My Canon: "Design for Living" (1933)
The first post in a new series revisiting my favorite movies.
Introduction
“We don’t see things as they are,” Anaïs Nin once wrote; “we see them as we are.” This, I think, is the distinction that drives many people toward the obsession of collecting. No matter what it is that’s being collected—stamps, coins, antiques, toys, clothing, artworks, books, sneakers, cars, vinyl, baseball cards, vintage neon beer signs, you name it—the items in a collection tell us more about the collector than about the items themselves. By collecting, we pretend we can master our memories, our experiences; we think of who and where we were when we first encountered the items in our collections, and as a result we try to make sense of the chaos of our lives.
This is even more fitting when the items in a collection are intangible memories rather than physical objects. Film collectors occupy this amorphous middle ground. Movie collections do have tangible media, of course—DVDs and Blu-rays, 16mm or 35mm reels, VHS tapes, laserdiscs, all the accompanying posters and memorabilia—but what film lovers really try to collect, I think, are the experiences of seeing these movies for the first time (or the second, or the third…). As much as I love attractive packaging and informative booklets, it’s the memory of being part of an audience that we want to recapture, the feeling of being hypnotized by the rays of a projector’s light, or (less momentous, perhaps) astonished by the information stored on a disc or videotape. In this way, we treasure our most beloved encounters with an art form that’s notoriously effervescent.
Lists work the same way. They’re an attempt to catalogue the memories and feelings that struck us once like a bolt of lightning—the kinds of things that can never be placed in a collection, that will eventually leave us entirely. Of course, lists are also arbitrary, unachievable tasks, doomed to failure before they even begin. Is it ever possible to name the hundred best movies of all time? Or even the best movies of a given year? The greatest actors, directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, composers? Obviously not; as soon as a list is made, you see new movies that will rearrange everything. Not to mention the fact that no two people’s lists will ever look exactly alike (nor should they).
These are the reasons why many people bemoan “best of” lists—they’re subjective and untrustworthy. Whenever the BFI’s once-a-decade poll of the greatest movies of all time is released (most recently in 2022), a number of artists and critics always condemn the endeavor as futile. Of course, many of them submit their own list anyway, apparently in an attempt to prove how futile it all is. The subjective, untrustworthy, ever-changing nature of lists, though, is why I love them. As Anaïs Nin wrote, the specific movies on the list—as fun as they are to remember and argue about—aren’t as important as their connections to the person that compiled them.
Like most ardent movie lovers who take their opinions a little too seriously, I’ve maintained a list of my favorite movies for about two decades now. The list has changed drastically, of course. I used to try to give specific rankings to hundreds of movies, spending way too much time debating which movie should be #112, for example, and which should follow it up at #113. (That truly is a futile task.) The list used to be chronological, which had the benefit of showing me which periods of film history I was the most unversed in. Nowadays, my list has ballooned to about 350 movies, placed in general “tiers” of greatness. Is it absurd to keep a list of several hundred movies in nebulous order—a list that’s bound to change often, which jumps frequently from all-time classics to personal favorites to obscure oddities that may not be objectively “great”? Absolutely—and therein lies the pleasure.
This new series of posts will tackle various movies from “my canon,” selected randomly one at a time. Some of them I haven’t seen for ten years or more; some of them might have just been added weeks or months ago. After revisiting them, I’ll give them a new “verdict”: Top 20, Upper Tier, Middle Tier, Bottom Tier, or Off the List. I hope that, cumulatively, these movies will give a sense of my overall cinematic tastes, the qualities I find most most significant in this mercurial art form. And, somewhat selfishly, I look forward to taking a trip down memory lane throughout this series, encountering the various versions of myself as a movie lover throughout the years.
