over the line
by Douglas Messerli
Stanley
Shapiro and Maurice Richlin (screenply, based on a story by Russell Rouse and
Clarence Green), Michael Gordon (director) Pillow
Talk / 1959
Watching
Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk again
the other afternoon, I recovered an old memory from youth. My mother and father
seldom attended films; I can remember only about 10 times in their entire life
when they did, three or four of those times with the whole family in tow. But
in 1959, I remember one morning after which they had gone to see Pillow Talk—while I cared for my brother
and sister—my mother recounting the entire story with great joy,
giggling—something this not so happy homemaker seldom did—as she relayed the
details of the plot. My mother loved both comedies and romantic dramas, the
latter of which my father disdained. At the ripe age of 12, I was even more
dismissive that he: I, who had become enamored with the plays of Genet,
Ionesco, Pinter, Beckett and Albee, would never have attended such “fluff,” and
could never have imagined that someday I might even choose to discuss the film.
Now that I have watched this film
numerous times, I realize that my mother, as much as she had enjoyed the movie,
had not perceived any of the film’s darker aspects. Indeed, when I first saw Pillow Talk, years later, and the two
Rock Hudson and Doris Day films that followed it, I was a bit shocked. Not only
did Pillow Talk reconfirm what I had
long suspected—and which, being the “good boy” I was, kept me from having
intercourse with the opposite sex straight through my college days—that the
male was expected to forcibly rape a desired woman, was even encouraged by
policeman to haul their bodies off to their apartments through the New York
streets, but that women—at least the smart, good-looking, working women who Day
represented—had to be lured through plots of great deception into the arms of
men in order to accomplish the sexual “act.” No wonder I had been a virgin all
those years! Sex was so inexplicably complex. Who had time for anything else?
With a guy, I soon discovered, all you needed to say was “let’s go to bed.”

Just as startlingly, I perceived, like
several of the films of Carey Grant, the authors had embedded jokes and
situations throughout their script that eluded to and played with the fact of
Rock Hudson’s homosexuality, creating a kind of “other” film hidden below the
surface of the first—the one that most Americans, like my mother, had so
enjoyably read.
Accordingly, while seemingly a story of
love or, at least, “attraction,” Pillow
Talk, in my reading was a story of deception, indeed numerous layers of
deception. Songwriter Brad Allen (Hudson) has a busy life seducing and
deceiving various women, singing a ditty he has written to all of his “loves”
by simply changing the name each time he sings it, a trick overheard by Jan
Morrow (Day), with whom he shares a party line, as she attempts to make and
receive calls. Frustrated by Allen’s telephonic trickery and angry with his
holding the phone line hostage, she reports him to the telephone company, who
send out an agent, who herself is seduced by Allen. (Jan: “Can you believe
that? They sent a woman. That’s like sending a marshmallow to put out a
bonfire.”)

Working as an interior decorator, Jan is
being wooed by one of her wealthy clients, Jonathan Forbes (Tony Randall), who,
unbeknownst to her, is also the financial backer of Brad Allen’s musical shows
on Broadway. At the party of another of her clients, Jan encounters a young
soon-to-be Harvard grad, Tony Walters (Nick Adams) who insists upon driving Jan
home from his mother’s Scarsdale mansion. They are only a few miles into the
voyage before Tony is pawing Jan, and she, to sober him up and quiet him down,
allows herself to be taken to a small supper club, where, by coincidence, Brad
sits with one of the club’s performers, one of his girlfriends. Overhearing
part of Tony and Jan’s conversation, and realizing suddenly that the attractive,
dancing woman is also his formerly invisible telephone sparer, he begins the
long series of seductions by playing a shy, gentlemanly Texan, Rex Stetson,
lonely in New York.
Still attempting to marry her, Jonathan
also reveals his love for Jan to Brad, who uses what he learns to good effect,
thus deceiving not only Jan, but his best friend. At another point when visiting his friend’s
office Brad/Rex spots Jan leaving, he ducks into a nearby doctor’s office, a doctor
who just happens to be an obstetrician. When the nurse queries him if his visit
is for his wife, Brad insists he himself has not been feeling “right,” a joke
which implies that it he is who may be pregnant. Reporting the fact to the
doctor arouses a kind of dizzy wonderment in both nurse and doctor that is played
out not only once, but three times in the film (Doctor: “There may be a man who
has crossed a new future.”). I guess we must presume that Hudson was what is
called a “bottom,” a man who likes to get fucked.
Obviously—this is after all still
1959—Brad must get his comeuppance, as Jan discovers in a Connecticut hide-away
to where he has lured her for the “kill,” that Rex Stetson and Brad Allen are one
and the same, as, just in time, Jonathan arrives to save her. She cries all the
way back to New York.
As I suggested earlier, her revenge is
reciprocated by his literal “rape” in that word’s original meaning of “carrying
away a person by force,” as he takes her to his apartment, revealing that he
has cut himself off from his old life, she employing his own traps (locked
door, unfolding bed) to keep him from leaving as she falls into his arms with
the happy ending of pillows and implied babies rolling behind the credits—assuring
my mother, I am certain, that everything had turned out just swell, but leading
me to believe that the writers’, characters’ and directors’ deceit had just
begun, reifying as it had, everything they had previously satirized and mocked.
It’s the kind of late 1950s entertainment, to my way of thinking, that not only
crossed the line (both the telephone lines and the sexual line), but lied,
while winking, even to itself.
Los Angeles,
October 24, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment