I’ve never cared much for Design for Living, and I’m not quite sure why. It doesn’t seem to be a favorite of many other critics, either. It’s respected, but not loved. James Harvey, whose Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges is like Scripture for me, makes an interesting claim about this. He argues that the core idea of Noel Coward’s popular play, from which Lubitsch’s film is adapted, is basically about a romantic adventure — three intelligent bohemian spirits decide to break with bourgeois conventions and attempt an original relationship of their own. Lubitsch, according to Harvey, isn’t really interested in risky romantic adventures. It’s a fascinating insight that I think is half-right and half-wrong. There’s something schizophrenic about Lubitsch’s version of Design, an uncertain fit between idea and manner. I think Harvey is right that Lubitsch doesn’t usually imagine worlds where relationships break out of classical patterns — in his worlds, those patterns can be ironized, but not abandoned. Lubitsch loves to depict relationships as games. They have rules and playing fields. The rules are known by all the players. The clever ones can bend those rules. They can’t leave the field, though. In Design for Living the three romantic protagonists try to create their own rules, but the game-board is Lubitsch’s.
Is that really a bad thing? Don’t all romantic comedies do that? Don’t they all take characters roiling with desire and energy and place them in the comic structure, one of the most ancient and predictable in literature? Whether that friction works in Design depends on whether you sympathize with the characters and story, or with the film itself. I think Lubitsch, far from being averse to adventure, made lots of adventurous decisions with Design, and they, ironically, messed up the storytelling. Lubitsch had a design project of his own with the film. It’s his attempt to make a continental comedy on American terms.
One of the boldest of Lubitsch’s adventures in making Design was having Ben Hecht write the screenplay. Hecht was at the time the highest paid, and hence the most respected, screenwriter in Hollywood. And the most American. His adaptation of his play The Front Page established the conventions of fast-talking, streetsmart, wiseass dialogue and situation that dominated Hollywood films in the ’30s, especially the comedies. Perfectly suited for the talkies, Hecht’s sensibility was shaped by his experience as a Chicago newspaperman, and it captured American modernity in the interwar period: the irreverent, cynical language of working people in constant motion, scorning elite, European-inspired decorum. Perfect for a Lubitsch film. Not.
I’m not sure how Hecht came to be Lubitsch’s collaborator. It’s hard to imagine a comic sensibility more at odds with Lubitsch’s — or Coward’s, for that matter. Lubitsch’s longtime collaborator, screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, turned down the offer to write the screenplay. He said he saw no purpose in refashioning one of the most successful plays by one of the most successful playwrights on both sides of the Atlantic, and a revered snob. Not, Raphaelson believed, in Lubitsch’s wheelhouse. Lubitsch’s specialty was finding negligible Austro-Hungarian boulevard comedies he could transform at will. Yet, after Rafaelson demurred, somehow it was Hecht that was hired. From everything I’ve read, it was Lubitsch’s idea, and that seems like a decisive sign that the director wanted Design to be totally transformed into an American comedy — in a sense, Lubitsch’s first attempt to imagine one. He not only took up the challenge of making an American romantic farce out of a dry, witty, and elegant British comedy. It would also be a critique. The result is not a very great American comedy in my opinion, but an unusually subtle and indirect lampoon of both the Coward play’s snobbery and American pretentiousness.
Harvey’s tacit premise in his book is that the Hollywood comedies of the early ’30s were modeled on contemporary plays that emphasized witty dialogue, upper class manners, and the liberties of the rich — all values associated with European high culture. The great revolution in romantic comedy comes about, again according to Harvey, when elements of risk, disruption, and fluidity in social relationships begin to dominate. In other words, when they become truly American. Harvey often characterizes Lubitsch’s attitude toward romance in his early Hollywood films as “distant.” That’s fair enough. As Chaplin remarked about filming comedy: for comedy, a long shot; for drama, a close up. But I think Harvey ignores the particular comic joy that the “continental” game-world values, namely, gaiety. Gaiety is an elation appropriate for collective pleasure temporarily secure from danger. The walls of the ballroom, the rules of the dance, the codes of flirtation create the safe space for it. Lubitsch’s first Hollywood films are masterpieces of gaiety. But as the Depression hit and the American social mood darkened, movie audiences no longer tolerated the safe spaces so well, especially when they were seen as fortresses of the rich. In Design, Lubitsch wanted to deliver some American gaiety. Not easy to do in 1933, and as a result the film falls between two stools. Its Paris isn’t gay, its American rich folk aren’t gay (they play “20 Questions” instead of waltzing), and our lovers aren’t gay. They might become so after the curtain falls, but then there’s the problem of “no sex.”
