At the heart of Design for Living is the idea that rigidity is the enemy of human life –rigidity in thinking, rigidity in morality and behavior, and also rigidity in art. The film is the work of one of the wittiest and most flexible makers of comedy in American movies, Ernst Lubitsch.
The film came out in 1933, which makes it a pre-Code picture, meaning that it was made after the censorship document called The Hollywood Production Code was written in 1930, but before the Code came to be enforced in 1934. The pre-Code period is now beloved for its lively sex and politics.
Design for Living started as a play by the ultimate sophisticate Noel Coward, but it was much changed in the screenplay by the great Ben Hecht, whose work ranges from Hitchcock’s Notorious, to His Girl Friday to Wuthering Heights to the lurid film noir Kiss of Death. Design for Living itself is racy, funny, mocking of social mores and conformities, and quite gleeful in its acceptance of an untraditional sexual arrangement.
In the story, a hopeful young playwright (Frederick March) is best friends with a struggling painter (Gary Cooper). They share a garret in Paris. Into their world comes a tiny blonde (Miriam Hopkins), who can be simultaneously sultry and ridiculous. Both men fall in love with her, and she with them. The pre-Code films embraced sex, and the movie doesn’t shy away from letting the audience know that Hopkins has sex with both men. But the arrangement fails because of the jealousies that arise, so the three agree on “no more sex,” that Hopkins will become a tough muse to both of them. They call it a gentlemen’s agreement, but with a positively juicy smirk, Hopkins adds, “But I’m no gentleman.”
She sneers “Rotten” at the plays and does the same with the paintings, and helps both men find success. But sex never disappears for long in a Lubitcsh film and the arrangement falters.
If comedy has to do with shortcuts in logic and unexpected results, Lubitsch is one of the great masters of comedy. He’s famous for hiding crucial events behind closed doors, and teasing the audience with what people imagine is going on. Hopkins’s character marries a prissy man who thinks only of his clients – especially the dreary Mr. Egelbauer. The husband is played by Everett Edward Horton, an actor even then known as gay who also played mostly characters coded 30s-style as gay.
After the wedding night – which Lubitsch does not show – Horton exits the bedroom, a frustrated look on his face, and he kicks over a flower pot. So, the wedding night was unsuccessful, and the action does two things for which Lubitsch is famous. It’s funny, but it also respects the feelings of a man who has just failed at something that matters to him. Lubitsch never made comedies that demean characters who do no harm to others. Horton’s character may be foolish, but he’s no villain and he deserves basic respect as a human being.
Lubitsch comedies come from the fundamental sense that human life is ultimately comic that we are frail and often silly beings, and maybe the only way to make that frailty understandable is to laugh at it. Lubitsch characters get caught in their own snares and exposed by their own words. No one is immune, but only those who intentionally give pain to others are punished.
A lot of recent comedies make jokes. You laugh and then wait for the next joke. With Design for Living, the comic thread runs continually through the movie. It’s always there; you just don’t know when it will pop up. A suitcase by the door, or a second used Champagne glass on the breakfast table can make you erupt in laughter because they show everything you imagine you know.
