Design for Living

Design for Living is a romantic comedy set in Paris, where two struggling American artists share an apartment: Tom Chambers, a playwright whose work nobody will stage, and George Curtis, a painter without success. On a train they meet Gilda Farrell, a commercial illustrator and fellow American, and both men fall for her at once. Unable to choose between them, Gilda proposes an arrangement in which she lives with them as a friend and critic of their work, with nothing more. The balance is tested when a London theatre buys one of Tom's plays and he leaves for several days, and later when a wealthy admirer enters the picture.

Ernst Lubitsch directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Ben Hecht. It followed his 1932 films Broken Lullaby and Trouble in Paradise, and came before later work including Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner. Fredric March and Gary Cooper play Tom and George, with Miriam Hopkins as Gilda and Edward Everett Horton as the suitor Max Plunkett; the credited cast runs to thirty-four performers.

On IMDb the film holds 7.4 out of 10 from around 8,500 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.1 from roughly 216 votes, a narrower sample. A critics' rating of 7.9 from seventeen reviews places it somewhat above the audience scores.