Recorded at the Historic Camelot Theater, Palm Springs, CA on April 28, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
(MOLLY HASKELL:) You know from the outset this is an impossible situation.
They have to be together.
Yet they can’t be together.
(ALIECE PICKETT:) It seems to work out for them.
>> MH: You don’t know.
The ending, it’s left open.
Can they maintain this platonic relationship?
>> AP: It’s ambiguous.
And morally ambiguous.
>> MH: The one thing they do want is bohemia.
They want art and bohemia.
A fascinating thing in the Noel Coward play, “Gilda” is an interior designer.
After she marries “Max Plunkett”, she continues with her career.
My first thought, that’s interesting.
it seems more feminist that she keeps on with her career.
But “Gilda”(in the film) is a much stronger figure because she’s the anchor.
She’s the mother of the arts and their inspiration, the critic, the manager.
She keeps them at it.
It’s a powerful role.
>> AP: She’s negotiating contracts.
She gets the play produced.
She’s negotiating commissions on the painting.
>> MH: It also provides the framework.
I don’t know how Coward does it, but she’s necessary.
It provides a framework that feels organic.
She’s operating in this way, and they fit together in this way.
I don’t know how they maintain the menage a trois in the play if she continues her work, but she’s the one that keeps it going.
>> AP: This movie has a lot of sex, an underlying implication.
There was an esteemed film critic, perhaps you know of him.
His name was Andrew Sarris. He said “Screwball Comedy is a sex comedy without the sex.” For those of you in the audience who know, Andrew Sarris was the consort of Molly Haskell, in a 40-year plus marriage.
They were a real-life Screwball Comedy couple.
>> MH: (Off mic: but we had sex).
>> AP: At one time even working at competing publications.
Partners in business, partners in life.
>> MH: Something wonderful I was going to read, about the difference between Lubitsch and Sturges.
I don’t have it.
You see the ellipses.
That’s the “Lubitsch Touch”.
He does certain things.
He leads you to the door, and not beyond it.
>> AP: You see a lot of doors, but never see what’s going on beyond the doors.
>> MH: Georges Feydeau, the French playwright, farceur.
His thing was different couples matching up with different partners, and going in-and-out of bedroom doors.
This is Feydeau with feeling, the underlying feeling.
I was struck this time about melancholy that underrides the whole thing.
I feel it, they have to be together.
It’s organic.
It’s necessary to each one in different ways.
Yet, can it be maintained?
>> AP: It’s complicated.
I don’t think Lubitsch offers easy answers.
A lot is implied.
Things are left unsaid.
It’s nuanced.
Subtle.
Discreet.
Fun. And playful.
At the same time, we talk about Lubitsch, and what makes his films so distinctive.
First, the women.
Lubitsch women are remarkable.
He treated them very differently.
He showcases them.
They drive the plot.
They’re unconventional, self-determined.
His visuals are sumptuous.
And his ellipses.
What is subtle, unseen that we fill-in with our imagination.
There are three (ellipses) in the film we should touch on.
The opening scene.
That wordless, efficient opening scene.
You don’t hear a thing.
There’s no dialogue spoken.
Yet you learn how attractive she finds these gentlemen.
They find her attractive.
Then when they’re resting and she rests her legs between them.
>> MH: That’s wonderful.
She puts her legs up on the seat.
They’re still half- sleeping, and she puts her legs on the seat between them.
What’s great about that is she’s both joining them, and separating them, at the same time.
That’s the paradox underlying the whole thing.
>> AP: There was a lot of ink spilled about Ben Hecht abandoning Noel Coward’s words.
>> MH: In the Noel Coward play, Lunt and Fontanne were “la-dee-da”.
They were European.
They didn’t belong anywhere.
They were creatures of the world.
They were cosmopolitan, superior to everybody.
I think that may have put people off.
They weren’t–“relatable”.
But these two, Hecht Americanizes it.
They’re very American.
They start out with saluting each other that way.
>>AP: As a journalist, Hecht writes with brevity.
He writes using American slang and language we relate to.
The arch British words are foreign and off-putting to many Americans.
>> MH: And there’s the naivete of all of them, which you wouldn’t have with people of “the world”.
Probably a little more playing around with the two men.
From what I’ve read, that’s what we’re talking about.
“Challengers” (2024) does that; and “Call Me By Your Name” (2017) had a homoerotic theme.
