Rent Bluebeard's 8th Wife (1938)

Mixed Comedy. - Bluebeard's 8th Wife review by Steve

This looks fabulous on paper. It's directed by the maestro of the sophisticated, studio era sex comedy, Ernst Lubitsch, who as usual adapts his story from a successful European play. There's a script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. It stars the  doyenne of '30s screwball, Claudette Colbert. And Gary Cooper was as big a star as anyone in the studio era.

Unfortunately it doesn't work. The contrived situations are heavy with salacious gags, but they fail to go off. Possibly because the slow and lugubrious Cooper is miscast. Lubitsch can't bring a sparkle to Wilder and Brackett's trademark cynicism and eventually the ironic tone gets tiresome. Though there is the most famous and inspired meet-cute in pictures.

An American tycoon (Cooper) on the Côte d'Azur is frustrated in his quest to buy pyjama tops as the posh department store won't separate them.  He encounters a penniless French aristocrat (Colbert) looking to purchase just the bottoms... At their wedding she discovers his seven previous marriages. So she- basically- withholds sex until he learns not to be a toxic male.

There's a regrettable male on female slap, though the wife wins the battle of the sexes through her wits. It's insubstantial frou-frou. There's some light subtext about the friction between US capitalism and European aristocracy but reality hardly intrudes. Colbert almost rescues it, and wears some eye-catching fashions. But everyone's best work is elsewhere.