Design is the first of Lubitsch’s comedies that features Americans as main characters, and the first that sets some of the action in the US. These changes affect everything else. Even the requisite Edward Everett Horton fool is an American. So, what is this Americanization of Coward about? I’m pretty sure Paramount’s brass didn’t think the audience would be very familiar with, or sympathetic to, the play, in any case. Besides, many of the most interesting changes of sensibility came about serendipitously. Begin with our main male characters, Tom Chambers (Fredric March) and George Curtis (Gary Cooper). Lubitsch had originally planned for Ronald Colman and Lesley Howard to play them; when they declined, he asked Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. to play George. When Fairbanks withdrew because of illness, he was replaced by Cooper. It’s easy to see how the sensibility changed with those developments. Colman and Howard were both British. Had they accepted the roles, Design would have been a British comedy de facto. And the American Fairbanks’s brand was playing debonair cosmopolitans. I think Fairbanks would have been an excellent George — a buoyant bon vivant with a perpetual raffish glint in his eye –, but the film would still have been “continental.” March seemed to have a similar m.o. as Fairbanks, but Cooper had never acted in comedies before, and he already had a reputation as a handsome, rugged, reticent manly man. A real American. The studio heads were nervous, but Lubitsch believed Cooper had comic potential. (He cast him twice afterward, in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and, as a producer, in Borzage’s Desire, opening the path to Cooper’s collaborations with Capra and Hawks.) There was nothing British or cosmopolitan about Cooper. Next to him, and with a Hecht script, March had to become American, too. And the Hecht script trumped all.
When we meet our protagonists, even though we soon learn they are artists they don’t look it. More like slightly seedy young clerks than bohemians. Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), by contrast, arrives accoutred with a classical beret and immediately proceeds to draw them as they sleep. She must be a real artist. When she falls asleep in her turn, the boys discover that her sketch book contains a caricature of Napoleon in underwear. Naturally, it turns out that she’s an American, too — not a “fine” artist, and not a bohemian. She draws advertising copy for an undergarment company. Only an American could subject the Little Emperor to such lèse-majesté. And of course only an American expostulates with “Nuts!”
It turns out that Tom is an aspiring playwright and George a struggling painter. (George’s most memorable painting so far is of Lady Godiva on a bicycle. Très moderne, n’est-ce pas? Gilda has seen it. She’s not a fan.) And here’s where the character-problems begin. The setting is Paris, the Holy City of Bohemia. Aspiring American artists in the Paris of the 20s and 30s were thick as fleas. So far, so good. American commerce was also making headway in Europe after World War I. The problem is that Gilda, with her knowledge of the business world, believes both of her boys have great potential as artists, worthy of her becoming their muse; or more accurately, their agent. She can make successes of them. Rich and respected. However, although we see some signs of their success, we see little sign of their skill or creative passion. George will eventually become a portrait painter for hire, largely through Gilda’s ministrations, but we never see him painting; we see some crude Modigliani-ish portraits that we infer are his, but there’s little about Cooper’s character that indicates an artistic attitude. That’s puzzling, because painting can be funny even in a Hollywood Movie. (Another portrait of Bonaparte is the theme of one of the funniest jokes in Lubitsch’s own The Merry Widow). Tom’s creative process is detailed, by contrast, in a great comic scene. He’s creatively stuck because he’s trying to imagine characters that are British stuffed shirts, not the “indelicate” Americans that he knows. His problem is ostensibly solved by sheer luck, when Gilda’s American boss and sugar-daddy, Max Plunkett (Horton), confronts him in the refined high-bourgeois manner, demanding that he cease his liaison with Gilda. By great good fortune, Max utters the bourgeois credo that completes Tom’s stalled dialogue: “Immorality may be fun, but it isn’t fun enough to take the place of one hundred percent virtue and three square meals a day.” When Tom is later shown to be a success in London, it’s in spite of his artistic intentions. The line he takes to be serious bourgeois-busting turns out to be a comic hoot. His play is received by the opening night audience not as an earnest social drama as he intended, but a laugh-riot. This imbalance in depicting the two artists makes no sense to me formally, but even with the asymmetry it’s pretty clear that there’s something screwy about both men as artists. They’re 10% artists and 90% Americans. The American artist in Europe was one of the Astaire-Rogers films’ driving themes. Fred and Ginger demonstrated the power of American art right there onscreen, in dance and jazz. It’s harder to demonstrate in theater and painting, traditional European strong suits.
