Recorded at the Historic Camelot Theater, Palm Springs, CA on April 28, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
(ALIECE PICKETT:) Back with us today to introduce “Design for Living” (1933) is legendary film critic, historian, and author Molly Haskell.
Ms. Haskell is the author of six books, and she has written for the “New York Times”, “The Guardian”, “Esquire”, “The Nation”, “Town and Country”, “The New York Observer”, “The New York Review of Books”, “The Village Voice”, “New York Magazine”, and “Vogue”.
She served as Associate Professor of Film at Barnard, and Adjunct Professor of Film at Columbia University.
She’s written and lectured extensively on Screwball Comedy and has appeared on many DVD commentaries and interviews, including contributing to TCM.
Ms. Haskell curated this weekend’s films to provide us with bookends of Screwball Comedy in the classic era.
After the film, she and I will be discussing today’s filmmaker, Ernst Lubitsch, and the foundation he built for the Screwball Comedy genre.
Please join me in welcoming back Ms. Molly Haskell.
(MOLLY HASKELL:) Thank you, Aliece, and all of you.
I’m so excited to be here.
We’ve been discussing this by email for two years now.
At first I said, “A Screwball Comedy film festival?” How can it be?
It’s too good to be true.” It still is.
It’s fantastic.
We’re lucky to have it.
I think Aliece and Ed are two of the great people who have created this imaginatively and faithfully.
Ernst Lubitsch was German, and the most sophisticated director ever to come to Hollywood.
And not just versatile, but nimble in the way he went from silent film to sound.
And from before the Production Code.
The Hays Office came in full force in 1933, and imposed strict moral standards on film.
Many things were forbidden that you couldn’t do.
Somehow Lubitsch, on the cusp of the Code, and it still raises eyebrows.
That’s how modern and sophisticated Lubitsch was.
He was born in Germany, of a tailor.
His father was a tailor.
He got to Berlin, and into the Max Reinhardt Theater Troupe, first as an actor, then as a director.
He loved directing right from the start.
He worked with all the great German stars of the day.
He did light-comedy and epics, most were popular.
One, “Carmen” (1918), broke through internationally.
With that, he said “Now is the time to go to the United States”.
He came to Hollywood, still the silent 1920s, silent-era.
Mary Pickford got him to do a film with her, “Rosita” (1923 silent).
They didn’t get along, but that was a good place to start and he went from there.
He did wonderful silent films, “Lady Windermere’s Fan” (1925).
Many people think it’s better than the Oscar Wilde play.
“Design for Living” was a play by Noel Coward that came out in late-1932, 1933.
He wrote it for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.
You probably know them.
Big acting couple in New York. The three were buddies.
They said, “You’ve got to write a play for us”.
Now was the time he wrote “Design for Living”, and he starred in it with Lunt and Fontanne.
He played the writer, and Alfred Lunt played the painter.
It was a big hit in New York.
Miriam Hopkins was from the South.
You can hear it in her voice, as you can in mine.
We’ll get that out of the way.
She had a good education.
I wondered about it because she speaks briefly, but good French in the film and came to Hollywood.
She had a flurry of interesting parts, of which I think this may be the best.
She got a little shrill or mannered in later films.
In “The Smiling Lieutenant” (1931), she’s innocent.
Here, she’s sort of perfect.
The other film Lubitsch did just before this is “Trouble in Paradise” (1932), another great comedy.
Miriam Hopkins is the calculating one.
But here, she’s something in between.
She’s calculating and independent.
She initiates everything that happens.
Yet at the same time, you feel a vulnerability.
Her wonderful co-stars are Gary Cooper and Fredric March.
They’re both so good in this.
Some thought Gary Cooper was miscast when they saw him at the time, because they were used to seeing him in westerns or Frank Capra movies.
Screwball Comedy was not what they associated him with.
Yet that’s what makes him so good.
I don’t want to say too much.
We’ll talk about that afterwards.
This is the background of the film.
It was popular.
Lubitsch went on to do great things.
He was known for the “Lubitsch Touch”.
We’ll talk about that afterwards too.
Aliece and I want to discuss it because it’s been used about him by so many people but in different ways.
What does it mean?
Suffice to say, the “Lubitsch Touch”, you couldn’t have today because you can do anything.
The “Touch” has to do with not being able to show and say everything.
Things are inevitably repressed.
Hinting and suggesting them, all the same.
Also, like all Screwball Comedies, it’s hectic.
It’s fast-paced, but underneath it there’s a sense of time. Lubitsch created an idealized world.
A world that was characterized by grace and manners.
Life is short, and this is how people should behave.
But there is an undercurrent of sadness you feel in the Hopkins character.
I don’t want to say any more.
I hope you enjoy it.🎥
Film Society of Screwball Comedy®
Edited by Aliece Pickett
Copyright 2025