A film adaptation of Private Lives was released in December, 1931, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It starred Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery as Amanda and Elyot, with Reginald Denny and Una Merkel as Victor and Sibyl. While it retained most of Coward's story and dialogue, director Sidney Franklin also made significant alterations: extending the "set-up" in Act I while compressing the action of Acts H and HI; and having the lovers escape not to a Paris flat but to a Swiss chalet. The film is available on videocassette through MGM/UA Home Video Victor and Sibyl represent the traditional, "normal" modes of behavior for their gender-roles. He is conservative and reliable, moderate in all things, and paternally protective of his bride; she is bubbly and romantic, given to dramatic emotional displays, expecting (and needing) to be "taken care of" by her man Coward sketches them as shallow, comic exaggerations of...