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
Swampflix 