This may seem like nit-picking, but I think it’s important. Gilda is supposedly drawn to them not only because they are handsome and lovable, but because as bona fide bohemians they are exemplary material for the threesome “design.” And it reflects back onto the sense we have of that design. Gilda’s men are not very good at being unorthodox artists, so why should we believe they will be good at unorthodox amorous designs?
I think this is one of the drawbacks of the Hecht screenplay. As artist-characters, Tom and George are negligible, even ludicrous. The hand of the anti-snob Hecht seems heavy here. What’s important about them is their Americanness. They’re go-getters who believe in themselves, even though the only justification the audience sees for that is that Gilda believes in them even more. But who is Gilda, other than a commercial artist for an American underwear company? And since we see them grow into mainly worldly successes, Coward’s rich association of his characters’ artistic minds with their romantic imaginations plays almost no role in the film. Tom and George could just as well be apprentice bankers in love. They bask in the glory of Gilda’s powerful passion-dynamo.
The hilarious window into Tom’s creative process begins a joke whose punchline is only delivered later in the film, when we hear about the finished product — but it does double duty, both comic and satirical, already in the scene. It’s comic because Tom isn’t all that good a playwright. We catch him fretting about how to represent two stuffy upper-class Englishmen. It’s satirical, because Coward’s play is, from the “American point of view,” about upper-class Anglo-Saxons trying to get free of British stuffiness. What’s more, Tom’s creative problem is solved by stealing a line from Max, a true blue twit, who manages to combine the stuffiness of an Englishman, the crassness of an American, and the shifty morals of a Frenchman. It’s a great scene. With all these complicated cultural gestures, the key moment is when Tom drops his artistic pretensions and becomes a red-blooded American. After taking Max through the catechism of an elderly patron to the young Gilda, he delivers his clincher: “you never got to first base.” The mis en scène may be Lubitsch, but the language is pure Hecht. Tom’s artistic bona fides are dubious; his American earthiness is the real thing. It places him in the same register as Gilda’s “nuts!”
MAX :I am not Miss Farrell’s husband, nor her fiance, in any shape, form, or manner.
TOM: I see. Her devoted friend.
MAX: Yes. For five years.
TOM: Her guide, I take it, and counselor.
MAX: Yes.
TOM: Her protector.
MAX: Exactly.
TOM: In other words, Mr. Plunkett, you, uh, you never got to first base.
Having no success steering Tom away from Gilda, Max heads off to Gilda’s apartment, and runs into George just leaving it after a steamy tryst. Max delivers the same bourgeois formula that he delivered to Tom, but now it’s on George’s terms. In his scene with Max, Tom’s tone had started out witty and refined, but gradually descended to street slang. George’s terms are simpler. As innocent and American as a grown-up Huck Finn, Cooper’s George invites Max to have a seat on the public stairs (Max won’t accept) to discuss Gilda, until he feels compelled to stand up (literally) for himself. Where Tom used earthy wit, George looms and subtly threatens. It’s his m.o. — not just with Max, but with Tom and Gilda, too. And his threat is Capitalism 101 — he’ll report Max to his customers.
