DESIGN FOR LIVING (Blu-Ray) - #592

The first scene of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1933 romantic comedy Design for Living is so perfectly composed, it tells you everything you need to know about the film’s trio of main characters and their relationship to one another before any of them even speak. A blonde woman enters a train car to find two men asleep, shoulder to shoulder, heads back, leaning in. She is amused by their pose, and, sitting across from them, she pulls out a sketchpad to draw them. When she is done sketching, she goes to sleep, too. She puts her feet up on the bench between the two men, her decidedly feminine shoes nestled between their masculine frames. One of them drops his hand in his slumber, and it rests on her ankle. The other fellow leans in closer. Here we have a classic love triangle.

The girl is Gilda Farrell, a commercial illustrator played by the delightful Miriam Hopkins (Trouble in Paradise, Virginia City). The men are painter George Curtis (Gary Cooper, Pride of the Yankees [review], High Noon [review]) and playwright Tom Chambers (Fredric March, Nothing Sacred [review], The Best Years of Our Lives), two not entirely successful Americans living in a flop in Paris. Gilda is American, as well, but unlike the boys, has a successful career. Banter comes naturally, as does romance. On two consecutive days, Gilda has a date with each man. As she explains it, George makes her feel all heated from head to toe; Tom’s fires start stoking down at her feet and work their way up to her head. Both men fulfill something different for her (in a sense, one is brawn, the other brains), and so she proposes that she not choose between them, or ask them to sacrifice their friendship. Instead, she will date them both simultaneously.

Design for Living is based on a play by Noël Coward, and adapted for the screen by Ben Hecht (Notorious [review], His Girl Friday). Lubitsch helmed the production before the Hayes Code, and so Design for Living maintains a surprising frankness. Coward created three intelligent characters who choose an unconventional method for cohabitation, and rather than shying away from it or moralizing, he lets the love story play out. The dialogue is witty and biting, establishing believable connections between all three participants. The tone is erudite, the jokes snappy and clever, and the overall philosophy progressive. Gilda is an example of early feminism in cinema: she has her own income, and thus her independence. When she suggests the open relationship, she states quite clearly that if she were a man, she’d be allowed to sample as many partners as she liked without having to settle. Why shouldn’t a lady be afforded the same luxury?

In fact, the pact between the triangle is referred to as a “gentleman’s agreement,” though the terminology will prove troublesome. The three swear off sex. Not even kissing is allowed. Instead, Gilda will put her energy into helping the men’s careers, judging their work with a harsh critical eye until they are good enough to sell. In more conventional terms, a sort of domestic partnership is created, with the three living together, honoring the pact, keeping each other honest. Thomas is the first one to have success, with his play being picked up for a production to London. (In another example of pre-Code frankness, Gilda connects Tom with a gay producer; if his sexuality weren’t evident in his decidedly non-caricatured flamboyance, Gilda’s crack that he’d like the script because it’s “a woman’s play” is an amusing tip-off.) This leaves Gilda and George alone, with no buffer between them. As Gilda says, moments before giving in to her sexual impulse, “It’s true we have a gentleman’s agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman.”

This, of course, brings complications. There is a back and forth of temptation. Gilda really does love both of them, and there is no choosing one or the other for her. Thomas’ return from London, where he finds his old friends living in luxury following George’s blossoming as a painter--in fact, George is out of town--turns into a tough display of feelings and then a randy expression of lust. Thomas’ old typewriter serves as a rather effective visual metaphor for their mutual sex drive: only Gilda can ring his bell.

Miriam Hopkins is wonderful in this scene, as she is in the entire movie. She is confident and charismatic, feisty with a cutting tongue, and also perfectly feminine. She doesn’t sacrifice beauty or glamour for career, and her nurturing of the two manchildren in her care even supports more “traditional” interpretations of male-female relations. The only thing she has to give up is sex, but that’s not to have a life denied women, it’s to have the life they all three pursue in the face of conflicting social mores. Hopkins provides Design for Living’s center, and the others all orbit around her. March and Cooper make an excellent comic team, perfectly cast in their opposing yet complementary roles. March is droll and a little smarmy, while the towering Cooper is clumsy and blunt. Their expertly timed back-and-forth absolutely sells the completeness of their friendship.

