DESIGN FOR LIVING

Easily slipping though the Hayes censorship code, founded to protect the sensibilities of 30s morality, Lubitsch borrows the idea of a love triangle from Noel Coward's eponymous play and reworks it as a square testing his audience's tolerance of libertinage. The sex cards are suffled between two American artists sharing a flat in Paris, Gilda, an American advertizer who enters their lives, and her boss, who offers her the option of a more sensible monogamous relationship. What will Gilda choose? The monogamous ethic and security of married life or the alternative polygamous model? Or is there perhaps a third path?