Lagniappe Podcast: The Men Who Knew Too Much

November 19, 2025November 29, 2025 / swampflix / 2 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two different films that share the same title and director: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and its loose remake The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

00:00 The Soup
02:50 KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
8:02 The Blue Gardenia (1953)
13:25 Erica’s First Holy Sh!t (2022)
20:06 Cloud (2025)
26:40 The Mastermind (2025)
30:54 Eephus (2025)
37:00 Frankenstein (2025)
44:47 Predator – Badlands (2025)
52:32 Keeper (2025)
1:04:36 Materialists (2025)
1:10:15 Die My Love (2025)
1:14:12 Reflections in a Dead Diamond (2025)
1:17:48 Mr. Melvin (2025)
1:22:12 Sirāt (2025)
1:26:37 Twinless (2025)

1:33:00 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, 1956)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Pillow Talk (1959)

January 18, 2025January 18, 2025 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Rock Hudson was an enormous presence in Old Hollywood, and I don’t just mean as the personification of movie star handsomeness or as an archetype of “open secret” closeted gay celebrity. He was physically enormous, towering over his co-stars at 6’5″ with a burly lumberjack build to match his cartoonishly square jaw. Somehow, that imposing figure never really stood out to me in the romantic dramas of Hudson’s prime, starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Giant or Jayne Wyman in All that Heaven Allows. Where he becomes most glaringly imposing is in his career-pivot to comedy in 1959’s Pillow Talk, which features several gags about his gigantic build. Pillow Talk gawks at Hudson’s enormous body as he struggles to squeeze it into bathtubs and sportscars that were designed to house mere mortals, then concludes on a gag where he carries co-star Doris Day’s pajama-clad body through New York City streets like a firefighter rescuing a small child while she kicks her feet in petulant protest. Tony Randall looks even mousier in comparison with that towering wall of beef as his ill-equipped romantic rival, posing next to him like a civilian fan taking photos with their favorite professional wrestler – physically mismatched to great comedic effect.

Hudson plays a jolly fuckboy giant in Pillow Talk, a skyscraper cad. His meet-cute with Day involves a shared partyline between the two mismatched lovers’ NYC apartments, which Day is never able to use because Hudson is constantly tying up the line wooing a bevy of short-term lovers. That partyline etiquette premise is just as relatable to kids today as their absurd romcom-trope professions: Broadway songwriter & interior decorator, respectively. Day is understandably annoyed by Hudson’s playboy antics, describing him as a “sex maniac” in her request to the phone company to break up their partyline. Meanwhile, Hudson is frustrated by Day’s immunity to his fuckboy charms, diagnosing her with “bedroom problems” during one of their shared-line squabbles. According to romcom law, the pair are obviously destined to couple up by the end credits, but it takes some Three’s Company-style sitcom hijinks on Hudson’s behalf to make that happen. He invents a flimsy naïve-Texan-in-the-big-city persona so that he can date her in person, which mostly amounts to Hudson doing a half-assed John Wayne impersonation while “aw, shucks”ing his way through several low-stakes dates. Meanwhile, Day experiments with being overtly sexy onscreen for the first time in her career while maintaining a sense of cocktail-hour class, which is mirrored in her character’s struggles to loosen up enough to finally solve her “bedroom problems” once & for all. Tony Randall also hangs around as their ineffectual third wheel, landing none of the successful smooches but most of the successful punchlines.

Pillow Talk precariously teeters between a more buttoned-up, euphemistic era of Hollywood screenwriting where characters are described as “bothered” instead of “horny” and the looser-morals Hollywood to follow where characters brag about bedding & marrying “strippers” in free-wheeling locker room talk. If it were directed by Frank Tashlin in the mode of Rock Hunter or The Girl Can’t Help It, it might’ve been a perfectly anarchic, amoral comedy, but workman director Michael Gordon keeps it all at an even keel (likely just happy to be working again after being blacklisted for Communist ties). In our collective memory, it’s lingered as cutesier and tamer than what Gordon delivered in reality, as evidenced by its ironic, post-modern homage in Peyton Reed’s 90s send-up Down with Love. Like most comedies, a lot of Pillow Talk‘s individual punchlines have not aged well politically, especially when punching down at date-rape victims, racist stereotypes, and fat-bodied uggos. Still, its willingness to offend leads to one of its more metatextually interesting gags, when Rock Hudson briefly indicates that he is a closeted homosexual so that Doris Day will up the stakes of their sexual contact to test his orientation. In that moment, he’s a known-to-be-closeted actor playing a hyper-straight himbo slut who’s only pretending to be closeted so he can bed even more women. The open discussion of that perceived queerness feels wildly out of sync with the Hays Code-era Hollywood glamor of the film’s Cinemascope extravagance, which twinkles in every one of Doris Day’s gowns & jewels, as spotlighted in the opening credits.

