Darling and Design for Living

Today was a double feature about infidelity and polyamory!

Darling (1965), directed by John Schlesinger and starring Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. Christie won the BAFTA and the Oscar for her performance, playing a model who moves from one affair to another as she pursues her career.  

In the end, she returns to an unhappy marriage to an wealthy Italian prince when she is rejected by a former lover  (Dirk Bogarde). Her lively exuberance and beauty give her great charisma, but she also suffers the consequences of selfish choices. The movie has a kind of edgy humor.

Design for Living (1933),  directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and starring Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March. The Noel Coward play was basically re-written by Ben Hecht, removing the more overtly gay subtext. Gilda is pursued by two starving artists and a wealthy businessman. She declines to choose between the two attractive artists and they agree to a platonic threesome. This doesn't last long, and she becomes the lover of first one, and then the other. Jealousy and accusations of betrayal ensue, and she leaves both of them to marry the stodgy boring businessman. She's miserable in the marriage, and when the two artists show up at her mansion she ends up leaving with both of them, presumably to enter into a threesome with them both. In contrast to Darling, where the woman's free sexuality is connected to infidelity and degrading orgies, in Design for Living, the  idea of witty polyamory is presented as preferable to a loveless bourgeois marriage.