In his 2007 essay on the two directors for " Stop Smiling " magazine, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that " Love in the Afternoon " was " the most obvious and explicit and also, arguably, the clunkiest of his tributes to Lubitsch, partially inspired by Lubitsch's 1938 " Bluebeard's Eighth Wife " ( which Wilder and Brackett also helped to script, and which also starred Gary Cooper, again playing a womanizing American millionaire in France ) ".