The segmented comic book framing of Pillow Talk‘s 1st-act phone calls conveys a modern, chic playfulness, while every one of its punchlines are underscored by stale, goofball sound-effects. During a dual bathtub scene, its two near-nude stars play footsy at the barrier between their respective frames, so that you get a full view of their muscular gams, and yet they’re not allowed to consummate that mutual desire until they agree to marry at the end. It’s a 1960s sex comedy made within the bounds of a 1950s romcom that’s not allowed to openly joke about sex. None of this truly matters, though, since the main selling point is the spectacle of its two main stars. Doris Day’s uncomfortable transformation into a Hollywood sex symbol makes for great comedic tension against Hudson’s rock-hard leading man physique. Meanwhile, Hudson’s massive body is a spectacle unto itself, one that every woman onscreen instantly swoons over . . . Except, of course, for the one he loves. It’s a dynamic so charming that it led to two more romcom pairings of those stars in Send Me No Flowers and Lover Come Back, both of which brought Tony Randall along for the ride to ensure no chemistry was lost.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 38: Young at Heart (1954)

June 2, 2018 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Young at Heart(1954) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 158 of the first edition hardback, Ebert explains his general taste in cinema. He writes, “I don’t care much for movies that get all serious about their love affairs, because I think the actors tend to take it too solemnly and end up silly. I like it better when love simply makes the characters very happy, as when Doris Day first falls for Frank Sinatra in Young at Heart.”

What Ebert had to say in his review(s): Ebert never properly reviewed the film, but when reminiscing about Frank Sinatra’s legendary career onscreen, he wrote, “The image that lingers is from Young at Heart, when he pushed back his hat, lit a cigarette, sat down at a piano and sang to Doris Day and broke her heart. He never had the looks to be a matinee idol, but he had a voice – the Voice – and he had a screen presence, and for a time in the 1950s, Frank Sinatra was one of the most interesting and successful actors in American movies.”

The Hays Code had a peculiar way of obscuring intent in older Hollywood fare. Films that superficially appear to be wholesome & chaste can sometimes be subversively disguising much darker, less moralistic themes than what that infamous production code permitted. It’s also tempting to read too much into that subversion in attempting to parse out artists’ intent vs. what Major Studios of the one era would allow. The musical romance Young at Heart operates within this historical grey area, concluding a schmaltzy musical reverie with an absurdly handed tragic conclusion that’s incongruous with the film’s overall tone, then immediately reversed. The film either doesn’t have the heart to follow through on its own devastating implications or was obstructed by Studio heads’ demands for a happy conclusion to a generally happy story. Its ending can be read either way, both literally blissful or figuratively tragic, making it only increasingly, frustratingly bizarre the longer you sit with it.

A remake of a popular 1930s musical titled Four Daughters, Young at Heart functions on the surface as a well-behaved Technicolor romance. Doris Day stars as an eligible bachelorette at the center of a musical family mostly made up of daughters desperate to be married off. With an alarming focus on anxieties of weight loss & living single, the desperately lonely girls (adult women, really) are all awestruck by the arrival of a handsome, overconfident songwriter played by Gig Young. As he’s employed to write songs for the family, the girls all separately pine for his affection, something that’s awarded to Doris Day’s lead, to her sisters’ jealousy. Much of this early stretch of the film is dependent on the simple joy of watching Doris Day sing, a talent that’s dedicated to culturally toxic, marriage-obsessed diddies like “Til My Love Comes for Me,” “Ready, Willing, and Able,” “Hold Me in Your Arms,” and “Make it Soon.” Thankfully this nauseous love fest is disrupted by the arrival of Frank Sinatra as a troubled, dangerous piano player and friend to the songwriter beau. For her sisters’ sake and because she’s genuinely turned on by his talent, Doris Day’s protagonist leaves her dream man for this sad puppy dog of a romantic rival. This much-needed interjection of danger & sexuality opens the film up to an increasingly tense conflict of hurt feelings, romantic betrayals, and declining mental health. This all culminates in a climactic suicide that feels miles & miles away from the sunny, romantic (even if unhealthily marriage & weight obsessed) disposition of the film’s opening stretch.

Or does it? In an incredibly bizarre denouement, the tragic suicide that tears this family apart is undone with an idyllic Easter morning get-together, the attempted death being retconned as a failure. The 1930s version, Four Daughters, stuck to the implications of the suicide while Young at Heart tacks on a happy ending so artificially saccharine it can almost be read as dream of Heaven. As Four Daughter was also produced under the Hays Code, it’s unclear whether the suicide was not allowed by the studio for moral reasons, its actor‘s vanity, or a general preference for romantic musicals to end on a happy note. What’s even more unclear is what director Gordon Douglas (who helmed the horror classic Them! this same year) intended to convey in its ending. Is the final scene supposed to be taken as a literal happy conclusion to a dark chapter in these sisters’ lives or is it a subversive workaround that concludes the story on a more logical beat, subtly indicating that its image of peace & romantic calm is actually a vision of Heaven? I honestly have no idea what to make of it, thanks to more notorious Hays Code & Studio System shenanigans, which almost makes for a more intriguing conclusion than the straightforward approach of Four Daughters.

If you read Young at Heart as a straight, well-behaved Technicolor romance, it’s a kind of unremarkable, modest pleasure. Doris Day & Frank Sinatra are compelling performers, but most of the material is a cookie cutter approach to movie magic. The in-the-moment intensity & absurdly incongruous fallout of the film’s climactic suicide scene is what really makes it interesting as a Studio System relic. It’s impossible to know what Studio Notes or Hays Code adherence might have steered Young at Heart to such a bizarrely artificial conclusion., but it created an interesting tension in the process. Just as Sinatra’s arrival earlier in the film disrupted its chaste, serene romance, Gordon’s return to that chastity after such a tensely bleak suicide sequence feels like just as much of an intrusion, so much so that the scene can be comfortably read as a supernatural broadcast from Heaven above. The censorship of the Hays Code era encourages that kind of skeptical, overreaching reading of what movies are doing on the surface vs. what they’re getting away with beneath it, whether or not that kind of interpretation is warranted here specifically.