Adapted from Sir James Barrie's play, “The Admirable Crichton,” Male and Female is something of a precursor to Wertmuller's Swept Away.... The plot, as described by De Mille in his autobiography, is “the amusing and touching story of how a butler's natural leadership asserted itself when the noble family he served was shipwrecked on an island in the South Seas. We first thought of changing the (play's) title to ‘The Spell,' but I settled upon Male and Female as best expressing the elemental situation of the story, when the primitive necessities of life on a desert island knocked out the class distinctions between lords and butlers, ladies and maids, and left them all merely men and women.”
De Mille's wealthy characters display considerable freedom in their love affairs, but this license is balanced by a Babylonian “flashback,” intended as a pointed parallel. “I engaged Mitchell Leisen to design the lavish costumes for the Babylonian flashback scene,” De Mille writes. “I feel sure that the superlative quality of Mitch's work may have been one reason why Sir James Barrie neither exploded nor fainted when he saw the Babylonian embellishment added to his play.”