"The glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves.” Not exactly the most flattering portrait of bisexuals, but one which pervades their presence in cinema – so greedy in their obsession with sex, they do not care if they take a man or a woman to bed with them (sometimes they opt for both). Such insatiability can be both the bisexual’s tragedy, and their humour. Noël Coward’s description of his insouciant ménage à trois in the 1932 play Design for Living comes to its farcical conclusion at the end: the curtain falls on the threesome as they fall about with laughter.
Despite being a Broadway success, the British censor banned the play from being staged in London until 1939. The whole script was reworked for its 1933 film adaptation, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, inspiring Coward to remark that one of the only lines to remain from his original was, “Pass the mustard”. In the film, Gilda (Miriam Hopkins) is caught between the affections of artist George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) as she needs somewhere to stay in Paris. She does so on the condition that she will have sex with neither, and inevitably
