Pillow Talk **** (1959, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Tony Randall, Thelma Ritter) – Classic Movie Review 1718

The 1959 film Pillow Talk sparked off Doris Day and Rock Hudson’s series of profitable hit comedy movies. They teamed for three films and this is the best of them. Day was Oscar nominated as Best Actress.

Director Michael Gordon’s 1959 film Pillow Talk sparked off Doris Day and Rock Hudson’s series of profitable hit comedy movies. They teamed for three films and this is the best of them. It is a delightfully jaunty, glossy comedy with a polished veneer of sophistication and cleverly devised, well honed and nicely crafted material for the main players to work on. It proves perfect material for the stars to shine. They give light-heated, expert and delightful performances. Day was Oscar nominated as Best Actress in her one and only Oscar nomination.

Doris and Rock play warring neighbours – she’s an interior decorator called Jan Morrow, he’s a womanising songwriter named Brad Allen – who despise each other because they have to share a telephone party line and they’re chalk and cheese. But, hey, opposites attract!

They’ve only ever met on the phone, which Brad keeps busy most of the time flirting with his girlfriends. But soon, they are sharing pillow talk too when he has fun by romancing her with his voice disguised.

The pillow talk turns to real talk when Brad meets Jan by chance in a restaurant, poses as a naive tourist from Texas named Rex Stetson and seduces her. Tony Randall plays Jonathan Forbes, Jan’s wealthy client who woos her, but he is also Brad’s best buddy, leading to new farcical complications.

The title may promise erotically charged material that’s much sexier than anything that emerges in the movie but the film’s very coyness proves part of its charm and allure. It’s an excellent screenplay and screenwriters Stanley Shapiro, Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene and Maurice Richlin deservedly won Oscars for Best Original Story and Best Original Screenplay. Universal studios splash out on a pretty-looking, very late-Fifties period production.

Thelma Ritter, delightful as Day’s drunken maidservant, was nominated as best supporting actress for the fifth of six times – a record. Infuriatingly, she never won. Her movie career started with a bit part in the original Miracle on 34th Street (1947), playing a weary Christmas shopper.

Nick Adams, Julia Meade, Allen Jenkins, Marcel Dalio and Lee Patrick also co-star.

Rock Hudson and Doris Day re-teamed for Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964).

Doris Day (1922–2019).

Hollywood legend Doris Day celebrated her 90th birthday on April 3 2014, though it later turned out she was actually 92 at the time. Her last movie was With Six You Get Eggroll in 1968, though she followed it on TV with The Doris Day Show (1968-73). She passed away on May 2019 at the age of 97. She will have ‘no funeral, no memorial and no marker’ because she ‘didn’t like death’. Pillow Talk is her sole Oscar nomination, though she sang the Oscar-winning song ‘Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)’ in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1718

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