Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938, Ernst Lubitsch) (Patreon)

61/100

Anticipates The Lady Eve in many respects, minus the woman assuming a new identity for her revenge-as-equilibrium-restoring-second-seduction scheme. You'd think that'd be to its favor, since Sturges' screwball classic is among my dozen favorite features of all time, but I was perhaps too conscious of Bluebeard's comparative emotional flimsiness, with the rift hinging on Nicole's mild indignation at being treated like a commodity that'll eventually lose value. There's none of the genuine pain that Stanwyck's Jean experiences upon being spurned, and it's that depth of feeling, somewhat paradoxically, that powers all of the cartoon-nobility goofiness. Here, we get more of a conventional battle of the sexes, and Mr. Hays' Code forces Wilder and Brackett to dance around what I imagine was more explicit in the source play (not only written in 1921, but French to boot!), viz. that Nicole's primary weapon—her means of prodding Michael to divorce her, thereby triggering their lucrative pre-nup—is declining to consummate the marriage. I mean, it's perfectly clear, and the censor-imposed obfuscation does inspire one superb visual joke: our newlyweds in Venice, on a romantic nighttime canal excursion...in separate gondolas that pass each other rowing in opposite directions. Still feels slightly defanged, though, relative to what both Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise is among my 20 all-time favorites) and Wilder (three films in my top 25) could accomplish at their peak. Maybe it just needed an actor with more of a detectable libido than Cooper possessed—I can  heat this sucker up no small amount simply by imagining Gable in his place.

Still, it's often damn funny. Some gags feel unmistakably Wilder-esque (and seem unlikely to have originated onstage)—you know you're in good hands when an argument about whether a pajama top can be sold for half price, without its accompanying trousers, gets referred by telephone to the store's manager, who's still lounging in bed and arises, bare-legged, to insist that they must be sold as a set. Other exchanges, like one between Edward Everett Horton's deadbeat dad and two hotel employees who return Louis XIV's bathtub/washbasin ("Is there any message?" "Yes. Mr. Brandon said that you are—" "Maurice. Why make an enemy?"), couldn't be better tailored to Lubitsch's penchant for bone-dry elegance. Nifty farcical plotting, presumably straight from the play, in a husband lying about his travel plans so that he can sneak home and catch his wife red-handed not cheating on him, followed by the wife learning of his plan and engineering a phony fling that itself goes badly awry. There's plenty to enjoy, and perhaps it's churlish to complain that these characters remain entirely bound by writers' machinations, lacking even the illusion of agency. (Colbert's a pro, but she can't really make sense of Nicole's wild, instantaneous swings from apathy to ardor, acceptance to outrage.) It's second-tier work by everyone involved, but I can't pretend that there's nothing bracing about a Depression-era comedy in which a woman tells her millionaire husband, "I'm your worst investment. I don't pay any dividends and I'm proud of it."