A friendship that Gilda ultimately won’t sacrifice. She leaves them rather than destroy their bond, and she ends up marrying her old boss. True domestic bliss is not to be had, however, as sublimating her will to be the dutiful wife is not in Gilda’s nature. It’s rather sly; Design for Living validates and promotes equality amongst the sexes by removing the sex. Which isn’t to say that man and woman can’t have a physical relationship and the woman not be allowed to be herself within it--Gilda could have had that with either of her suitors--because where the characters end up ultimately lends support to monogamy, as well. The three lovers here are pursuing something imperfect, but possibly more pure. A Platonic ideal, perhaps. An artistic existence. Artists tend to live outside of the norm, after all, dedicating themselves to their work in a way that is usually beyond the understanding of their friends and family. It’s that creative exuberance that Gilda is afraid to extinguish, just as much as she is afraid of destroying the men’s friendship. “Stay an artist,” she tells George when she’s leaving him. “That’s important. In fact, the most important thing.”

Gilda can’t be an artist with a man who would be her boss. She can only be who she is with men who see her as a peer.

With as much as can be read into Design for Living, its true achievement is that it’s never didactic. Though I’ve been pulling subtext up by the roots for this essay, Lubitsch is careful to make sure that it always remains exactly what it is: subtext. The up-top is important above all: the relationship and the interaction of the characters. Design for Living is a facile romantic comedy, full of hilarious one-liners and even funnier escalating, conversational jokes. One need never pause from the laughing to think about all that’s going on. The laughter on its own is enough. This, surely, is the quality that Preston Sturges wanted us to remember when he namedropped his fellow director in Sullivan’s Travels [review]. John L. Sullivan wanted to create motion pictures that mattered, and had he known Lubitsch’s work, he’d not have had to travel so far to discover that all you had to do was leave the audience smiling, and that mattered enough.

It’s amazing to think that the first time I saw Design for Living, it was buried on a cut-rate Gary Cooper boxed set, given little fanfare next to some of his historical adventure pictures. Thank goodness Criterion saw fit to rescue it and give the film its own release. The Blu-Ray restoration looks fantastic. While not all lines and scratches could be whisked away, the high-definition resolution is otherwise flawless, light years away from the banged-up, dark transfer on the old disc. If I recall, that one had a soundtrack full of hiss, as well. Criterion’s uncompressed mono has nary a crackle. 

Also of note on this disc is the inclusion of a two-minute sequence Lubitsch contributed to the anthology film If I Had a Million in 1932. “The Clerk” stars Charles Laughton as, well, a clerk who receives a check for a million dollars. While merely just a gag piece, the comedic business here is flawlessly executed, working a slow-build to lull the audience into a comfortable spot before hitting them with a rather simple, silly, and effective punchline. Even at such a short running time, Ernst Lubitsch manages to say it all!

For further reading, please visit Kim Morgan's site and her piece on Design for Living (also included in full in the disc's booklet). It should be noted that I took some of the images here from Sunset Gun.

DAVID LEAN DIRECTS NOEL COWARD (Blu-Ray) - #603

One was an accomplished film editor looking to move up the cinema ladder, the other a successful playwright ready to embrace motion pictures in full. David Lean, the man who would go on to make Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, two of the biggest big-screen epics of all time, began his career on a relatively moderate scale by comparison, but teaming with a writer as popular as Noël Coward (A Design forLiving) was somewhat epic unto itself. The pair made four films between 1942 and 1945, showing increasing progress across the quartet and culminating in a genuine masterpiece of romantic cinema. Criterion finally collects all of these movies under one banner, David Lean Directs NoëlCoward, boasting new high-definition transfers and a healthy selection of bonus materials.

I reviewed the movies in the set separately for this blog, but you can read them compiled together, along with notes on the technical specs, over at DVD Talk.