The only thing that elevates the two handsome clowns is Gilda’s deeply sensual attraction to both. As she describes it to poor, outclassed Max, whatever she may think about their talent, they really razzle her berries.
GILDA: Max, have you ever been in love?
MAX: This is no time to answer that.
GILDA: Have you ever felt your brain catch fire and a curious, dreadful thing go right through your body, down, down to your very toes, and leave you with your ears ringing?
MAX: That’s abnormal.
GILDA: Well, that’s how I felt just before you came in.
MAX: Yes? How’d you feel yesterday, after your promenade with Tom?
GILDA: Just the opposite.It started in my toes and came up, up, up very slowly until my brain caught fire. But the ringing in the ears was the same.
The men who set Gilda on fire are very different from Coward’s passionate, self-ironizing wits. Tom and George are basically boys, prone to fits of petulance, depression, and fawning. Cooper is most responsible for this. His George is alternately sullen and goofy, aggressive and soft, and completely lacking in self-irony. Jealous of Max’s role in Gilda’s life, he protests that he isn’t really jealous, it’s “that I just don’t want any competition. It belittles me in my own eyes. It… it interferes with my work. I… I can’t paint when I’m worried.” He’s earnest and honest, humorless and possessive, completely unaware of the ironies of being an artist who can’t paint when he’s “belittled” in his own eyes, or of the definition of jealousy. Tom and George work out their rivalry first through jealousy, then shared contempt for womanhood, then poised nonchalance, and finally shared abject infatuation — not so much “like men,” but like frat boys. Hecht and Lubitsch transform la vie bohème into life on a frat floor. We’re very far from the charmeurs of Lubitsch’s earlier follies.
What we not far from is screwball, that most American of comic genres. Lubitsch’s and Hecht’s Design is formally proto-screwball: an attractive, dynamic, fast-talking gal navigates romantic and work relationships with men who are used to taking their phallic power for granted, and are consequently ripe to be worked around by a woman who won’t play by their rules. Like most screwball heroines, Gilda is more than equal to the men by virtue of her energy, intelligence, and patter. She controls the phallus game as long as she doesn’t take it for granted herself or give it up voluntarily. As in most rom-coms, the screwball heroine has to juggle at least two potential partners — one stable and unadventurous (the quintessential “Bellamy”) and one imaginative and risky. (The formula is easily inverted, as in Bringing Up Baby, where it’s the male who has to manage the stuffy workaholic Miss Swallow and the daffy but rich Susan Vance.) The Lubitschean genius in Design is in breaking up this pattern before it is fully codified in Hollywood films. The two male rivals are both equally dull and passionate, equally erotically attractive, and their ménage with the heroine is comically appropriate. It’s as if The Bellamy turned out to be a hot partner after all, and is welcomed with open arms. It helps, of course, that the actual “Bellamy” role in Design is entrusted to Edward Everett Horton’s Max.
Some writers believe that the screwball style emerged in response to the Hays Code’s suppression of explicit references to sex. In 1933 the Code was still weakly enforced (strict enforcement by the studios would come the following year). Screenwriters and directors made an art of tweaking it — not just through sly intimations and witty double-entendres (that had been Lubitsch’s m.o. from the beginning of his Hollywood career), but displaying their tricky workarounds to the censorship up front. Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, and the Wilder-Brackett writing team pushed the envelope the furthest but none of them could match the Lubitsch-Hecht joke of making the threesome explicitly agree that their unorthodox relationship would include “no sex.” To resolve all lingering jealousies of her “boys,” Gilda proposes that they concentrate only on their work — their art and her agency — and forget about sex. It will be a non-prurient alliance.
GILDA: Boys, let’s sit down. Now let’s talk it over from every angle, without any excitement, like a disarmament conference.
…
Well, boys, it’s the only thing we can do. Let’s forget sex.
GEORGE: Okay.
TOM: Agreed.
GEORGE: It may be a bit difficult in the beginning.
TOM: But it can be worked out.
GILDA: Oh, it’ll be grand.
GEORGE: Saves lots of time.
TOM: And confusion.
