Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) – E. Lubitsch

Although not rivalling Lubitsch’s masterpieces and filmed immediately before two of them (Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner), Bluebeard still has enough of the director’s sly “touch” to bring a smile to these lips and even some chortles.  Gary Cooper is a multimillionaire used to getting his way who decides that he’d like to have Claudette Colbert as his wife (and her hustler father, Edward Everett Horton is certainly keen). However, when she finds out she is to be the 8^th wife (and he is rather cavalier about it), she forces Cooper to boost the pre-nup agreement to give her a healthy annual pay-out upon divorce.  And then she proceeds to torment him by partying and carrying on and ignoring him (particularly in the boudoir).  A very young David Niven plays her supposed love interest and it’s a good comic turn from him.  Of course, Colbert is sparkling and even Cooper (who can be stodgy) is able to bring laughs. Perhaps the battle of the sexes doesn’t quite soar but it’s refreshing to see the topic broached (as Lubitsch has done before).  Worth a watch (after you watch the director’s 4 or 5 even funnier films). 

 

Pygmalion (1938)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Pygmalion (1938) – A. Asquith

George Bernard Shaw’s play, scripted for the screen by the playwright himself, was first directed by Anthony Asquith (with co-director’s credit to star Leslie Howard).  But then it was famously revisioned as the musical, My Fair Lady (first on stage and then on screen in 1964, directed by George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison).  Having seen the musical first, as a child, it is hard not to hear the lines of the play/1938 film (“the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain”) and recall the songs they became later.  But without revisiting the latter film, it is rewarding to say that Pygmalion may be better.  Both Leslie Howard (as Professor Higgins) and Wendy Hiller (as Eliza Doolittle) present memorable and charismatic characters and the plot twists (such that they are) are funny and well-played; Wilfrid Lawson and Esme Percy are solid and comical in support.  Of course, the basis of the story, Higgins’ boast that he could refashion Cockney flower seller Doolittle into a princess simply by teaching her phonetics and improving her diction, is still condescending and paternalistic – but Howard plays Higgins with his flaws foregrounded, so perhaps this can be forgiven? (And Eliza does tweak him in the end, at least – but what will their relationship be, if relationship there is to be?).  Eighty years on, the social satire (or fantasy?) designed for the British class system may or may not hold up (depending on your aims) – and it is tempting to imagine the roles with different cultural variations (for example, there appears to be a version with genders reversed) but any new version would require a lot more bite and insight than what is managed here. There’s no denying that we use accents to stigmatise people though…

Holiday (1938)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Holiday (1938) – G. Cukor

I thought this was going to be a screwball comedy, given the time (late ‘30s) and the stars (Cary Grant & Katharine Hepburn) but that isn’t what it was at all.  And I don’t even think it was a comedy at all – or maybe it just hit some kind of nerve that led me to ponder, not laugh.  Grant plays a free-thinking young man who is in the business world only to make money to allow him to take a long holiday and figure out the world and his place in it. He doesn’t really discuss this with the girl he gets engaged to (after a whirlwind romance at a ski resort on Lake Placid) who turns out to be from an enormously rich family with a father who values “good breeding” and “credentials”.  Grant has the latter but not the former.  Once he’s won over the father by his business acumen, he doesn’t seem to realise that his plan to drop out won’t go over as well – and he his shocked to find out that his fiancée also doesn’t agree.  They are too wedded to the capitalist and materialist values that were instilled in them.  But sister Linda (Hepburn) is the black sheep of the family and, of course, the perfect match for Grant – except that he’s engaged to her sister.  To me, this didn’t seem funny but more tragic.  Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon are around for some laughs – or at least they are jovial and sympathetic as Grant’s old mates (possibly his foster parents?) who also don’t care about status or position.  But the movie made me reflect on whether I, too, have gotten stuck in the grind and routine of life, forgetting my purpose, and in need of a holiday of the kind Grant desires -- but age 30 and age 50 are very different times.  Oh to be young and free (-thinking) again! 

Jezebel (1938)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Jezebel (1938) – W. Wyler

I guess it should come as no surprise that a film set in the Antebellum American South (1850’s) seems misogynistic, with the male (and older female) characters always trying to keep headstrong Bette Davis in her place.  But one wonders whether this also played into the stereotypes and preferences of some of the 1938 audience (and perhaps how it is received today).  Of course, Davis excelled at this sort of selfish petulant bad girl and another reading of the film is that she simply wasn’t fair to her fiancé, Henry Fonda, in trying to dominate him and the backlash against her is a personal (not sexist) matter.  Davis is gleefully awful until the melodramatic yellow-fever focused ending where her efforts to redeem herself (in the eyes of whom?) seem yet another attempt to be close and take control of Fonda, even though his heart belongs to someone else.  Wyler’s direction is perfect and the whole damn thing is lavish, even if today it reads as a prelude to Gone With The Wind (hello Southern clichés!).

Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938)

☆ ☆ ½

Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938) – H. B. Humberstone

The first of the new series (still at 20^th Century Fox) with Sidney Toler as the wise detective after Warner Oland’s unexpected death.  This time, murder takes place on Charlie’s doorstep on a freighter docked in Pearl Harbor.  But Charlie is distracted with his first grandchild’s impending birth – so Number Two Son Jimmy tries to handle the case himself to comic effect.  In fact, there is probably too much intended comedy in this outing – the mystery itself almost plays second fiddle to Eddie Collins’ drunken clowning and a pet lion wandering around (not to mention Number Five Son getting into trouble too).  There are the usual red herrings strewn about to implicate one or more of the sketchily drawn cast of character actors.  Still, there is plenty of nostalgia value for dreams of late night TV watching with Dad.