DAVID LEAN DIRECTS NOEL COWARD (#603): THIS HAPPY BREED (Blu-Ray) - #605

There is a breezy simplicity to the 1944 Lean/Coward collaboration This Happy Breed that almost completely obscures the ambition of the piece. Based on Coward's original play, David Lean's team--including Ronald Neame on script and camera, as per usual--remove any staginess from the production and create a seamless history of one family's ups and downs from just after the end of World War I to the sketchy days just prior to World War II.

Robert Newton and Lean regular Celia Johnson star as Frank and Ethel Gibbons. Following Frank's discharge from the service, the Gibbons family--two daughters, a son, Ethel's mother, and Frank's sister--move into a home on High Street in London. Next door is one of Frank's army buddies, Bob Mitchell (Stanley Holloway, My Fair Lady [review]), and so this new homecoming is also like a reunion. Bob has one son, Billy (In Which We Serve's John Mills [review]), who wants to be a sailor, and he will eventually fall for Queenie Gibbons (Kay Walsh). The length of their relationship is one of This Happy Breed's many subplots.

The script moves swiftly, leapfrogging over the years, showing the changing times through the news, popular entertainment, and the advancement of technology, particularly the radio. The film examines just about everything: the influence of Communism and workers strife, increasing freedom for women, crackpot spirituality, and the encroaching winds of war. Parent and child disagree and then find common ground. Hotheaded youth succumbs to everyday life. Babies are born, family members die, and through it all, Frank and Ethel persevere, growing older and more gray. This Happy Breed is punctuated with two drinking binges by Frank and Bob--one midway through the picture on the night that Queenie disappears and the other near the end, when Neville Chamberlain woos England into believing that war is being averted. The men represent a generation that has seen much trouble in their time, and who are cautious about how easy it will be to avoid such trouble again.

This Happy Breed is phenomenally compact, and yet it doesn't sacrifice depth of story or character. It would have been rather easy to rely on cliché and stereotype, and in some ways, that happens--the other daughter, Vi (Eileen Erskine), falls for a rabblerousing Bolshevik (Guy Verney) who ultimately settles into the expected role of wage earner and social conservative--but the brilliance of Noël Coward's dialogue is how he uses average conversation to reveal so much about the people engaged in the talk. These are people really saying something, not just filling the time between opening and closing credits. One of the best scenes is when Frank gives his son, Reg (John Blythe), advice on the day of his wedding. Robert Newton nails the speech, covering his nerves with a stern, fatherly tone, and Coward's writing expertly dances around sensitive issues without resorting to trite euphemism. Frank says plenty about the birds and the bees both without ever mentioning either by name.

This Happy Breed doesn't build to a big crescendo. Rather, the story evolves to a natural place, and life's changes dictate how the Gibbons family will exit their cinematic excursion. In many ways, it reminds me of William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, even if it is on a completely different continent and on the opposite side of WWII. The drama is never overwrought, the sentimentality never mawkish, and the decisions never easy, holding up a compelling mirror to an audience who likely had no difficulty recognizing themselves in the faces in the glass.

DAVID LEAN DIRECTS NOEL COWARD (#603): IN WHICH WE SERVE (Blu-Ray) - #604

All you need to know about the demeanor of 1942’s In Which We Serve comes from a scene three-quarters of the way through the nearly two-hour movie. A sailor of a lesser rank receives a letter that says his superior’s wife and mother have been killed in the blitz, and he has to go and tell the other man the bad news. They speak plainly, their voices maintaining a hushed reverence. It’s the epitome of the cliché of British reserve. Forget the upper lip, everything is stiff. And if you want to know just what kind of drama this propaganda production is, the scene ends with the younger man telling the older patriarchal figure that, though that fellow’s family is dead, his own wife survived and had a baby. One generation passes away, and another carries on.

The first collaboration between David Lean and Noël Coward had one specific purpose: to celebrate the troops and prepare a nation at war to handle the hard times ahead. There will be loss and heartbreak, but there will also be much to be proud of. The British Navy? Best there is!

