Design for Living (1933)

It seems like some of the hullabaloo about this film stems from the fact that it's an infamous pre-code flick, that it's way ahead of its time with its frankness about sexuality. Well, it still seems ahead of its time to me. I've never quite seen a movie like this. It's about an ad-woman in Paris who falls in love with two men at the same time. The two men, both played beautifully by Gary Cooper and Frederic March, are best friends, a pair of ex-pat artists (one a painter and the other a playwright) living in a garret in the Montmartre. She can't choose so they all agree to a quasi menage a trois, one in which sex is not allowed. It's their Design for Living. It fails, of course, because sex naturally becomes involved. Complications ensue and Gilda (Miriam Hopkins) runs off to marry someone else, not because she feels bad about her split affections but because she feels bad about what she is doing to the two best friends. This is the rare romantic comedy in which everyone has chemistry together.

Design for Living was written by Ben Hecht, adapting Noel Coward's play, and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It's very funny, but somehow it's tender as well. It's impossible not to like the threesome and what they represent. There's no moralizing (or not much) about Gilda's inability to choose and her desire to have both men. And you understand her choice; it would be hard to choose. Gary Cooper is utterly gorgeous but Frederic March, while not as good looking, is very charming. Here's all three below. It's available on Criterion.

L'Atalante and 1934

I just watched Jean Vigo's surrealist/realist portrait of the first year of marriage, L'Atalante, on Hulu (thank you, Hulu/Criterion collection collaboration), and it got me thinking about the year it came out, 1934, and how that was a pretty amazing year at ye olde picture shows.

Not only did we get Vigo's only full-length film (he sadly died at the age of 29 from tuberculosis), but we got the following:

 Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century.

Capra's It Happened One Night. I'll put this one up against any romantic comedy, then and now.

The greatest Tarzan film ever made, Tarzan and his Mate, and I'm only slightly swayed by the pre-code nudity.

The first Thin Man, and still one of the best comedy/mystery/romances ever made.

Hitchcock's brilliant English thriller, The Man Who Knew Too Much.

 Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat.

 Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage.

The first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee.

And Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra in DeMille's epic. Seen here bathing in milk.