Design for Living

Ben Hecht adapted Noel Coward's very continental play for director Ernst Lubitsch, and Hecht's gift for both highbrow wit and street-smart dialogue is a fine match for the Lubitsch touch in this elegant and risqué 1933 comedy. Fredric March and Gary Cooper star as Tom Chambers and George Curtis, American artists and best friends in Paris, who take up housekeeping with the modern-thinking Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins), a Yank they meet on a train in a delicious scene of miscommunication and good old American forwardness. Gilda decides that rather than choose one over the other, she'll live with them both—a situation Lubitsch would never have gotten past the censors after the imposition of the Production Code later that year. The arrangement is strictly platonic, of course, which only compounds the tensions. The glory of Lubitsch was the sly way he brought winking innuendo into his motion pictures, suggesting what he couldn't actually show onscreen, and this is one of his best efforts, with the European grace of Coward and the American earthiness of Hecht brought together in a glorious marriage (or should I say ménage à trois?) of sophistication, sex, and farce. Previously only available exclusively in a Gary Cooper DVD boxed set, this superior new Criterion release on DVD and Blu-ray features a wealth of extras, including select-scene commentary by film professor William Paul, a segment from the 1932 film If I Had a Million starring Charles Laughton, a 1964 British television production of the play Design for Living (introduced on camera by playwright Coward), a new interview with film scholar Joseph McBride, and a booklet. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)