Cinema Sunday: Design For Living

 

If your point of reference of what life is like for other people comes from the movies, one might think sex wasn't invented until the 1970s. 

Such a perspective derived from American cinema owes to the heavy handed puritanical code that governed Hollywood known as the Hays Code. 

Which is why it's always a surprise for me to encounter a black and white film from the 1930s with a rather casual, adult view of sex.  

Made in 1933, Design For Living is what is known as a pre-Code picture, a movie made before the ham fisted moralists of the Hays office got hold of it. 

I happened to stumble upon Design For Living late one night and was pleasantly surprised by the principal characters discussing sex while actually using the word sex. 

Both artist George Curtis and playwright Thomas Chambers, fellow Americans who share an apartment in Paris, are in love with commercial artist Gilda Farrell. Which is fine with Gilda because she's in love with both of them and is having way too much fun with both of them to choose.  George and Tom are uptight Americans and aren't as sanguine about the situation as Gilda. 

Unable to choose between the two men, Gilda proposes she live with them as a friend, muse, and critic but with the understanding they will not have sex.

The arrangement works until, with some help from Gilda, a producer takes an interest in Tom's play and Tom has to head off to London where it will be produced. 

George and Gilda are left alone. George is prepared, in deference to his friendship with Tom, to honor the gentleman's agreement not to have sex with Gilda. 

Gilda, just oozing her luxurious frame over a sofa, purrs, "I am, unfortunately, no gentleman." 

And we're off to the races! 

Tom returns to Paris for a visit while George is away and rekindles his romance with Gilda. 

George is not happy about that and once more, Gilda is forced to choose between Tom and George. She solves this problem by choosing neither of them but instead marries Max, an older stuffed shirt with a stick up his ass. Max is all wrong for Gilda. 

George and Tom team up to rescue Gilda from her bad decision marriage.   

The movie is based on the 1932 play Design for Living by Noël Coward but all that remains from the play is the title and the premise.  Screenwriter Ben Hecht seemed to take some twisted delight that not one line of Coward's play made it into Hecht's screenplay.  

The free wheeling sexually adventurous trio at the core of the film certainly evokes the spirit of a Noel Coward creation. But if Ben Hecht was only doing his impression of a Noel Coward script, I can't help but wonder just how much funnier and off the rails the original play can be.  

Design For Living may have been made in 1933 but Miriam Hopkins as Gilda Farrell is immediately recognizable as a thoroughly modern woman, bold, direct, playful and passionate. Gilda's scene where she says   "I am, unfortunately, no gentleman" is one of the sexiest line readings I've seen in any movie made in any century.  

However it may fail the source material, Design for Living has a surprisingly fresh, contemporary feel with moral attitudes ahead of it's time played out against very crisp and sleek film work.