gentleman’s agreement
by
Douglas Messerli
Ben
Hecht (screenplay, based on the play by Noel Coward), Ernst Lubitsch (director)
Design for Living / 1933
One wants so
much to love Ernst Lubitsch’s nod to Noel Coward’s Design for Living of 1933! No matter that Gary Cooper already
displays too many of the Caparesque ticks of his later acting career—the “aw
shucks, disturbingly-innocent American, all too ready to slug-it-out with
anyone who disagrees with him, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude”-school of acting
that he eventually dominated; for a moment, I was a afraid he might even take
out his harmonica! I hate the type but enjoy the actor. Frederic March is a
first-rate stage actor often used miserably by filmmakers. And Miriam Hopkins,
a precursor of the breezy slightly addlepated, good hearted dame that Carole
Lombard would soon perfect, found her voice in this and other films of the
period.
Ernst Lubitsch was the absolute master of
pre-code adult sex comedies—representing some of the most mature filmmaking
about the relationships between men and women and anyone in between of the
American cinema. And Noel Coward…well Coward simply speaks for himself: he was
urbane and sophisticated comedy incarnate. The limited run with Alfred Lunt,
Lynn Fontanne, and himself of this play at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre
caused near-riots as audiences rushed to the theater to see the play in the
last weeks of its run.
On
the other side, there’s the screenwriter, Ben Hecht. One of the most talented
of all of film writers in screen history, Hecht knew the American psyche better
than nearly anyone in his day. He could seemingly do anything: mad-cap comedy (Twentieth Century, Monkey Business),
regular comedy (His Girl Friday, Nothing Sacred), drama (Notorious), and even high melodrama (Wuthering Heights). What he couldn’t do
and wouldn’t do was English drawing-room patter. And that’s where Design for Living somehow lost its
bounce.
Although Hecht, despite what might have
been his deep-down druthers, kept the basic structure of Coward’s witty ménage-a-tois,
in converting it a story of three Americans on the loose in Paris instead of
three jaded British artists, everything in the work—except for the fact that
the three major characters in this pre-code work actually do have sex, the two males, at least, copulating with their female
friend—is transformed from a spritely series of quick-witted lines, with the
characters, like moths, “colliding constantly and bruising each other’s wings”
(as Coward put it), into a bell-ringing (if only the bell of an now-obsolete
typewriter) pin-ball machine, each figure taking his turn to intercept,
out-maneuver, and cheat against the others. If Coward’s males might be imagined
to be attracted to one another as much as to the lovely woman with whom they
share their small flat, these clumsy Americans are just “long-time friends”
who—reminding one all too much of the later Bing Crosby and Bob Hope
duo—attempt to maintain their platonic partnership* while personally winning
over the woman they share, which means, simply put, getting her into bed: the
fact of which demands that she immediately marry the one her beds her first!
While abandoning the comedy’s sexual insouciance,
Hecht does allow his heroine to become a proto-feminist figure, delighted by
the fact that she, like most men before her, has suddenly found herself in the
position of choosing between her suitors, a bit like choosing between two
appealing hats. But in order to gain that transcendence she is forced, given the
writer’s American moral compunctions, to become a kind of mother to them both,
while stimulating them to achieve new heights in their careers.
Long passages, accordingly, are required
in which to explain the changes in their lives. In what might be described as
the first act, the Frederic March character is sent off to England to become famous,
while Cooper establishes his territory. March’s second act return, finally—and
far too late to save the comedy’s pacing—changes everything. The result, act
three, is a completely unbelievable “third marriage” of the title character,
Gilda, to the career-centered (read intractably male-centered) advertising
executive played to type by Edward Everett Horton, an advertising executive
whose central relationships are cast in cement, made literal by his attempt to
curry favor with a major producer of the substance.
The film slightly redeems itself when the
two competitive “roommates,” after drinking themselves into a sentimental
tizzy, realize that the original “design for living”— the three for all and all
for one—was better than living without her, and show up in matching tuxedos to
a high-class dinner, popping up like dueling-puppets from behind her dressing
screen to easily win her back.
It’s fascinating that in Coward’s comedy
the trio ends the play in a ridiculous fit of laughter, rejoicing, perhaps, in
the absurdity of their irreconcilable bisexual and heterosexual urges. In the
Lubitsch-Hecht Americanized version, they, once more, come to “a gentleman’s
agreement,” a temporary lacuna in which they agree to have no sex. Instead of
laugher, Hecht poises his male figures, a bit like a traditional Western, in
another standoff. And, we all know by this time where that will end.
Fortunately, we know their history; these men may have come to such an
agreement, but, as Gilda readily admits, “I’m no gentleman.” The question
remains, obviously, whether these temporary “gentlemen” can stop being stereotypical
American males long enough to become “gentle” men able to embrace whatever
sexual realities they might face.
Los Angeles,
December 10, 2014
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December
2014).
*On
the other hand, one must admit that seldom has there been so much evidence of
male-on-male touching as in Lubitsch’s direction of this film. There’s hardly a
moment when these two male figures can keep their hands off one another.
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