Design for Living

Penniless artist friends George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) meet advertising artist Gilda (Miriam Hopkins) on the train and fall in love with her. To avoid any difficulties with their friendship and because Gilda reciprocates both their feelings, the three of them decide to live together in her bohemian Parisian apartment – without sex. When the solution doesn’t go according to plan, Gilda liberates herself from the emotional chaos by marrying her fatherly friend and boss Max Plunkett (played with inimitable comedic charm by Edward Everett Horton), a unfortunate stranger to fun and totally fixated on professional success ("Immorality may be fun, but it isn’t fun enough to take the place of 100 percent virtue and three square meals a day"). Tom and George eventually free her from her marriage to the pedantic businessman before the trio return to the only conceivable relationship model for them: a ménage à trois.