GILDA: We’re going to concentrate on work.
Despite Gilda’s forbidding touch-me-not dress, only an audience of middlebrow American Protestant-ethic puritans would believe that she, who revels in the swoons she gets from her boys, would accept those rules. The “work” moves along, but sex keeps getting in her way. The “gentlemen’s agreement” of no sex has no chance, when, as Gilda confesses, she’s no gentleman. (About that dress, it’s plausible that some wag in the costume department designed the X-motif to designate George’s and Max’s “crossed swords.”)
As for the work moving along, not so fast. Gallery curators won’t exhibit George’s paintings. Gilda persists in encouraging him to believe he is a great artist, and yet we still don’t have any evidence that she’s attached to him for anything other than physical desire and bohemian pretensions.
It’s a suspicion reinforced when we learn that Tom’s play is a parody of itself, not what Tom and presumably Gilda believed it to be. It’s telling that while George is in Nice painting a commissioned portrait of a Mrs. Butterfield, “a rotund but noble creature from Des Moines” (Tom makes sure we know it’s “Des Moines, Iowa“), Lubitsch and Hecht once again give Tom’s professional aspirations more love than George’s. In a famous moment, Gilda and Tom renew their spark by waxing nostalgic over Tom’s old typewriter, which still “rings.” It was probably Hecht’s idea. Typewriters play outsized roles in many of his newsroom films. In any case, it still doesn’t have much to do with art. Hecht’s anti-bohemian snobbery comes out full force in his typewriters, which are the holy tools of journalism, not “literature.” It’s hard to miss that all of our bohemian artist-types are now impeccably attired and employed, but it ain’t higher aesthetic ambitions that bind them together. In fact, it looks for all the world like bohemia is no longer in the picture. At all.
So the core problem among the bohemian American artist-types is pretty much exclusively sexual love, and the only reason it must be in bohemia rather than among New York City clerks is that American prudes wouldn’t allow the space to negotiate it. Coward’s sophisticated urbanites would have a hard time getting along with George and Tom. For the Yankee underwear enterpreneur Max (who is always as well-dressed as our boys), marriage is a matter to be filed along with plumbing and laundry. A lot of my feelings that Design isn’t sure of what’s it’s doing come from this: the romantic ménage isn’t possible in Max’s America, but our beautiful American protagonists aren’t really bohemians, or even British snobs. George looks like a businessman (an image that will be made real in Borzage’s Lubitsch-produced Desire three years later, and Lubitsch’s own Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife two years after that); he makes a living painting portraits of rotund American expat wives; and he acts like a rube. Tom does look like a British socialite, but he’s a feckless poseur whose success appears to come through plays that are received as light satirical comedy. And Gilda, heartstuck between her two boys, opts to marry Max, to enjoy his “security,” and return to the dreaded States.
When our heroes crash the wedding reception, it’s the equivalent of a fraternity prank.
Romance reasserts itself as the boys make their play just as Gilda’s patience with Max’s commercial materialism (that is, “America”) runs out. She seals the deal on her erotic liberty by becoming a passionate runaway bride — unlike most screwball runaways, though, she’s already married when she sets herself loose. Oh so transgressive.
The conclusion’s reaffirmation of the “no sex clause” is clearly aimed at Decency League prudery. It’s still an exciting moment, and one can’t help but wonder (as many have) how it remained in the film, especially considering the voluminous correspondence that Lubitsch had with Hays Code censors. According to Joseph McBride in his book How Did Lubitsch Do It?, Joseph Breen, the head censor of the Code, gave Design a green light because he took the “no sex” line to be bona fide.
For my money, Design for Living is a funny, inventive experiment that doesn’t succeed in balancing satire (at the expense of all sorts of social pretensions) and romance. Sometimes, I feel that Hecht and Lubitsch simply couldn’t prevent their own sardonic attitudes toward all the players — American businessmen, naive Americans in general, and pretentious artists — from bubbling up. There are no ideas or wit, and there’s no gaiety. There is plenty of sexual desire though, so that “no sex” comes to mean “only sex.” That’s plenty funny, though, I admit.