In Which We Serve is a somber picture. It was instigated by Coward, who not only wrote, but he co-directed with a young David Lean and also starred in the movie as Captain “D.” Lean had worked on other movies, editing notable pictures like Anthony Asquith’s Pygmalion and the Archers’ own propaganda piece The 49th Parallel [review]; however, excepting some uncredited work directing sequences of Major Barbara [review], he had never worked behind the camera. Coward brought him on to aid in helming this dream project: a tribute to the Royal Navy that would attempt to portray true naval life. In this, In Which We Serve is successful. It’s one major recommending point to this day is its incredible footage of the naval ships being built and operated. It’s celluloid as essential to the historical record as any wartime documentary.

This stuff is fascinating, as is some of the battle footage. The filmmakers don’t overdue it in the combat scenes. The visual language for overly dramatic fight sequences was perhaps not yet developed, but there is something riveting about the unadorned nature of the skirmishes here. Shot from the ship’s deck, these scenes largely feature men taking coordinates, loading guns, and firing as the German ships circle back and forth, emptying ammo clips and dropping bombs. Sure, it’s a little dry, but the whole of In Which We Serve is dry. Even when it is melodramatic, it’s as dry as Noël Coward likely preferred his martinis.

The careful measurement of In Which We Serve’s narrative is both a fault and a virtue. While it likely served to rally the British people behind their armed services without hitting any regrettable racist caricatures or resorting to jingoist language, the lack of blood and guts ultimately drags. In Which We Serve is a long movie, easily too long. The upside is that Coward has invented a fantastic structural conceit for the film.

In Which We Serve begins out on the ocean as the HMS Torrin contends with a Nazi squadron. They end up beating the German’s ace pilot, but not before he delivers a crushing blow. A handful of men make it overboard, and they cling to a life raft, watching their ship sink and reminiscing about what got them there. The main focal points are the Captain (as played by Coward), and two men in his service, one an officer and one a lower-ranked enlisted man (the ones mentioned at the outset, and played by Bernard Miles and John Mills). We see the captain’s family, complete with wife (Celia Johnson) and kids, alongside the officer’s childless but loving marriage and the younger man’s new romance. He marries just before shipping out (his wife is Kay Walsh). The back-and-forth structure, including the captain’s own underwater reverie, dreaming of his beloved in anticipation of drowning, allows us to see how the camaraderie of warriors develops and also look at the consequences back home. How the battle affected the loved ones who were left behind must have been of utmost concern to the English populace.

All of the lead actors are very good, with Mills being the most memorable as the always-genial Shorty Blake. The most striking supporting performance, though, comes from a very young Richard Attenborough, stepping on screen a few years before his creepy star turn in Brighton Rock. Here he plays a disgraced soldier getting a second chance. Attenborough makes for a very convincing onscreen drunk.

Despite neither Lean nor Coward having directed before, and forgiving the overlong running time, they show an assured hand while dealing with an extremely ambitious, complicated production. Combat footage is never easy, and I would guess particularly not on the water. In Which We Serve never looks faked or chintzy. It’s a quality war picture, and even if it is totally dated, it serves its purpose.

DAVID LEAN DIRECTS NOEL COWARD (#603): BLITHE SPIRIT (Blu-Ray) - #606

Released the same year as Brief Encounter [review], David Lean’s adaptation of Noël Coward’s hit comedy Blithe Spirit couldn’t be further in tone from what would become the duo’s unassailable masterpiece, and yet thematically, they are actually pretty close in terms of their deeper narrative concerns. At the heart of Blithe Spirit beats questions of conjugal love, infidelity, and a cast of characters who soldier on together even when the soldiering gets rough.

