BLUEBEARD'S EIGHTH WIFE

Seven marriages, seven divorces, and Gary Cooper still hasn't figured out what women want. His latest prospective bride is Claudette Colbert, a penniless French aristocrat who discovers that the handsome American millionaire she's agreed to marry has already been through seven wives, each of whom walked away with a substantial settlement. Rather than call the whole thing off, she decides to give him an eighth marriage he won't soon forget. Ernst Lubitsch's deliciously wicked comedy begins with one of the great meet-cutes in Hollywood history, a dispute over the purchase of a pair of pajamas, and proceeds to make a magnificent mess of the institution of marriage.

Working from a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, Lubitsch finds endless opportunities for sexual mischief in the peculiar arrangement between a man who thinks money entitles him to anything and a woman determined to prove that it doesn't. Cooper's usual air of masculine self-assurance is subjected to a sustained campaign of humiliation, while Colbert enjoys herself enormously at his expense. With two stars this irresistible and Lubitsch finding something indecent in practically every innocent gesture, BLUEBEARD'S EIGHTH WIFE is exactly the sort of sophisticated Hollywood comedy that deserves to be enjoyed in a room full of people laughing.