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Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: 7 Mar 2015 13:51:00
Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

Design for Living (1933)
DVD9 + DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 01:31:27 | 7,67 Gb + 4,44 Gb
Audio: English AC3 1.0 @ 384 Kbps | Subtitles: English SDH
Genre: Comedy, Romance |The Criterion Collection #592

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Stars: Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins

Gary Cooper, Fredric March, and Miriam Hopkins play a trio of Americans in Paris who enter into a very adult “gentleman’s agree­ment” in this continental pre-Code comedy, freely adapted by Ben Hecht from a play by Noël Coward and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. A risqué relationship story and a witty take on creative pursuits, the film concerns a commercial artist (Hopkins) unable—or unwilling—to choose between the equally dashing painter (Cooper) and playwright (March) she meets on a train en route to the City of Light. Design for Living is Lubitsch at his sexiest, an entertainment at once debonair and racy, featuring three stars at the height of their allure.

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It would likely disappoint some contemporary viewers of Ernst Lubitsch's 1933 comedy Design for Living—and put others at ease—to learn that the verb "to make love to" was not a popular American euphemism for intercourse until the mid '50s. Before that, the phrase could denote practically any sort of amorous attention—a purplish gradient running from polite and courtly to hot and bothered, from flowers and smiles to interrupted groping and sighing. It was, if we can forgive a sexualized metaphor, a sort of sly, blank space to be filled by context and the imaginative listener's discrimination.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

With this idiomatic etymology in mind, Design in Living becomes franker than ever: When the characters say "sex" they mean sex, without quotation marks. But the bohemian configuration it limns may be less casual than it appears. Artists Tom Chambers (Fredric March) and George Curtis (Gary Cooper) have "made love to" their Tiger Mom-like muse Gilda (Miriam Hopkins) when she decides to move into their expressionistically shabby Parisian flat, but they haven't, ahem, slept with her yet—which is why they're so willing to attempt a celibate three-way. This "gentleman's agreement," of course, turns out to be more difficult to uphold than initially anticipated. And the stakes for these three, who at this point in the story are still "unknown" to one another in the Biblical sense, are enormous.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

The niceties of this delicate balance are key to understanding Tom's emotionally ashen response to its disruption. When he ventures to London to see through the production of his first play and then learns that George and Gilda have consummated the hitherto unconsummated, he's emasculated and down-trodden. (It doesn't help that he gets the news in front of his elderly, librarian-like assistant, who balks at dictating his punchy slang.) The narrative is a jokey pathway toward this ultimate betrayal, and its, ahem, tit-for-tat retaliation; these are enclosed, hierarchy-enforcing sex acts in what would otherwise be a fluid and egalitarian, if teasingly tense, environment. Because of the bargain of the three-way, whoever has the girl is a thief, and whoever doesn't is a quasi-cuckold.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

This "sex-as-social-currency" reading makes further sense as a Depression-era reversal of fortune. Consider the crustily upper-crust ad man Max Plunkett (Edward Everett Horton), whom Gilda eventually marries after confusingly retreating from her flunky art boys. At the hilarious climax of this plot twist, the new bride and groom retire to their bedroom, and a lighting cue signals the transition from night to day. Max swiftly emerges, furious but timid, and kicks a potted plant with two phallic bulb peeking out of it that the couple received as a wedding gift. The sex act is discussed surprisingly freely in this adult landscape, yes, but engaging in it still comes at a price.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

Due to the uncommonly risqué, if comically clunky, plot points described above, Design for Living is often considered minor Lubitsch and major pre-Code - but it's more accurately major Ben Hecht. The storyline, "inspired" by Noel Coward's partially autobiographical stage play of the same name but drastically rewritten, maintains an oddly proto-His Girl Friday cadence throughout. This isn't always successful; March and Cooper don't quite know how to treat lines that aren't funny themselves but are rather meant to establish a comic rhythm, and you wonder if certain overlong scenes weren't meant as placeholders for musical numbers that were never written. But the script was clearly important to Hecht's development, and to the progression of cinematic comedy as a genre independent of silent clowns, George S. Kaufman's Broadway, and the Marx Brothers. Lubitsch fills the screen with objects like the aforementioned potted plant and Tom Chambers's broken typewriter; they aren't gag props, but almost incidental characters themselves, with their own tragic and comedic weight.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

The script, too, represents every limit of possibility within early Hollywood's subject matter permissiveness. Put another way: The lack of innuendo drove the censors wild, but its perspective of human sexuality never quite oversteps the boundaries of tradition. Two men compete for the favor of the character played by Hopkins, who reprises her "comedienne of empowerment" from Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, and she doesn't allow herself to be penetrated by anyone she doesn't love. The primary sexual freedom rendered on the screen is the freedom to confess—to express attraction, or to admit dalliances that will cause hurt. In one faux-feminist monologue Glida marvels at the luck she's been given to be able to try various men on, like hats, and decide to keep two in her closet. And when March's playwright succeeds in stealing away Gilda from Cooper's painter for a night, the conversational results—an exchange of words and fists—are uncomfortably candid.

Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

But ultimately, what's most likeable about Design for Living is how the low-rent central menage-a-trois acts as a metaphor for the film's own gawkiness. Cooper and March are just about as successful as comedians as their characters are as artists; we don't feel like either one of them really deserves any success professionally or sexually. Glida, however, as Lubitsch's counterpart, understands her boys as two halves of an irresistible composite, and she shepherds them into triumph with scolds, teases, sex, and hard-boiled eggs. Describing the scenario sounds like an old joke: Take a mediocre painter and a mediocre playwright and put them together, and you've got…well, double the mediocrity. But at least it's sturdy, easily manipulated mediocrity.
Slant Magazine
Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]

Special Features:
- New high-definition digital restoration
- “The Clerk,” starring Charles Laughton, director Ernst Lubitsch’s segment of the 1932 omnibus film If I Had a Million
- Selected-scene commentary by film scholar William Paul
- British television production of the play Design for Living from 1964, introduced on camera by playwright Noël Coward
- New interview with film scholar and screenwriter Joseph McBride on Lubitsch and screenwriter Ben Hecht’s adaptation of the Coward play
Design for Living (1933) [The Criterion Collection #592] [ReUp]


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