Pillow Talk

Perhaps the biggest outrage of the 32nd Academy Awards, which bestowed honors to films from 1959, was in the Original Screenplay category. Nominees included such time-tested classics as The 400 Blows, North by Northwest, and Wild Strawberries. The winner was Pillow Talk, a frothy Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy. At least Operation Petticoat, the fifth nominee, didn't win. Of course Stanley Shapiro and Maurice Richlin, the writers of that film, were the guys who won for Pillow Talk.

I don't mean to dump on Pillow Talk, which is a perfectly acceptable entertainment in the light romantic comedy field, and today is something of the standard that defines that era. But let's face it, it doesn't come close to the skill exhibited of the other three nominees.

Though they are thought of as a team today, this was the first pairing of Hudson and Day, and it was departure for both. Hudson had never done comedy before, and Day had never played a role in which it suggested she might have sex. They were both the biggest stars of their era, and they would go on to make two more similar films together, along with Tony Randall, who was typically the best friend role. Watching scenes of Hudson and Randall talking about babes is snicker-worthy today (although it should be said that Randall did actually father children, despite his fancy-man demeanor).

Pillow Talk today plays like a relic, not only due to its period decor, costumes, and attitudes (which Peyton Reed paid homage to in Down With Love) but also because the plot hinges around the obsolete concept of a party-line. Yes, kids, once people, even in Manhattan, had to share phone lines with complete strangers. Day, an interior decorator, is infuriated with Hudson, who hogs their shared line by wooing countless girlfriends. Randall is Hudson's friend and Day's client, and through him Hudson finds out Day is a dish, and seeks to woo her by pretending to be a humble country boy from Texas. Hilarity ensues.

This all goes down fairly easily, especially enjoyable when Randall is on screen. The dialogue is bubbly and often inane, but not offensive, even the laughs about Hudson ducking into an obstetrician's office to elude Day, and the running gags thereafter about him being a man having a baby. The attitude about Day's single status being an aberration are typical of the Mad Men period.

In addition to Shapiro and Richlin, Day was nominated for an Oscar, as was Thelma Ritter as her hard-drinking maid, who provides some of the best comedy (she frequently upbraids the elevator-operator for going too fast). Elevator operators, party-lines, they're all gone now.