Design for Living
Has there ever been a period of filmmaking as fertile and unique as pre-Code Hollywood? This subset of movies only lasted about seven years, from the rise of “the talkies” in 1927 to the firm entrenchment of the Production Code Administration (PCA) in 1934, which sternly enforced what could and could not be portrayed in American films. During those seven years, though, there was a still-shocking permissiveness in terms of violence, sexuality and nudity, and moral looseness. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that America’s bastions of propriety made Hollywood clean up its act, leading to several decades of prim and proper representation that aimed to clean up the seedier side of human existence. (Of course, many directors during that time found ways to include sly double entendres and bleak moral philosophy nonetheless.) No disrespect to the many masterworks of Hollywood’s Golden Age or the New American Cinema of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, but pre-Code cinema will probably always be my favorite period of American film, as innovative in form and subject matter as it is boundary-pushing in its films’ sex and violence.
Ernst Lubitsch is, in some ways, the paragon of pre-Code cinema; in fact, his 1933 masterpiece Design for Living helped expedite the end of the era and brought about the rise of the PCA (especially after the Catholic Legion of Decency banned the movie upon its release). The film is problematic right down to its storyline: two American bohemian artists, playwright Tom (Fredric March) and painter George (Gary Cooper), travel to Paris and meet commercial illustrator Gilda (Miriam Hopkins) on a train. They both fall in love with her; she falls in love with both of them. If the film had been made a few years later, during the height of the Production Code, one monogamous union would have been formed out of this love triangle, and the extraneous character probably would have found a match of his own. (This is essentially what happens in 1940’s The Philadelphia Story.) In 1933, however, Design for Living opted for an approach that scandalized straitlaced American viewers: Tom, George, and Gilda (with a soft “G”) decide to remain a ménage à trois and live happily ever after (supposedly) in their polyamory.
Though Design for Living offers a fair share of winking sexual innuendos (many of them revolving around Tom’s old typewriter and how well-lubricated its keys are), the movie is remarkable for taking its characters and their happiness seriously. This isn’t just a love triangle for the sake of salaciousness; these are three distinct personalities who could probably only find joy with each other. Tom is witty and urbane, confident to a fault; he’s found a way to thrive on cynicism by turning it into a comedic art (shades of Lubitsch here, who first rose to prominence in the Berlin theater scene before heading to Hollywood in 1922). George can be sullen and boorish, and is easily wounded when his art is criticized, but his vulnerability and sensitivity are among his most attractive qualities (especially when they come in the form of tall, dashing Gary Cooper). Most remarkable of all is headstrong, sexy, self-assured Gilda, immortalized by Miriam Hopkins (more on her later). She has no qualms about being cruel and exacting to George and Tom, and especially to their art, but only because she sees how brilliant they could be if they weren’t allowed to coast on talent alone. Although (or probably because) she’s a commercial artist, she values the creation of true, noble, soul-searching art as the greatest human aspiration—which she reminds George and Tom of constantly. (Weirdly, on this most recent rewatch, Gilda reminded me of Pauline Kael in how acerbic yet irresistibly witty she is.) While there have been lots of think pieces and click-baiting articles about the value of non-monogamy in recent years, a movie like Design for Living reminds you this isn’t a new concept—and Lubitsch’s film is more convincing in showing how these particular people are fulfilled by their peculiar arrangement.
As Lubitsch’s critical and commercial popularity grew with the advent of sound—leading to a string of hits like The Love Parade (1929), Monte Carlo (1930), The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), and Trouble in Paradise (1932)—the catchphrase “the Lubitsch touch” was coined to define the director’s inimitable sense of comedy, romance, and sophistication. (Indeed, the Lubitsch touch was such a well-known phrase that Hitchcock worked hard to become known as “the Master of Suspense” when he moved to Hollywood to compete with Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder tried unsuccessfully to develop a similar nickname for himself.) There are some ways in which the Lubitsch touch can be isolated: for example, his penchant for introducing characters by showing close-ups of disembodied hands, legs, and feet (memorably, Tom first spots Gilda on the train by eyeing her bare calves); Lubitsch’s use of doors and staircases as domestic spaces where all kinds of mayhem (often sexual) plays out (Design for Living, like Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and Monte Carlo, features a crane shot that follows characters as they ascend or descend stairs); and setting up a joke in one shot only to provide the punchline by cutting to a different scene. (In Design for Living, that memorably happens when Tom professes his love for Gilda to her stuffy employer, played by Edward Everett Horton, only for the film to cut to a shot of Gilda and George passionately kissing; miraculously, the moment seems more sympathetic than cruel.) In other ways, though, I think the Lubitsch touch is indefinable, a kind of preternatural grace that permeated every shot, every set, every performance. Either way, Design for Living provides plenty of evidence for why Lubitsch might be the greatest comedic director of all time, or at least in the sound era.
