A minor Lubitsch fluff transposes Noël Coward’s eponymous play onto the celluloid (but in only bare-bones terms), DESIGN FOR LIVING is a witty but stuffy comedy hammers out an uncharacteristic denouement for a risquéthree-way relationship between two men and a woman, a progenitor of François Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM (1962).
Three Americans in Paris, best friends and roomies, struggling artists Tom Chambers (March) and George Curtis (Cooper) both are swept off their feet by a chic girl Gilda Farrell (Hopkins), who reciprocates them with isometric amount of affection, before soon a platonic ménage-à-trois under the same roof is propounded and accepted with a tripartite agreement, only sabotaged when one party is away in London for his burgeoning playwright career, the remaining two becomes an item, occasioning a crack in two men's friendship, and a seesawing Gilda has only one exit route when she is again, impelled to make the impossible choosing, leaving both and hurriedly marries to her long-time admirer Max Plunkett (Horton, utterly jolly in his priggish, business-oriented persona), which turns out to be an exasperating mistake on her part.
It is a jocose folie-à-trois panning out like a heady and mellifluous minuet, predominantly confined itself within interior spaces, aptly conceals its hanky-panky business off the screen (released within a whisker of the advent of the notorious Hays Code), but revels in its proto-screwball faux-naïf characterization to the hilt. The trio leads are all up for it, although acting side by side, a debonair March fairly eclipses an impetuous Cooper in his sonorous diction and unperturbed demeanor, but the cynosure here is a ripsnorting Hopkins, exerts her high-wire balancing act between two emblems of idealized American masculinity and only comically falls prey of her own indecision in the slapdash third act, as a matter of fact, Lubitsch cunningly expurgates all the frills and trimmings from his camera (including a climactic brawl, vanishingly completed in a trice), less is more, this blithe rom-com once again bears witness to Lubitsh’s master-class aptitude of economic elegance under the Studio system.
companion pieces: Lubitsch’s ONE HOUR WITH YOU (1932, 7.1/10), HEAVEN CAN WAIT (1943, 7.9/10).
HD中字
