Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

calvinnme An Ernst Lubitsch comedy, co-scripted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, which has always been generally dismissed by critics and fans alike. Perhaps with the film's reputation as a lesser effort those who sit down to view it will be pleasantly surprised to find it an agreeable affair, anyway.Gary Cooper plays a seven times married American businessman millionaire who finds that with wife no. 8 (Claudette Colbert) he may have met his match. She has made him agree to a pre nuptial agreement of paying her $100,000 should there be a divorce and then makes him spend much of the marriage unhappy and wishing he hadn't signed that agreement.While the film is never as funny or clever as the best of Lubitsch, it still has its moments. The film is remembered primarily for the scene in which Colbert and Cooper "meet cute" as they agree to split a pair of pajamas in a department store.But there are other moments, too, such as the scene in which Cooper, inspired by having just read Taming of the Shrew, bursts out of his room, walks with great macho determination and accompanying soundtrack drum roll down a hallway, enters a room where Colbert stands and slaps her across the face. She responds by slapping him back and Cooper, perplexed by this unexpected turn of events, leaves the room, walks back through that same hallway to his room again and picks up the book to try to figure out what he did wrong.Like all Lubitsch productions this film has a graceful air of sophistication, with a physical elegance in its sets and photography. Colbert is an old hand at frothy material like this while Cooper, cast against type, plays his role with obvious enthusiasm. He's a far cry from the Cooper we're used to seeing on screen in the scene in which he plays a piano while singing "Looky, looky, looky, Here comes Cookie" to Claudette. The supporting cast is first rate, all of them deft performers: a young David Niven, and old pro character actors Edward Everett Horton and Herman Bing.English mangling, beer barrel shaped Herman Bing is the unlikeliest of detectives, hired by Cooper to follow his wife to see if she has any lovers. "Don't forget," he tells the millionaire, "we are a first class firm. You will find that out when you get our bill." Recommended as middling production code era Paramount fare.

morhellis When my colleague suggested watching this movie, she showed me the Shakespeare-reading scene. As I found it really amusing, I later watched the whole piece. And I didn't regret the time I spent! To say honestly, I'm not the old movie addict who knows all the history of American and European film industry back to black-and-white silent pictures and being woken up at night can list all the prominent actors and directors. I'm not into movies at all, which is the reason that my watching list is highly haphazard with British series followed up by French melodramas and historical documentaries. Bluebeard's Eighth Wife is a really nice piece featuring good-looking actors, jokes, funny without the slightest trace of vulgarity. The plot is a turned inside out ''Taming of the Shrew'', and no wonder it appears as a book the main hero reads, as I mentioned at the beginning of my review. However, it is common knowledge that not the plot itself, but its presentation matters, and in this case it does not undermine expectations. The naivety of the old times has a special charm, especially the good old happy end, so enjoy!

judy t They meet on the Riviera - buying pajamas. This opening scene is a labored buildup for the hilarious payoff - one of those lauded Lubitsch 'touches'. My favorite scene from this film comes next. Colbert has left the dept store and is walking down the street, with Cooper walking fast to catch up. Colbert smiles knowingly to herself. Then Cooper strides past with narry a howdy-do and is gone. Now this IS a surprise and howlingly funny. But it doesn't make sense. Cooper is obviously smitten, but he ignores her. Further, how are they to get together when he doesn't know her name or address?The it-makes-no-sense-at-all plot has them marry and divorce. Now with alimony Colbert has money of her own and doesn't need to marry him for his money. She says this proves she loves him. Say again? After making him miserable and crazy, in the last 3 minutes the story wraps up happily and unconvincingly. Her goal was to cure her divorce inclined mate and make him a forever husband. But has this goal been accomplished? Along the way a bit of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is tossed into the mix. We see Cooper reading 'Shrew' and then acting on what he has misread. In an hilarious scene he marches from his rooms to her rooms and does something that Petruchio would never have done to Kate, and Colbert swiftly sets him straight. It's been suggested that the script was a retelling of 'Shrew' with Colbert in the Petruchio role, but I, familiar with Shakespeare, don't see it. Oh, yes, Cooper spanks Colbert, just as Petruchio did Kate. But that's where the likeness ends.It IS fun watching Colbert make mincemeat out of Bluebeard. Colbert is an expert comedienne. Cooper less so. He's handsome and charming, but stolid where playful is required. Cooper had worked with Lubitsch 2 years earlier in 'Desire' with Marlene Dietrich, and he was excellent in this comedy. Apparently the problem in this film lies in the mismatch between Cooper's image and the Bluebeard character. Was Cary Grant not available? Or Melvyn Douglas? The film looks classy, except for the too obvious rear-projection scenes of the honeymoon couple walking the streets of European cities, which are jarring in this A-budget film. Colbert's costumes of ruffles, furs and spiffy hats are gorgeous. Colbert is gorgeous. I have long thought her chirpiness annoying, but in 'She Met Him in Paris', '3-Cornered Moon' and this film, all on the Colbert Collection set, she's perfection.In spite of the goofy plot and a not-quite-up-to-the-task Cooper, you'll enjoy watching these 2 great Stars deliver a lot of laughs.

tedg Sometimes the best experiences are watching movies that are bad but nearly good.That's because movies are all in the same class of languages, meaning they all say different things, but in the same way. So when you watch a movie, in a sense you are watching all the others you have, and in a stranger sense all the movies ever watched by anyone who has had anything to do with this one.That means that when you watch, you make up your own movie out of stuff that isn't necessarily on screen but is in your situation of recalled narratives. In other words, you see it in context of other movies, and especially those that were good. What this means for me is that unless I truly am captured and fall into the story, losing myself, I watch it with an eye to how it could or should have been. That's easier when the movie is quite bad but almost good, and its more effective when the movie is from the 1930s decade when the vocabulary was still malleable. This movie has Cooper in a type of role that Cary Grant mastered, a role where the character is a knowing character, who mugs for the audience and winks at the camera, occasionally stepping out of the role. It isn't what I call folded acting, where these things are done simultaneously, like Tuvan throatsingers. Cooper can't quite get it: he's actually serious. He actually thinks he is playing a rich guy with (for Cooper) complex attributes. His co-star gets it, moving in and out of supporting what the movie needs to work and what her character needs to have her scheme work.In the middle is a reference to "Taming of the Shrew" that has a rather complex generation. The point of that play (if you are a highschooler) is that the wit of the husband is turned on his wife to neutralize her faults. Here, through an equally complex setup, we are introduced to the notion of taking a bit of complex writing (represented by the word "Czechoslovakia") and "reading" it backwards to "enter dreams."Read "Shrew" backwards and you get a wife taming her husband and the husband's excesses are similar to those of Petruchio in the play. Its an extremely rich and promising notion, and you can see Billy Wilder's mind behind it. There's even an end in a place (a crazyhouse) where people believe they are something they are not — and our wayward man gets tamed, literally in a straitjacket.Bur everything is off. Cooper is inadequate as mentioned. The comic idea requires something more deft than the screwball formula which was then already mature. And the script has all sorts of false starts. For instance, there's a commanding wheelchair-bound woman who is head of the wife's family. That family is either impoverished or completely fictitious nobility who live for the dependent scam. We have them in the beginning, the part I believe Wilder influenced the most, but she and they disappear when the mechanics of delivering the "lesson" take over. Then we enter something else, dull and halfwitted, inherited from the previous version.See if you can figure out why Wilder spends so much time on a Louis XIVth bathtub and why that man's death was so important to mention several times.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.