The Still Ahead of Its Time Sexuality of Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living
Note: This is the hundred-and-seventy-second in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Letterboxd, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my second favorite 1933 film, DESIGN FOR LIVING, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
When many talk or write about the Pre-Code era of Hollywood films, that brief sound period from 1929 to early 1934 during which many filmmakers tackled serious social issues and/or reveled in debauchery with an unflinching approach relative to the sanitized decades to come, there is still an acknowledgement that those movies did so “for their time.” Indeed, Pre-Code standards still did not allow explicit violence or nudity as would be allowed in films once the Code was done away with in the 1960s. Society being what it was, viewers weren’t actually ready for that kind of depiction, but “Pre-Code” is also a misnomer; the so-called Hays Code had been installed in 1930, but was only nominally enforced to save face from, mostly, Catholic leagues calling for censorship of the movies.
Into this conversation steps DESIGN FOR LIVING, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, a constant boundary-crosser even once the Code was enforced, based on a play by Noël Coward, who was on the receiving end of his fair share of pearl-clutching over the years and especially for his play. But famously, or infamously to some, Lubitsch’s film, written by an unlikely collaborator in the form of gritty crime story scribe Ben Hecht, is only very loosely based on Coward’s original work…and it’s all the better for it, at least judging from a 1964 British television adaptation that I didn’t like very much.
There’s a matter of taste in the superior performances and more extensive visual approach of Lubitsch’s film to the relatively simple TV play of more than 30 years later. But the director and Hecht’s remix of Coward’s central conceit, that of three lovers throwing themselves into an unconventional “gentleman’s agreement,” deliriously expands the devil-may-care circumstances and charts a path for two men and a woman that, in true social terms if not in graphic portrayal on screen, is still out-of-step.
In fact, Lubitsch and Hecht so expand the story of DESIGN FOR LIVING that the movie picks up where the play starts with only 30 minutes or so left in the 90-minute film. This follows the central logic of filmmaking to “show not tell,” as we see the beginning of Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), Tom (Fredric March), and George’s (Gary Cooper) relationship and the trials and tribulations that lead two of them to end up together…for a time. There is a beautiful symmetry, then asymmetry, to the story’s structure and interactions between Gilda and the two men.
It all starts on board a train, where the two American men, one a painter (George), the other a playwright (Tom), both struggling, are snoozing when Gilda, also an American and a commercial artist, sits in their compartment and starts sketching them. When they awake to find themselves lampooned by Gilda in her sketchbook, a conversation ensues in which the principle drivers are the two artists: Gilda and George. This is the earliest hint to Tom’s being left out, but the interaction quickly picks back up into a threesome as Gilda, flanked by the two men, walks onto the train platform.
What ensues is the introduction of Edward Everett Horton’s Max Plunkett, a stuffy “friend” of Gilda’s who runs the ad agency to which she contributes art and who is desperately pining after her…at least in the sense of possessing her. And there is some back and forth between Tom and George when, upon discovering the other has secretly been seeing Gilda behind his back and “making love” to her, they seem poised to cease being friends. The “Lubitsch touch,” yes, a vague term, nevertheless never makes these early moments feel like a rote rehash of love triangle comedy/drama, but the events to come totally demolish generic and societal expectations.
Gilda describes what has happened to her as “something that only happens to men,” using a metaphor of trying on multiple hats and expressing that women can’t do that and still be labeled “nice.” The forthrightness of Gilda, played wonderfully by a growing favorite of mine in Hopkins, was almost unprecedented in American studio film. Her love for George, with an against-type Cooper acting as a kind of meathead artist, an inspired choice in spite of then-and-now criticism, and Tom, with March in the role with customary refinement and wit, coincides with lust. And what keeps this from being cheap melodrama, among other elements, is George and Tom’s love for each other, weaving into anger here and there but overall presenting a deep and playful bond that never quite teeters into, but borders on, homoeroticism.
But these three are still human and still living in a monogamous world. There is jealousy and a desire for sex, even in the face of an agreement to abstinence, so in short order, Gilda is living with George while Tom becomes successful as a playwright. You see, the female muse at the center of the trio decides to become a “mother of the arts,” in a move that is perhaps the only retrograde element of DESIGN FOR LIVING. Even as she defers to the careers of the men, however, Gilda does not lose her characterization of agency, and indeed, they are only successful because of her efforts.
When Tom returns, spends a night with Gilda, and is caught with her by George in the morning over breakfast, Gilda flees, ultimately taking up with Plunkett in a safe yet staid marriage. There is a strong phallic symbol in the delivery of flowers from the two “hooligans,” as Horton’s character calls them, and their presence, it is implied, ruins his own performance in the marital bed. This leaden sense of duty, which also involves Plunkett’s showcasing of his bride at deal-centered dinner parties, eats away at Gilda until the boys return and whisk her away, ending with three laughing together in a cab, their fates uncertain but their freedom intact.
It’s a remarkable end to a remarkable movie. And its happy ending, in which no one couple is formed nor is there some tragic resolution to put the lie to notion that DESIGN FOR LIVING’s “gentlemen’s agreement” could ever work, was radical. Today, when polyamory is still often jokingly spoken of or shamed, it still feels so. Lubitsch’s deft direction had never turned out a film quite so thoroughly pleasing for its entire run, grounding a delightful trio in a world of stark, bohemian, and Expressionist Parisian garrets, chic and tidy modern apartments, and expansive mansions, all set dressed and shot by Ernst Fegté and Victor Milner, respectively.
DESIGN FOR LIVING is one of the great comedies in that its central, apparently ridiculous premise is treated earnestly and, without becoming “preachy” or suggesting this should be everyone’s design for living, matter-of-factly presents an alternative to our traditional way of doing things. The point is that things seem like they will work out for George, Tom, and Gilda, that this is their arrangement for happiness, and who are we to deny them?