But I’d also like to focus on the non-Lubitsch things that make Design for Living a masterpiece, since these are the things that stood out to me on this rewatch. For one thing, Lubitsch’s collaboration with screenwriter Ben Hecht shouldn’t be underestimated. Hecht was a former Chicago journalist who wrote some of the finest screenplays of the early sound era, like the original Scarface (1932) and one of the best screwball comedies of all time, His Girl Friday (1940). With Design for Living, Hecht adapted a popular play by Noël Coward, changing its setting and its characters from the urbane upper crust of the play to the bohemian Parisian setting of the movie. (In doing so, Design for Living partly deviates from the glamorous setting of Lubitsch’s previous movie, Trouble in Paradise, while also likely appealing to audiences still in the midst of the Great Depression.) Upon the film’s release in 1933, the critic for Time Out London wrote that “Noël Coward's teacup wit and elegance hardly suits the beer glass temperament of his screen adapter Ben Hecht,” which is one of the best compliments one could pay Hecht’s adaptation. The film is rife with fast-paced, clever wordplay, as when Gilda offers a long monologue in French only to conclude it with a distinctly American “Oh, nuts!,” or when Tom tells a wealthy patron of the arts why politeness and civility are overrated.
Along with Lubitsch and Hecht, the third collaborator who really shapes Design for Living is Miriam Hopkins. No disrespect to March and Cooper, who are moving and charismatic as the men who swoon over Gilda, but the latter is the most memorable character in the film, a fiery, radiant presence who lives life by her own rules. When she briefly attempts a bout of reserved domesticity in Design for Living, she’s only further convinced that a life of dull respectability means nothing for her. In the way that The Philadelphia Story functions mostly as a character study of Katharine Hepburn’s Tracy, so too is Design for Living a comedy first and a character study second, with Gilda receiving the bulk of the film’s admiration.
Hopkins starred in a number of pre-Code classics, including Trouble in Paradise and the excellent adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) that also starred Fredric March. But Design for Living offers her best performance. She proudly underscores the feminist impulse of the film, as when Gilda states, “A thing happened to me that usually happens to men,” referring to her urge to juggle multiple lovers. But Gilda also embraces the carnal pleasures of life, as when she breaks the no-sex clause between her, George, and Tom by saying, “It’s true we have a gentleman’s agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman.” Finally, Gilda is a woman of principle, valuing art and real human affection above all else; her romantic liberation is given a slightly political edge when she tells her businesslike, ad-exec husband (shortly before leaving him) “I’m sick of being a trademark married to a slogan!”
The joyful chemistry between Gilda, George, and Tom (and the actors who play them) creates one of cinema’s greatest love triangles. Seeing them in Design for Living again, I wondered if they inspired French New Wave directors decades later, as the plans à trois in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) and Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964) recall the freewheeling intimacy of Lubitsch’s trio (at least at first, before they turn to tragedy in the later French iterations). While Design for Living is one of the best expressions of the Lubitsch touch, it also reminds you that movies are always an act of collaboration—in this case, enlivened by the contributions of Hecht and Hopkins especially. The film is, in the end, one of the most romantic and humane comedies of all time, shocking not so much because of its brazen amorality as for the starry-eyed love it shows to its characters, who refuse to live a life anything less than blissful.
Verdict: Upper Tier
Next Up: Empire of Passion (Nagisa Ōshima, 1978)