Today We Live is a 1933 American pre-Code romance drama film produced and directed by Howard Hawks and starring Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Robert Young and Franchot Tone.

[2] Based on the story "Turnabout" by William Faulkner, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on March 5, 1932, the film is about two officers during World War I, who compete for the same beautiful young woman.

Meanwhile, her brother Lt. Ronnie Boyce-Smith (Franchot Tone) and Lt. Claude Hope (Robert Young) are both British Naval officers going off to fight in the war.

[5] Faulkner took only five days to write the film himself, but when Irving Thalberg, the vice-president of MGM studios at the time, insisted that Crawford be written into the script as she was contractually committed to a $500,000 salary, working or not, the first of many rewrites began.

[4] MGM marketed the film as a romance with the trailer focusing on the two stars, gushing on screen with the taglines, "The fiery head-strong personality of exquisite Joan Crawford" and "The calm strength, the eager romantic nature of handsome Gary Cooper.

[9] Cooper was in a slight decline with two other "mediocre" films in release, and when the opportunity to work with Hawks came, it also aligned him with the mercurial Crawford, albeit in what he later would regard as a "misguided project".

[10][N 2] A series of rewrites with both Faulkner and other screenwriters along with the cutting of key opening scenes led to a confusing jumble of versions, as the original screen time of 135 minutes of a preview print indicates.

[14] After looking at rushes of the young actors that were integral to the background of the film, it was evident that their British accents were completely unconvincing and Hawks resorted to excising their scenes altogether and entering a new rewrite, focusing more heavily on Crawford's character, with no better results.

It possesses, however, the spark of sincerity, and its lack of clarity might be ascribed either to Howard Hawks's direction or to the script contributed by Edith Fitzgerald and Dwight Taylor, for there are sequences that are far too lengthy and others that would be considerably improved by more detail.