Summary : Two American artists sharing an apartment in Paris both fall in love with the beautiful and witty Gilda Farrell who cannot decide between the two suitors. They then decide to move in all three.
Critical : Produced by Paramount, Threesome serenade is the second masterpiece of talking pictures by Ernst Lubitsch, after high underworld, released a year earlier. The film is adapted from a play by Noel Coward which had just triumphed on Broadway. As required by the division of labor inherent in Hollywood cinema at the time, Lubitsch signed the direction and not the script and the adapted dialogues, entrusted to Ben Hecht, author, in particular of the scripts of the scarface by Howard Hawks and The Fantastic Ride by John Ford. But we can assume that the understanding between the two men was perfect, so much the subtlety of the story of Design for Living (original title) is in osmosis with the elegance of Lubitsch’s style. It should be noted that the footage was shot a year before the application of the Hays code, a set of moral principles enacted under pressure from virtue leagues, and at the origin of censorship (and self-censorship) for several decades. The mention of the “menage à trois” suggested by the title therefore joins the freedom of words and tone of the first years of talkies, in the same way as other productions such as the comedies mounted around the buxom and witty Mae West (I am not an angel, Lady Lou).
- © Splendor Films
We could however fear everything from this adaptation of a success of the boards, vein of which the cinema was fond of after the death of the silent: “canned theater”, overplaying of the actors, staging static. In France, authors like Pagnol or Guitry have assumed the filmed theater system while giving it real cinematographic value; in Hollywood, a Lubitsch could immediately think of a device of the seventh art, by making forget the scenic origin of the story. However, the interior scenes constitute almost all of the narration, from the meeting between the three protagonists in a Paris-Marseille train, to the final fixed shot in a taxi, passing through a maid’s room in Montmartre, a theater London or an opulent villa in New York. But we are not thinking of a theatrical artifice. This is already the strength of Lubitsch’s cinema. His famous “touch”, then, appears in several elliptical or very subtle sequences, when Thomas or Georg hide behind a screen and feign a miraculous appearance, or when Georg discovers Thomas’s betrayal by discovering that he is in a tuxedo in the young woman’s apartment, in the early morning.
- © Splendor Films
Scenario and realization are thus in coherence in the delicacy and the suggestion. And if Gilda cannot choose between her two suitors, offering them a threesome but “sexless” complicity, the spectator is not fooled, as a kiss exchanged or the off-screen action are evocative. Bold film for its time, long before Jules and Jim, Threesome serenade, under its appearances of boulevard-like fantasy, is also a surprising reflection on feminine desire and a hymn to the joys of the bohemian artist, the sudden (and implausible) successes of the obscure painter and the failed playwright even being presented as a temporary misunderstanding in their existence! It is not superfluous to add that the interpretation is remarkable. Miriam Hopkins is divine, and fits into the mythology of the great Lubitschian performers, just like Claudette Colbert in Bluebeard’s eighth wife or Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be. His two partners are in tune, with a charisma bonus for Gary Cooper and a dramatic superiority for Fredric March. And as the hapless middle-class suitor, the hilarious Edward Everett Horton is irresistible.