taoyue.com: Film Reviews - Pillow Talk (1959)

Pillow Talk (1959)

directed by Michael Gordon
starring Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Tony Randall, and Thelma Ritter

If there's one thing that you can count on with a remake, it's that you'll soon get a a chance to see the original film on DVD. The lackluster Pearl Harbor resulted in a Special Edition of Tora! Tora! Tora! from Fox, and the Frank Oz remake of The Stepford Wives with Nicole Kidman got Paramount to reissue the original with Katharine Ross in a new transfer. The same thing happened with the deliberately 1960s-style Down With Love, which many reviewers noted had much of its plot lifted directly out of Pillow Talk. Video stores instantly saw a run on the film, and in 2004 Universal quickly replaced the lackluster 1999 DVD, featuring a poorly-timed recycled laserdisc transfer, with a fresh edition.

Pillow Talk in widescreen is almost a poster child for letterboxing. The expansive sets, the two-shot rear-projection scenes in cars, the widescreen pans that'd leave one dizzy in pan-and-scan, and, of course, those his-and-her split screens of phone conversations (sometimes split three ways).

Those phone conversations launch the plot, as the premise is that songwriter and playboy Brad Allen (Rock Hudson) shares a party line with interior decorator Jan Morrow (Doris Day). He's constantly hogging the line, crooning the same old love song to different women in English and French, while she's just annoyed that she never gets to use the line. She's happily single and resisting advances from her clients; Allen attributes her party-crashing (umm ...) phone interruptions to her "bedroom problems," and she happily redecorates her bedroom.

But when they meet in person, Allen is surprised at how pleasant and attractive she is in person. To leave his phone persona behind, he adopts a hilariously fake Texas drawl with an equally-stereotypical name of Rex Stetson, acts the perfect gentleman to her, and makes further inroads by using his phone persona to warn her away from this obviously-fake Texas rancher. It's working, except that client of Jan's is a college buddy of Allen's. After the inevitable revelation of the secret, how are Brad and Jan going to reconcile, get married, and have lots of babies?

This love-hate relationship is the opposite of the one in The Shop Around the Corner (and its remake You've Got Mail). But whether the non-personal medium is postal mail, telephone, or email, the dichotomy is the same. How much does one lead character really hate the other lead, and how much of the love (for a different person) spills over into affection for the real person?

The humor is in the details, and Pillow Talk crackles with wit. The script is loaded with double-entendres, some so fabulously risqué that getting past the Code censors must've been a real hoot. But then again, it's only a more conservative version of the surface-appearance-but-no-depth of today's ratings rigmarole.

It's a film that seems loaded with in-jokes. Some play with the actors' roles — Rock Hudson played a Texan much more seriously in the dramatic Academy Award-winning epic Giant, and of course Doris Day can't get through the film without getting a chance to sing some fabulous songs even though he's the songwriter! Others play on the cosmopolitan nature of the City and the suburban-housewife role that 1950s America shoehorned on women. From the stereotypically grand music as the camera tilts up a skyscraper, to characters getting romantic help from their psychiatrists, to the overeager Harvard man who "dig[s] older women," Pillow Talk takes jabs at the things that were unspoken of of polite society, even though everyone knows all about them. There also seems to be some buried social commentary, as all the nightclubs feature lily-white sharply-dressed customers and black or Caribbean musicians. It does bring to mind Holden Caulfield's comments about white vs. black singers in The Catcher in the Rye.

Still other in-jokes must've been either unintentional or truly limited in their inner circle, as is the case when Allen toys with Jan by suggesting that Stetson is gay, and Rock Hudson dangles his pinky and discusses recipes until Jan practically begs him to kiss her to prove it isn't true. Come to think of it, the mere suggestion of homosexuality is audacious, as the next year's Kubrick epic Spartacus had to excise all hints that Laurence Olivier's commanding Roman Senator was bisexual. Maybe the Code Office let it go because Rock Hudson's character did not turn out to be gay.

It is this added in-joke dimension to the humor, the uncertainty at whether they're poking fun at the obvious or the not-so-obvious, and the feeling of "How did they get away with it in 1959?" that make Pillow Talk so much better than its remake Down With Love. Pillow Talk is entirely unself-conscious, using cinematic conventions in creative ways (e.g. the bathtub split-screen scene), and so gets us laughing about the on-screen content while accepting the style at face value.

And even if one is in the mood for just some on-the-surface laughter to brighten up a dreary day without having to think too hard, Pillow Talk works on that level too. Doris Day is bubbly-as-chewing-gum, Rock Hudson is stoically naughty in a chauvinistic way, Tony Randall is believably insecure as the client and college buddy Jonathan Forbes, and Jan's alcoholic maid is played by Thelma Ritter in much the same role that she played in Hitchcock's Rear Window — the dour, slightly coarse working-class woman who thinks all this intellectual activity between the two leads is silly and they should just jump into bed. And it's rather fun to listen to the music score which punctuates every onscreen action in that style that works well for comedies like this one.