DESIGN FOR LIVING

Both Lubitsch and top-billed March had recently had their way with Miriam Hopkins, the lusty director via all-time indelible Trouble in Paradise and the latter having ravished the blonde terrier in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So inserting Gary Cooper’s gangly boyishness into Noel Coward’s triangle of “loose-living, irreligious, unmoral degenerates” prompted the film’s Code-impaired pact between the three Parisian bon vivants: “no sex.” (Can they say that?) Lubitsch and screenwriter Ben Hecht actually out duel their free love source work, arguing through March to Trouble in Paradise’s Edward Everett Horton: “Oh, don’t let’s be delicate Mr. Plunkett. Let us be crude and objectionable both of us… Delicacy, as philosophers point out, is the banana peel under the feet of truth.” -- Raoul Hernandez, guest curator