a year separation package upon the divorce.
This is where the film gets opaque. Nicole is angry, and she demands $100,000 a year in case of divorce in the instance of Michael getting tired of her and walking away. She never explains why she does this to anyone, and the quick montage of their honeymoon that shows the fast deterioration of their relationship to the point where they live on opposite sides of the same large apartment in Paris is unsupported by character motivation. It becomes clear by the end of the film, but there's a solid hour of screentime until then. For that hour, it's all about Nicole trying to convince Michael to divorce her. She tries creating distance between them, which doesn't work. Michael is angry, but he's not willing to divorce. She tries to repel him by chewing on onions just as they are about to kiss for the first time at a nice dinner. She brings in a boxer in order to convince Michael that she's having an affair, but the young man she had been spending some time with in the Riviera, Albert (David Niven), mixes things up and gets punched instead.
These events are amusing on their own, but I simply did not understand Nicole while she did it. I really didn't understand what she was doing or why, and it kept me from investing anything in what was going on.
It turns out that it's all an effort to make sure that the marriage is true and filled with love, and I simply don't think the way it plays out works. It's just too opaque from a character point of view for way too long, and it undermines so much of the comedy. It still works from a basic comedic structure point of view, but we're lost in a narrative murkiness that, despite the last minute clarifications, never really lifts. It feels like comedy in search of purpose, and I wonder if it was intentional or an oversight. Was it Wilder, Brackett, and Lubitsch trying to be coy with the audience? I'm not sure. I really get the sense that it's simply a miscalculation on their part about assuming a particular investment and level of knowledge of internal character motivations that they failed to actually build in as they spent a year searching for the comedy that Lubitsch wanted.
I think Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is a misfire. The character denouement doesn't hit hard enough to make up for the narrative opaqueness that precedes it. It's amusing pretty consistently, heavily helped by the charming leads in Cooper and Colbert, but Lubitsch is simply not operating at the same level here as he did in things like The Smiling Lieutenant or The Merry Widow.
Lubitsch was obviously trying to find his footing in this new era ruled by the Hays Office, and, after the straight drama that was Angel, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is an attempt to bring Lubitsch's comedic sensibilities into that new era. I would say that the comedy largely works, but the actual laying out of the plotting is off. There's an opaqueness to what's going on that prevents our investment in characters, the sort of thing that even in farce is usually pretty easy to figure out.
Anyway, Cooper plays Michael Brandon, a rich speculator and industrialist on vacation in the French Riviera. He has a problem, though. He needs a new pajama shirt, and he refuses to purchase the bottom half of the set. In walks Nicole (Claudette Colbert) who is out looking for just the bottoms for another man. Michael is smitten with her immediately, and she, not really knowing who he is, is somewhat dismissive of him. She remains on his mind though, even through his sleepless nights where he tries to apply her sleeping aid of spelling Czechoslovakia backwards. He cannot sleep in this place, and he demands a room change, leading him to barge into a new room where the deadbeat Marquis de Loiselle (Edward Everett Horton) is still in bed, wearing the bottom half of the pajamas that Michael purchased. This is Nicole's father, and in order to help him win Nicole's heart, Michael agrees to purchase a bathtub that was supposedly owned by Louis XIV as well as accepting the Marquis' business proposal. It works, and Nicole is in his arms. Upon their engagement announcement party, though, Nicole learns the torrid truth that Michael has been married seven times before, each ex-wife receiving a $50,000 a year separation package upon the divorce.
This is where the film gets opaque. Nicole is angry, and she demands $100,000 a year in case of divorce in the instance of Michael getting tired of her and walking away. She never explains why she does this to anyone, and the quick montage of their honeymoon that shows the fast deterioration of their relationship to the point where they live on opposite sides of the same large apartment in Paris is unsupported by character motivation. It becomes clear by the end of the film, but there's a solid hour of screentime until then. For that hour, it's all about Nicole trying to convince Michael to divorce her. She tries creating distance between them, which doesn't work. Michael is angry, but he's not willing to divorce. She tries to repel him by chewing on onions just as they are about to kiss for the first time at a nice dinner. She brings in a boxer in order to convince Michael that she's having an affair, but the young man she had been spending some time with in the Riviera, Albert (David Niven), mixes things up and gets punched instead.
These events are amusing on their own, but I simply did not understand Nicole while she did it. I really didn't understand what she was doing or why, and it kept me from investing anything in what was going on.
It turns out that it's all an effort to make sure that the marriage is true and filled with love, and I simply don't think the way it plays out works. It's just too opaque from a character point of view for way too long, and it undermines so much of the comedy. It still works from a basic comedic structure point of view, but we're lost in a narrative murkiness that, despite the last minute clarifications, never really lifts. It feels like comedy in search of purpose, and I wonder if it was intentional or an oversight. Was it Wilder, Brackett, and Lubitsch trying to be coy with the audience? I'm not sure. I really get the sense that it's simply a miscalculation on their part about assuming a particular investment and level of knowledge of internal character motivations that they failed to actually build in as they spent a year searching for the comedy that Lubitsch wanted.
I think Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is a misfire. The character denouement doesn't hit hard enough to make up for the narrative opaqueness that precedes it. It's amusing pretty consistently, heavily helped by the charming leads in Cooper and Colbert, but Lubitsch is simply not operating at the same level here as he did in things like The Smiling Lieutenant or The Merry Widow.