Paramount Pictures
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Bluebeard's 8th Wife
He married in haste and repeated with pleasure!
American multi-millionaire Michael Brandon marries his eighth wife, Nicole, the daughter of a broke French Marquis. But she doesn't want to be only a number in the line of his ex-wives and undertakes her own strategy to tame him.
- Original title
- Bluebeard's 8th Wife
- Language
- EN
- Country
- US
- Budget
- —
- Revenue
- —
tmdb28039023
Sep 15, 2022 · via TMDB
Bluebeard's Eighth Wife was the first of two collaborations between director Ernst Lubitsch and then up-and-coming screenwriter Billy Wilder. The film, all style and surface, is more Lubistch than Wilder, but the script co-written by Wilder and Charles Brackett (a tandem that would create, among others, The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard) lends itself perfectly to the famous 'Lubistch touch' — the German filmmaker’s characteristic shrewd and methodical humor. For Lubitsch, making laugh is like making love, and he isn’t the slightest bit interested in instant gratification; in fact, his approach is the comic equivalent of Hitchcock's definition of suspense. Michael (Gary Cooper) suffers from insomnia; Nicole (Claudette Colbert), whom he meets at the beginning of the story in the store where he goes to buy a pijama shirt (but no pants, which itself to an elaborately humorous visual gag), recommends “Professor Urganzeff's method ... take a long word, like 'Czechoslovakia' ... While you spell it backwards, you stretch and yawn between each letter … You only have to worry about 'slovakia.' By the time you get to "Czech" you will be fast asleep." The second half of the film actually takes place in Czechoslovakia, where we finally get the real punchline to a joke that Lubitsch set up some half-hour ago (and to top it off, near the end of the movie we find out that there really is a Professor Urganzeff). Michael is a 'serial husband'; marriage is such a revolving door for him that the suit he wears to his most recent wedding still has rice on it from the previous ceremony. Nicole is horrified to learn that Michael has been married seven times previously and calls off the wedding, much to her father's dismay. Michael explains that he gives each of his wives a prenuptial agreement that guarantees $50,000 a year for life if they divorce. Nicole agrees to marry for double that amount, and proceeds to apply withhold sex (not in so many words, of course) to precipitate a divorce and because otherwise "it wouldn't be fair to my next husband." As usual, Lubitsch knows that 'love' is not the stuff of drama but of farce, and that lovers are not so much to be pitied as ridiculed; on the other hand, he has a sincere appreciation for his characters, who are like little children, and he ultimately laughs with them, and not at them.
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Claudette Colbert
Nicole De Loiselle
Gary Cooper
Michael Brandon
Edward Everett Horton
Marquis De Loiselle
David Niven
Albert De Regnier
Elizabeth Patterson
Aunt Hedwige
Herman Bing
Monsieur Pepinard
Warren Hymer
Kid Mulligan
Franklin Pangborn
Assistant Hotel Manager
Rolfe Sedan
Floorwalker
Lawrence Grant
Professor Urganzeff
Tyler Brooke
Clerk
Leon Ames
Ex-Chauffeur (uncredited)
Gino Corrado
Waiter Arranging Furniture (uncredited)
Joseph Crehan
American Tourist (uncredited)
George Davis
Maurice (uncredited)
Lenore Aubert
Party Guest (uncredited)
Eugene Borden
Waiter on Stairs (uncredited)
Barlowe Borland
Uncle Fernandel (uncredited)
Marie Burton
(uncredited)
Dorothy Dayton
(uncredited)
Jean De Briac
Waiter in Hall (uncredited)
Sayre Dearing
Nightclub Patron (uncredited)
Pauline Garon
Customer (uncredited)
Grace Goodall
Nurse (uncredited)
Sacha Guitry
Man Leaving Hotel in France (uncredited)
Charles Halton
Monsieur de la Coste (uncredited)
Chuck Hamilton
Male Nurse in Sanitarium (uncredited)
Olaf Hytten
Store President's Valet (uncredited)
Gwen Kenyon
(uncredited)
Harry Lamont
Head Porter (uncredited)
Joyce Mathews
(uncredited)
Harold Minjir
Photographer (uncredited)
John Picorri
Train Conductor (uncredited)
Ruth Rogers
(uncredited)
Ronald R. Rondell
Laughing Man in Movie Theatre (uncredited)
Amzie Strickland
(uncredited)
Harry Tenbrook
Male Nurse in Sanitarium (uncredited)
Michael Visaroff
Store Vice-President (uncredited)
Wolfgang Zilzer
Book Salesman (uncredited)
Travis Banton
Costume Design
John Leipold
Additional Music
Adolph Zukor
Presenter
Ernst Lubitsch
Director
William LeBaron
Executive Producer
Ernst Lubitsch
Producer
John Leipold
Orchestrator
Friedrich Hollaender
Original Music Composer
Billy Wilder
Screenplay
Charles Brackett
Screenplay
According to Hoyle
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Last Holiday
The Woman Next Door
The Abominable Dr. Phibes
Cat People
I Married a Witch
Monkey Business
Sex and the Single Girl
A Song Is Born
The Grass Is Greener
JOE
Intolerable Cruelty
We're Not Married!
A Girl Cut in Two
Who's That Girl
Home Sweet Hell
Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!
It Happened One Night
The Philadelphia Story
Libeled Lady
What a Way to Go!
5 to 7
Pillow Talk
The Palm Beach Story
Lover Come Back
High Society
How to Marry a Millionaire
That Uncertain Feeling
Marry Me
That Touch of Mink
Easy Virtue
Let's Make Love
The Grass Is Greener
Watching the Detectives
Phffft
Runaway Bride
The Baxter
Mar 23, 1938
New York City, New York
Mar 25, 1938
Nov 3, 2009
DVD
Mar 31, 2020
Blu-ray