That’s a true characteristic of (director) Luca Guadagnino.
What’s fascinating is Zendaya of “Challengers”, the woman in the center of the triangle, ends up with an injury.
See can no longer play.
She was a professional (tennis) player as well.
She can no longer play, so she’s managing their careers.
It’s a “Gilda”-like role.
>> AP: I think there’s a tone of homoerotica in this film.
There is a love between those two gentlemen.
It comes through, strong.
>> MH: One moment where you get a little titter about that is when he comes home and sees Fredric March for the first time since he’s come home.
He’s so glad to see him and hugs him.
“Oh, sorry, I forgot to kiss you, Gilda.” That moment is a “frisson”.
There’s chemistry circling all the way around.
You don’t stop and think about it.
You don’t spell it out in clinical terms.
>> AP: Ernst Lubitsch is a master filmmaker.
He conveys all that, yet nothing’s written.
There’s nothing objectionable.
The censors passed it with flying colors.
Yet, wow!
It’s provocative. Even today it’s provocative.
>> MH: I don’t know what happens between her and Edward Everett Horton on their wedding night.
But first, before that, when she comes in and looks at the flowers, she’s running back and forth.
I thought “runaway bride”.
That’s Claudette Colbert’s role in “It Happened One Night” (1934).
She’s running away from this stuffy man (“Max”).
>> AP: She doesn’t want to go to the wedding bedroom.
You can just tell that.
>> MH: She’s got to get away before that happens.
She’s running, back-and-forth.
>> AP: Like atoms, moving frantically.
She’s getting more agitated as she looks at those phallic tulips.
From his demeanor the next morning, I gather it didn’t go well on his terms.
>> MH: He kicks the flowerpot.
All this Lubitsch symbolism, the “Lubitsch Touch”.
>> AP: From my research Lubitsch talks about a watershed moment, when he was watching Charlie Chaplin’s “A Woman of Paris” (1923 silent).
The ex-fiancé visits his beloved that he’s lost.
A collar shirt-stay drops on the ground.
Chaplin lets the camera (linger) on it, so we learn she’s moved on with a new man in her life.
Once Lubitsch saw that, he ran with it, working symbolism into his films.
>> MH: He uses “objective correlatives”.
I can’t imagine that being done in the play.
It has to be spelled out.
You can’t focus.
You can’t ask the audience to look at the–.
>> AP: Film is a visual medium.
If you want to hear Noel Coward’s words, you should go see the play.
If you want to see a masterwork of visual storytelling, you can’t get much better than “Design for Living”.
>> MH: The casting is perfect.
Fredric March didn’t do much comedy.
The only other comedy I can think of is “Nothing Sacred” (1937), which comes after this.
He’s so good at it because he can play pompous, self-involved.
They both have narcissistic sides to them.
Gary Cooper is always seen as the strong, silent type.
Here, he’s just goofy.
>> AP: He’s outstanding in two other Screwball Comedies, “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” (1938), directed by Lubitsch; and “Desire” (1936), directed by Frank Borzage.
Many good actors can move from genre to genre.
Today we don’t think of Gary Cooper as a Screwball anti-hero, but he does a fantastic job.
>> MH: It’s never obviously romantic, giving a comic dimension, so that we don’t take anything too seriously at the same time.
>> AP: Ben Hecht’s wordplay is so clever.
You can’t say enough about him.
You talked about him in the Intro, that he is one of the giants of all of film history, in screenwriting.
Credited and uncredited.
It’s often hard to know exactly the breadth of his work.
There were so many that he worked on that he didn’t get screen credit for.
I must point out some other Screwball Comedies he wrote: “The Front Page” (1931 film), and the gender-switch in “His Girl Friday” (1940); “Twentieth Century” (1934); “Nothing Sacred” (1937); “It’s a Wonderful World” (1939); and Howard Hawks’ “Monkey Business” (1952).
Ben Hecht was gifted with language and humor.
He’s an ideal writer for Screwball Comedy.
>> MH: Lubitsch also used Samson Raphaelson.
He’s the greatest.
“The Shop Around the Corner” (1940).
Ben Hecht is more urban and energetic.
There’s a difference in the two.
Raphaelson was middle-European.
>> AP: More courtly, not as rough-and-tumble as Ben Hecht. 🎥
Film Society of Screwball Comedy®
Edited by Aliece Pickett
Copyright 2025