Do you call it “fight between lovers” or “rape attempts”?

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife

For all of those who have always wondered what the tagline of this blog is – Wilder had a sign on his door, which said “How would Lubitsch do it?” If I wanted to make a movie today, I’d probably ask myself the same thing about Wilder – he was the more versatile of the two and was great at very different genres, he had (as far as I could have seen) a better grasp of actors than Lubitsch did, and ultimately was more successful than Lubitsch. But strangely enough, the latter produced so many more movies I liked. There is a reason why Lubitsch is the only director with 2 movies among my all-time favorites, and that certainly does not mean he only had two brilliant movies. Recently, when I saw “The Philadelphia Story”, I was seriously worried that I might have become bored and tired of the screwball genre. After “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife”, I know that this is certainly not the case.

I read awhile ago that Claudette Colbert was very cunning and strong-willed when it comes to getting what she wants from the movie bosses. To me it seems that it is perfectly reflected in this film – she is something like the perfect woman here. Smart, perfectly attractive and at all times stronger than the guy, she’s a whirlwind like Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing up baby” but without being so annoying at first. I thought it was pretty obvious that she has set her eyes on the guy she wanted ever since the first second, and when she realized that he might be easy to get but hard to keep, she faces the challenge and takes her sympathetic schemes up a notch. I don’t think you usually see a woman “playing” a guy throughout half of a movie, and it naturally begs the question how appropriate it is. It was very reminiscent of my favorite part of “Ai Monogatari”, story number 5 in which the woman gets her guy back by smiling when he breaks up with her, and crying the moment she leaves by train. In both cases, the woman succeeds by not showing her feeling at a specific time in order to make somebody desire her. Bottom line, they play hard to get. I have a hard time approving that (I don’t think feelings should ever be played with) but I cannot help but admire the capability of people who can do that with such rationality.

As it is so often with these screwball comedies, it’s not really the storyline that counts, nor the premise or what happens at the end. Screwball comedies are all about how to get to the destination, and “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” was a storm of enjoyment. I loved how much the film inherited aspects of the silent era, no doubt still very fresh in Lubitsch’s mind. Certainly the film was full of funny dialogue, but there were enough scenes in which just actions were enough to make me laugh, such as the one in which the husband reads “The Taming of the Shrew”, unsuccessfully trying to adapt the play’s ideas to real life. Obviously this is not how you get a woman to love you, tsk tsk, Shakespeare is all but vain male fantasies. Besides a pleasant focus on people’s facial expressions and general gestures, the film uses music in a wonderful fashion. I was heavily impressed at how greatly the background music matched to the specific scene, especially the parts with the wedding music – first played in a happy, then in a sombre manner. Pure comedic gold. I don’t remember any other movie in which the music made me want to laugh.

Watching one Lubitsch film totally made me want to see more, especially now that it restored my faith in old comedies. (How could I have ever doubted them?) It’s too bad that most of them are rather hard to get.