Design for Living
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Year Released: 1933
Rating: 1.0
Butchered, unforgivably bad adaptation of Noël Coward's stage play about two artists - a painter (Gary Cooper) and a playwright (Fredric March) - and their muse (Miriam Hopkins) and the way she changes hands between them. It would be a huge relief to blame this flat, uninspired dreck on a hack filmmaker and/or writer, but both Lubitsch and screenwriter Ben Hecht are anything but - couple that with the heinous miscasting of all three principal leads and you have a surefire disaster: only E. E. Horton has any kind of comedic timing (and Cooper, who generally struggles with dramatic parts, is especially out-of-place). No man, regardless of sexual orientation, would ever put up a fight for cock-eyed Miriam Hopkins.
