Design for Living (1933)
February 27th, 2010Noël Coward’s teacup humour and propriety not quite suits the beer mirror temperament of his concealment adaptor Ben Hecht, who later complained of the author’s ‘vaudeville gibberish with an English accent’, not to impart a ’superiority complex that went over humongous with sofa-cushion menders’. The script galumphs when it should slide, and neither the headman nor the stellar actresses can advance a earn this would-be soufflé about a bohemian ménage-à -trois (Cooper paints, Demonstration writers, Hopkins flits between them) to the right fluffy consistency.