The French Riviera. Millionaire Michael Brandon meets the quirky Nicole in a store, where they buy the upper and lower part of a pajama, respectively. He falls in love with her, and tries to buy her affection by buying a useless bathtub of her father. Nicole accepts his engagement, but is shocked to find out he already had seven marriages. She accepts to marry him under condition that she gets 100,000$ in case of a divorce. After the wedding, Nicole is distant and avoids Brandon. She even feigns having an affair, until Brandon snaps, divorces her and lands in a mental asylum. Nicole's father, now wealthy, buys off the asylum and puts Brandon in a straight jacket, thus forcing him to listen to Nicole. She tells Brandon she only divorced him to have enough money to be his equal, and now that she returned, he knows she didn't do it for money. They thus kiss and embrace.
One of Ernst Lubitsch's lesser films, "Bluebeards Eight Wife" has funny moments, but they are built on a fundamentally misguided concept: that a woman shows her love towards a man by making him hate her. The screenplay, one of the early works by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, works the best in the 1st half, displaying their sense for wit, charm and humor: the opening sequence shows the protagonist Brandon arguing with a clerk in a store, because he insists on buying only the upper half of a pajama, since he sleeps without pants. One superior talks to the other, until the "half pajama" case reaches the manager—who exits his bed wearing a pajama without pants himself—and rejects the bid of "selling in parts" on the telephone, saying: "No, no, never. That is communism." When Nicole shows up and teams up with Brandon to buy the entire pajama and share it, because she only needs pants, anyway, the story elegantly teams up the future couple, already setting up how she will "wear the pants" in the household. The joke also pays off wonderfully later on, for the second time, when Brandon rejects a business offer of a Marquis, laying in bed, but then changes his mind when the Marquis stands up from bed, revealing he wears Nicole's pajama pants, and is her father.
Some details are also classic example of Lubitsch's elevated humor, such as the beach sequence, where Nicole tells to Albert how her proprietor demanded she pays an old bill when she was having a manicure, and then displays her fingers—with only two colored fingernails. Great dialogues give some delicious quotes: one is the entire sequence when Brandon starts naming all his ex-wives (Marjorie, Linda, Elsie...) in front of Nicole, who makes a petrified face, and then he adds: "Am I boring you?" This culminates in a hilarious gag ("Michael, in one word, how many times were you married?" - "Have you heard of Henry VIII?"). The first half is excellent, but the second half is a terrible disappointment that devalues the high impression. The biggest problem is that the audience is not given a reason as to why Nicole suddenly treats Brandon is such a demeaning way right from the start: is she doing it to force him to divorce her, to get his money? Or because she is just mean? Her explanation (and catharsis) comes only in the last three minutes before the end, but by that time it is too late for the viewers to emotionally engage in her character and ill-conceived strategy or forgive her nastiness. Maybe if Brandon treated her as a property he bought for a long time, it would have made sense for her "rebellion", yet this way, the direction of the story went a wrong way, treating her convoluted reasoning as something romantic, and not even references to "The Taming of the Shrew" manage to save it.
Grade:++
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