Rex Harrison leads the cast of Blithe Spirit as Charles Condomine, an upper-class author content with his posh lifestyle, so much so that there is even some suggestion that his writing isn’t as good as it once was. Charles is married to Ruth (Constance Cummings), who is his second wife. She seems an able companion for him. Their senses of humor are in line with one another, and she goes along with his mad ideas. The current one is to have a medium come to their home for a séance. Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford, also in Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest) is the village joke, but she’s exactly the punchline Charles is waiting on: he is hoping to learn the art of the spiritual charlatan for the latest mystery he is penning.

Naturally, since this is a light comedy, that floating table holding the crystal ball is going to turn, and Charles is going to get what is coming to him. His first wife, the late Elvira (a saucy Kay Hammond), has been a presence in his house since her passing seven years ago, even if only as a topic of discussion between Charles and Ruth. Arcati’s shenanigans make that presence far more real: Elvira has returned as a ghost, one that only Charles can see and hear. His panic and the seemingly one-sided conversations he has with the ghost cause a rift with the understandably irritated second wife--but that’s only the beginning of Charles’ supernatural woes.

Blithe Spirit is, at a surface glance, charmingly toothless. The comedy is light and airless, playing rather innocently with the notion of a restless afterlife. In other words, it’s as far from spooky as you’re likely to get. Watching it actually reminded me of what a big fan of the Topper films I was as a child. I very much liked the idea of having spectral friends that only I could see, standing by my side, helping me out of scrapes. (Naturally, I was also on Jimmy Stewart’s team any time I watched
Harvey.) Blithe Spirit made me want to revisit Topper to see if it’s as harmless as I remember.

Because, of course, being a Noël Coward script, Blithe Spirit’s frothy appearance masks some darker, more mature undertones. There is much one can infer from the coded barbs that were the author’s trademark. (Such as, the suggestion that the previous maid got a sudden case of the marrieds because she was pregnant; it was only 1945, after all, and censorship being what it was....) Ruth’s jealousy of the unimpeachable, crystallized image of her predecessor gives way to a truer picture of Elvira when the dead woman returns and we see how she icily bullied her husband as a matter of foreplay. Presumably since they no longer have to get along by way of corporeal cohabitation, the veil between Charles’ romanticized feelings for Elvira and the side effects of her acidic promiscuity start to become more clear.

The ensemble cast is perfectly gung-ho and able-bodied. They stay committed to Blithe Spirit even when some of the slapstick gets clunky. (Lean’s direction seems to grow more wooden in direct proportion to how silly the story gets.) Rex Harrison adheres pretty closely to the Rex Harrison brand, so he is good, but offers few surprises here (none of that nastiness that makes his turn as Henry Higgins stand out amongst his filmography). Constance Cummings and Kay Hammond are both excellent as the wives: one steadfast and plucky, the other sexy and devious. Even better though, is Margaret Rutherford’s performance as the spiritualist. She is an exceptional character actress, and she creates a busy-bodied, addle-brained persona for the old woman. Rutherford’s performance is both physical and verbal, and despite the obvious craft put into it, surprisingly natural.

Perhaps more impressive, though, is how Lean and cinematographer Ronald Neame (who also contributed the script) handle Blithe Spirit’s special effects. There is less cinematic trickery here than there are tried-and-true stage techniques. Phosphorescent make-up and matching, flowing robes give Elvira her ghostly pallor. Only the woman’s lips have maintained a lively hue: red, passionate, alluring. Symbolically, the lady has yet to give up her last breath.

Those who have seen Blithe Spirit will know I am being coy in how I doled out that last compliment. There are some surprises to be had in the story’s later acts that, while not necessarily mind-blowing, add to the fun. The pace of the film increases as the situation becomes more desperate and Charles seeks to free himself from being haunted. The final scenes add further weight to the relationships, with us learning that Charles himself was not quite the gentleman he maybe pretended to be. Yet, there is also some validation of these relationships. Coward’s script may not necessarily seem to get behind the sanctity of marriage, but it does land firmly on the side of lifelong companionship--no matter how maddening or begrudging it might become. Some people are just meant to be stuck together.

This poster makes me laugh, since it looks nothing like the movie. Compare this lovely still of Kay Hammond below to the paperback novel painting above just to see how different they are.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.