Pretty good company, here: Ernst Lubitsch directing a Ben Hecht adaptation of a Noel Coward play starring Gary Cooper, Frederic March, Miriam Hopkins, and Edward Everett Horton. This wicked crew just barely sneaked *Design for Living* past the Production Code before it clamped down and sterilized the mainstream studio productions of Old Hollywood. Of course, modern audiences must take the word of obsessive cinephiles like myself when we tell you that this movie was once considered wildly indecent. Lubitsch's suggestive fade-outs and closing doors will appear as antiquated as 19th-century daguerreotypes next to the modern standard of painstakingly photographed aerobic coitus. For that matter, the notion of a woman simultaneously enjoying the favors of two handsome young men seems rather passé. Only antiquarians will watch *Design for Living* for its titillating sexual dynamics.
More relevant for the typical movie-lover is the wittiness of the script, which gets increasingly wittier as the movie wears on. Which is to say, the film IS a bit diagrammatic and stilted during the first act: two American bohemians in Paris (Cooper as -- get this -- a modernist painter, and March as an aspiring playwright) meet-cute with a fellow American art lover (Hopkins) on a train. She works at an ad agency in Paris managed by Edward Everett Horton, who, having failed to get to first base with the ripe young tomato, has resigned himself to act as her ersatz-guardian. The first twenty minutes of the movie are too stage-bound, but once we're fully introduced to the players and their circumstances, the script starts to take off. Whereas Noel Coward's original play seemed scandalous because it was about two not-so-in-the-closet homosexual artistes living with a hot broad in a Paris walk-up tenement, Ben Hecht's adaptation seemed scandalous in an entirely different manner: he re-fashioned it into a story about two clearly heterosexual artistes taking turns hiding the salami with a hot broad in a Paris walk-up tenement. In the meantime, the one-liners roll down the assembly-line with gathering force. Hopkins -- "I know we had a gentlemen's agreement, but I'm not a gentleman" (saying this to Cooper while lying provocatively on a couch); March -- "Delicacy is the banana-peel under the feet of Truth"; Cooper -- "Let's drink to smallpox", to which March adds, "In Latin, Variola Cocca!" You get the idea.
In the direction department, Lubitsch finds some surprising breathing-room for his camera. Never held hostage by the witty banter, he's always finding a way to tell his story visually. An unremarkable, but typical, example is when Cooper runs out of his swanky new apartment to retrieve a note from Hopkins which he had angrily tossed out the window: Lubitsch makes sure that when Cooper picks up the note, it's a truly exterior shot -- no mattes. And of course, the director fiddles around with things like subjective perspective, close-ups, zooms, out-of-focus fades, and so on.
In the acting department, Hopkins and Horton are the winners. Cooper is, of course, terribly miscast as a bohemian painter, and Frederic March just wasn't a comedian. Both of the male leads seem intimidated by the fantastically arch and very funny things that they're supposed to utter. Put it this way: they're not nearly as confident as their director with this material.
Which, by the way, doesn't reach the level of sublimity attained by Lubitsch's prior film, *Trouble in Paradise*. But *Design for Living* will definitely do. You can now see it on the new DVD compilation, "The Gary Cooper Collection", from Universal. Part 1 of a series, one hopes.
7 stars out of 10.
More relevant for the typical movie-lover is the wittiness of the script, which gets increasingly wittier as the movie wears on. Which is to say, the film IS a bit diagrammatic and stilted during the first act: two American bohemians in Paris (Cooper as -- get this -- a modernist painter, and March as an aspiring playwright) meet-cute with a fellow American art lover (Hopkins) on a train. She works at an ad agency in Paris managed by Edward Everett Horton, who, having failed to get to first base with the ripe young tomato, has resigned himself to act as her ersatz-guardian. The first twenty minutes of the movie are too stage-bound, but once we're fully introduced to the players and their circumstances, the script starts to take off. Whereas Noel Coward's original play seemed scandalous because it was about two not-so-in-the-closet homosexual artistes living with a hot broad in a Paris walk-up tenement, Ben Hecht's adaptation seemed scandalous in an entirely different manner: he re-fashioned it into a story about two clearly heterosexual artistes taking turns hiding the salami with a hot broad in a Paris walk-up tenement. In the meantime, the one-liners roll down the assembly-line with gathering force. Hopkins -- "I know we had a gentlemen's agreement, but I'm not a gentleman" (saying this to Cooper while lying provocatively on a couch); March -- "Delicacy is the banana-peel under the feet of Truth"; Cooper -- "Let's drink to smallpox", to which March adds, "In Latin, Variola Cocca!" You get the idea.
In the direction department, Lubitsch finds some surprising breathing-room for his camera. Never held hostage by the witty banter, he's always finding a way to tell his story visually. An unremarkable, but typical, example is when Cooper runs out of his swanky new apartment to retrieve a note from Hopkins which he had angrily tossed out the window: Lubitsch makes sure that when Cooper picks up the note, it's a truly exterior shot -- no mattes. And of course, the director fiddles around with things like subjective perspective, close-ups, zooms, out-of-focus fades, and so on.
In the acting department, Hopkins and Horton are the winners. Cooper is, of course, terribly miscast as a bohemian painter, and Frederic March just wasn't a comedian. Both of the male leads seem intimidated by the fantastically arch and very funny things that they're supposed to utter. Put it this way: they're not nearly as confident as their director with this material.
Which, by the way, doesn't reach the level of sublimity attained by Lubitsch's prior film, *Trouble in Paradise*. But *Design for Living* will definitely do. You can now see it on the new DVD compilation, "The Gary Cooper Collection", from Universal. Part 1 of a series, one hopes.
7 stars out of 10.