Design for Living

One of the films Ernst Lubitsch made just before the Hays Code came into force, and its subject is still direct today. Gilda meets two men on a train to Paris: George, a painter, and Tom, a playwright. The three become friends, then she loves them both and refuses to choose. The arrangement they reach is this: they will live together and nobody will sleep with anybody. That it will not hold is clear from the start. The source is Noël Coward's 1932 play, but Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay and rebuilt the text almost entirely; the number of Coward's original lines surviving in the film can be counted on one hand. Lubitsch had first offered it to Samson Raphaelson, who did not want to adapt Coward. Miriam Hopkins plays Gilda, Gary Cooper plays George and Fredric March plays Tom. Edward Everett Horton occupies the fourth corner as the man who thinks she ought to marry. Its strength is not in what is said but in what is not: the freedom of the pre-Code period is used here as implication rather than plain speech. One of the right places to start for anyone curious about 1930s Hollywood comedy and the Lubitsch touch. For a viewer expecting fast modern comedy, the film runs entirely on dialogue and its rhythm is slow by current habit.