"A woman cannot decide between two men who love her, it is a story about three people who have great difficulty living together. After the triumphant Broadway run, Noël rapidly sold the film rights in Design for Living to Paramount, who gave it to Ben Hecht to write and Ernst Lubitsch to direct, the result was successful but hugely unfaithful to Noël’s original.
Ernst Lubitsch was a major director for quite a while – through almost two full decades, first in Europe, and then in America. His films were the darlings of the early Academy days (three Best Picture nominations in the first five years and eventually six overall). And yet, for all of that, his best films were the ones that the Academy ignored. The five films that I rank as his best (Design for Living, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Trouble in Paradise) combined for only two Oscar nominations (Editing and Score for To Be). If people are going to talk about the Lubitsch touch, about that European approach to love and sex, this is the kind of the film they should start with."
Réservation en ligne