Design for Living

Design for Living -- Lubitsch, 1933 adapting a Noel Coward play – famously, the director retained only a single line of that show in his film. This comedy reverses the situation in Trouble in Paradise. In Design for Living, two American expat-artists compete for the affections of Miriam Hopkins. She likes them both and embarks on simultaneous love affairs with the two suitors – Frederick March and Gary Cooper. The men are best friends and soon enough discover that they are rivals. All three make a pact that they will live together, but without sex. Of course, an arrangement like this can not be sustained and the heroine entertains first one man and, then, another in her bed – in the process, somehow ripening these men’s artistic talents into maturity. (Sex in a Lubitsch film causes problems but also seems to cure ills.) Cooper’s character becomes a famous painter; March’s unsuccessful author writes a successful play and becomes the toast of the town in London. After some slight, and weightless, complications, and after a brief eruption of jealousy, the happy trio return to their ménage a trois, the film’s “design for living,” again vowing to refrain from sex – sort of. Edward Everett Horton is exceptional as an older advertising mogul that Miriam Hopkins, briefly and unhappily marries – she departs his household to return to Cooper and March. Miriam Hopkins radiates girl-next-door charm in the opening sequence, when she meets both men on a French train. But as the film progresses, she becomes an increasingly vampish seductress – in some scenes, she lounges around is negligees so tight and revealing as to be essentially nude. She is the aggressor and effortlessly ravishes the men when she desires them. The film’s is an exercise in audience wish-fulfillment – it solves the problem of the romantic triangle by simply, and impudently, positing that there is no problem. Gary Cooper seems to be painted with eye-liner make-up in some early scenes and he looks weirdly feminine. Everything is smooth and lacquered in this picture; the women have creamy porcelain breasts and the men’s hair is black enamel on their skulls. The dialogue is comprised of epigrams and dirty jokes. The film is completely amusing, nothing less and nothing more.