Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938)
On the French Riviera, wealthy businessman Michael Brandon wants to buy pajamas, but just the tops. When the store refuses to sell them without the pants, they are at an impasse. An attractive woman named Nicole offers to buy the bottoms.
At the hotel where he is staying, Michael has trouble sleeping, so the managers offer him a suite on a higher floor, further away from the sounds of the sea. The suite is occupied by the Marquis de Loiselle, who is two months in arrears. The penniless marquis, as it turns out, had sent Michael a business proposition, which Michael turns down. The marquis then offers to sell him a bathtub supposed owned by King Louis XIV, which he also rejects. Then Michael recognizes the mismatched pajama bottoms the marquis is wearing and, after discovering that Nicole is the man's daughter, buys the bathtub. He then pursues Nicole and proposes to her the same day. She turns him down, but eventually changes her mind and accepts.
However, she is horrified to learn that Michael has been married seven times before. She calls off the wedding, much to her father's dismay. Michael explains that he gives each of his wives a prenuptial agreement guaranteeing $50,000 a year for life if they divorce. He gives in when Nicole demands double that amount.
During their honeymoon and afterward in their home in Paris, Nicole keeps her discontented husband at arm's length, hoping to obtain a divorce, but that only strengthens his natural tenacity. After reading Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, he tries to follow Petruchio's example, but Nicole proves too strong for him.
She writes anonymous letters to him claiming that she has a lover, but Monsieur Pepinard, the private detective he hires, assures him that there is nothing to it. Nicole then blackmails Pepinard into finding her a fake lover, a boxer named Kid Mulligan, so Michael can catch her alone with him. Complications ensue when her friend Count Albert De Regnier picks the wrong time to return a purse she left behind and is mistaken for her husband by Kid Mulligan (and knocked out). Michael assumes that Albert is her lover and finally gives her a divorce.
Six months later, Michael has a nervous breakdown. Nicole tries to see him in the sanitarium, but is not allowed in. Luckily, Michael has been put into a straitjacket after spotting her father, who has arranged for her to get in. Nicole tells Michael that she loved him at first sight, but had to break him of his habit of marrying so often. Now that she is financially independent, she explains, he can see that she does not want to (re)marry him for his money. He frees himself from his straitjacket, advances on her menacingly, then embraces her.
