Movie Review – Design for Living

Design for Living (1933)
Written by Noel Coward & Ben Hecht
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

With Ernst Lubitsch’s penchant for directing films based on stage plays, it made sense that Noel Coward’s work would eventually cross his desk. Coward was a gay man living in a time where being out was a perilous move, so he was never publicly open about his sexuality. However, when you see him acting or in an interview, it becomes pretty apparent he is not straight. Because Coward was both queer and an artist, the people who regularly crossed his path also lived outside society’s rigid norms. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were two acting friends of Coward’s with whom he became very close. He promised that one day he would write a play about them, and when they were famous, they would star in it. This play would be about an unconventional relationship between three people and would eventually be adapted into this Hollywood feature film.

Artist George (Gary Cooper) and playwright Thomas (Frederic March) are two Americans living in Paris while pursuing their individual crafts. While on a train, they encounter Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), who works in commercial art. They hit it off quite well, and both men find they are attracted to Gilda. However, she likes both of them, so they decided on a platonic friendship. She will live with them as a friend, critic, and muse, but no sex. There’s also Max (Edward Everett Horton), an ad executive Gilda works for, who is smitten with her. He’s far less successful in pursuing Gilda. Thomas travels to London to oversee the staging of one of his plays, and while he’s away, George and Thomas become romantically and sexually involved. But that’s not the end of the story, and where these three end up, according to the film’s conclusion, will likely surprise viewers who view this era as puritanical. 

Contemporary audiences will be utterly shocked at how much agency Gilda has in this movie. Throughout the story, she has sex with each man, and not once does the picture attempt to slut shame her. It’s just simply an aspect of her relationship with these other people. The drama comes out of the pressures of society to choose one person. The title should be a giveaway about where the story is going because this doesn’t end with Giida choosing one man. She and they create the relationship that works best for them. Once again, this is a reminder that pre-Code Hollywood was a much more accurate reflection of how the people thought & lived than the puritanical censorship that came after.

Gilda is not a manic pixie dream girl who exists to fulfill the hopes & dreams of the men. She’s a person just as much as them with her own ambitions and desires. The fact that she has relationships with these men indicates her choice to be involved with them. She seeks them out because they overlap in their love of art, and Gilda can see how Thomas and George each have attributes that make them attractive to her. When I think about this film, I can’t help but imagine how different American cinema would be if censorship hadn’t gotten involved. It took roughly forty years for movies in the States to get back to a place where (with the MPAA’s ratings) you could have movies that discussed these things openly & frankly. Even then, those films were cordoned off with the R-rating instead of a Lubitsch film, which was something everyone could enjoy.

The place where you see the clash with modern convention is that Thomas and George never develop any feelings for each other as part of this arrangement. While cis-hetero polyamory was okay, anything queer was still not “acceptable” for American audiences. Apparently, there are numerous changes from Coward’s script to the film adaptation, and I can’t help but wonder if the presence of at least latent homosexuality was all but erased from the final product. If this were staged or remade today, you can imagine how things would be taken.

I really appreciated the lack of melodrama in the picture. Characters are in conflict, but how they handle things showcases what emotionally healthy & mature adults would do. Lubitsch has ensured the film is tightly paced so that every scene and moment matters to the overall picture. The three leads are split up for too much of the film, but that feeds into the tension about how this arrangement will turn out in the end. Much like Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch isn’t interested in straightforward villains so much as he appreciates how humans come into conflict and resolve these clashes. 

Gary Cooper’s inclusion made me remember Tony Soprano’s numerous lamentations over the loss of men like Cooper. For someone of Tony’s generation, he likely remembered later films like High Noon, Pride of the Yankees, or Sergeant York – all Hays Code era films centered on a right-wing view of masculinity. I suspect Mr. Soprano wasn’t aware that his beloved Cooper was part of a forward-thinking adult comedy about being in a thruple. I had only ever seen Cooper in High Noon, a film I must revisit, but I remember him being very wooden. The Cooper in Design felt completely different, a charming, erudite guy. 

Time was running out for Lubitsch in the pre-Code era. He had one last film to come before the censors started casting him a more spurious eye. That picture would end up being one of the most expensive pre-Code films ever made and a beautiful send-off to an era that should not have been stifled. More on that in our following review.