locked out
by Douglas Messerli
Charles
Brackett and Billy Wilder (based on the play by Alfred Savoir, Le humitième femme de Barbe-Bleue),
Ernst Lubitsch (director) Bluebeard’s
Eighth Wife / 1938
In
retrospect, Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s
Eighth Wife—based on a 1921 play by Alfred Savoir and proceeded by a 1923
film directed by Sam Wood—seems like a slightly uncomfortable mix between
Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and
Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, the would-be tyrannical
lady-killer begin trumped by the loving but revengeful wife, successfully
awarding her man his comeuppance so that a “real” marriage might finally be consummated.
This comedy alternately is absolutely
charming and mean-spirited, the later arising from a problem with its casting:
as The New York Times reviewer Frank
S. Nugent noted in 1938, it is simply impossible to imagine the lanky,
aw-shucks-likeable Gary Cooper as a multi-millionaire serial-spouse. That’s not
to say that the wonderful Lubitsch doesn’t give it a serious try, adding even a
few insightful perceptions about the Perreault-Bartok work to which the movie
very vaguely makes reference.
From the very first scene, Lubitsch
establishes that Bluebeard (Cooper) is definitely a dominating figure,
portraying him as a “top”—a man attempting to purchase only a pair of pajama
tops—as opposed to Nicole de Loiselle’s (Claudette Colbert) bottom—a woman who
is happy to purchase the bottoms as a gift to her down-on-the-heels,
money-conniving-Marquis father (Edward Everett Horton). And as in Bartok, he
prefers dark, while she suggests light, but with the added dimension of “stripes,”
hinting, perhaps, of his soon-to-be “locked out” situation.
Colbert, as always, plays her character
as a refined European to Cooper’s straight-forwardly tenacious American who
cannot comprehend why his immediately wanting to marry the mademoiselle meets
with her utter disdain. The fact that she dismissed him, indeed, hardly fazes
him; he not only feels he should be awarded for his straight-forward honesty,
but that he “deserves” her since he has, metaphorically, purchased her from her
father by paying for the ridiculous trinket from Louis XIV’s bathroom—an
elaborately embellished contraption so petite that he can perceive it only as a
washbasin.
The Marquis, however, in his underhanded
dealings has made his family deeply in debt, a problem which a marriage to such
a rich man would quickly resolve. Unlike the operatic Bluebeard, moreover, this
interminably innocent American even attempts to charm the object of his momentary
affection, memorizing—as he does the details of his business associates—the
history of Louis XIV; and, despite herself, Nicole seems to actually fall in
love with this ungainly courtier. Everything seems to be proceeding glowingly
until he begins to reveal the existence of seven (the film, apparently
conflating the number of the Bartok opera’s rooms with the wives) previous
wives. Unlike the operatic Bluebeard, this innocent galumpher has allowed for a
pre-nuptial agreement to pay each of them $50,000, saving them from the locked-away
“passing” of the mythical Bluebeard’s paramours.
The Marquis’ daughter, almost without
missing a beat, decides to take him up on the offer, if only he will raise the
ante to $100,000, while she determines to teach him an important lesson about
love from a pre-feminist perspective. It’s absolutely delightful that Lubitsch,
once described by Mary Pickford as a “director of doors” regally uses his
somewhat deserved moniker by reversing the situation of Bartok’s work,
representing Nicole as locking herself away from her new husband, refusing him
any sexual access and permitting him conversational entrance only upon
appointment. As in the operatic work, Lubitsch’s film is a movie of seemingly
endless doors locked and bolted—but this time from inside! It’s enough to make
any red-blooded Americun male go mad,
and this Bluebeard does end up, predictably, in a straitjacket, with Nicole
gloating over his shocked embarrassment.
Of course, there are a lot of other silly shenanigans
along the way, some featuring the effete would-be lover, Albert De Regnier’s (David
Niven), who is forced to play secretary to Bluebeard and who, in an absurd
series of misunderstandings, is beaten up by a hired wrestler and threatened
with strangulation by Bluebeard—a perfect role, I might argue, for Niven, who
always strikes me as a man about to puke over the impropriety of the roles
Hollywood has forced upon him—; Horton, as the Marquis gets several chances to puff-up
and putter-down as only he can; and Elizabeth Patterson has the short-lived opportunity
to shine as the mean-hearted, level-headed Aunt Hedwige. But everything and
everyone is truly unimportant in this tale, as we wait for the moment when
Bluebeard, like a cartoon figure who has been plopped over the head one-too-many-times,
pops out of his constraints to give the heroine what she has been asking for
behind all those closed doors: a good old-fashioned f— —or, shall we describe
it for what it really is, a rape?
Maybe Nicole should have asked the
questions on everyone else’s mind: why did Bluebeard divorce all those other
women? And what ever happened to them? Despite what seems to be the usual
Lubitsch sexual sophistication, the film is too prudish to let us know what
goes on behind all those closed doors.
Los Angeles,
February 20, 2015
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