Pillow Talk

Like most romantic comedies of its era, Pillow Talk (1959) is about a woman's attempt to curb a man's voracious sexual appetite--or at least redirect it toward the monogamous requirements of marriage. It's a diverting confection in CinemaScope: Doris Day, Hollywood's biggest-selling virgin, plays Jan Morrow, a New York interior designer who's horrified by the man (Rock Hudson) with whom she shares a telephone line. He's got any number of women under his charms, and she's more than a little jealous of his active love life. Tired of her judgmental criticisms and constant nagging of him to get off the phone, Hudson's character pretends to be a chivalrous Texan after meeting Jan by chance at a restaurant. He's taken with her, or at least, taken with the idea of deceiving her (and possibly adding her to his list of conquests.)

Pillow Talk is about as realistic as a bad sitcom, but that's part of its charm. It's a series of late-night jaunts to New York night clubs and swanky parties, and long drives at midnight, full of banal-comic banter between Day and Hudson, who teamed for a couple more romantic pictures after this one was a big hit.

Doris Day has always been good at playing cookie-cutter American women who react with the appropriate level of revulsion at the slightest hint of impropriety (even though she's secretly hoping a little of that impropriety will point itself in her direction.) Rock Hudson proves his charm and appeal as a leading man. But does this complement ultimately mean I will have to stop making fun of Channing Tatum's acting? Isn't Tatum just the next Rock Hudson? Perhaps--fifty years from now--someone else will comment on Tatum's likableness, which I generally see as blandness most of the time.

The script--by Russell Rouse and Maurice Richlin--earned an Oscar (a rare feat for a comedy). Directed by Michael Gordon. The supporting cast includes Tony Randall as Day's unflinching would-be suitor (who doesn't really convince as a ladies' man, but is funny nonetheless), and Thelma Ritter as her drunk maid. With Nick Adams, Allen Jenkins, Marcel Dalio, and Lee Patrick. 98 min. ★★★

All About Eve

All About Eve (1950) is just about the bitchiest movie ever made. It's chock full of delicious dialogue (including the famous "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.") and features Bette Davis in top form. She plays an aging Broadway star named Margo Channing. Anne Baxter plays Eve Herrington, an adoring young fan who cons her way into Margo's inner-circle in order to foster her own acting ambitions. She wants to be the new Margo. It's smashing good fun: overdramatic to the point of self-parody, but also a clever critique of Hollywood culture and the double-edged sword that is Fame.

Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve's impact on pop culture cannot be underestimated. Countless movies and television shows have borrowed its theme of the star being manipulated by a young and devious imposter, but none of these has ever come close to equaling it. 

Bette Davis had been the Queen of Warner Bros. in the 30s and early 40s, but in the years following Now Voyager (1942) her career sagged, and she had just about been written off as a performer. Her performance as the volatile, vicious and vulnerable Margo is perfection, and it briefly revitalized her career. And it's the performance you think of when you think of Bette Davis (unless it's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, but that role moves beyond self-parody into something positively uncanny and even undignified).

With George Sanders, who won an Oscar for his performance as a witty, acerbic drama critic, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe, Thelma Ritter, and, in a small role, Marilyn Monroe. Based on the short story "The Wisdom of Eve" by Mary Orr. ★★★★

Rear Window

I'm going to take a moment to plug the beautiful Florida Theatre, a landmark of downtown Jacksonville. Every summer they show a handful of classic movies, giving many of us a rare opportunity to see films that were decades old by the time we were born. Even if you've already seen a movie at home, nothing compares to experiencing it in a theater with an audience, especially a theater as elegant (and historical) as this one. Seeing Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train there several years ago got me fired up about about going to as many of these retrospective showings as possible, and this year I got to see my second Hitchcock film on the big screen, Rear Window, from 1954.

Rear Window has been reviewed too many times for me to go deeply into familiar territory, but I will briefly synopsize its plot and its critical reaction: it's about a photographer (James Stewart) who, when confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, begins spying on his neighbors from his conveniently-located rear window, which overlooks a large courtyard. Soon enough he begins to suspect that one of his neighbors (Raymond Burr) has committed a murder. Stewart's chic fashionista girlfriend (Grace Kelly) and no-nonsense rehab therapist (Thelma Ritter) become his Girls Friday in an attempt to prove a murder without a body or any real physical evidence.

As you may be able to imagine, critics have long focused on how Rear Window mirrors the act of watching a movie: Jimmy Stewart uses a telescope to anonymously spy on his neighbors the way we slip into dark theaters and stare at the characters on the screen. The drama that happens between the people in the movies is typically the stuff of closed doors, but to us, the door has been opened, all unbeknownst to the characters in the movie. This is what some critics and philosophers (such as Jacques Lacan) have characterized as scopophilia, the act of looking, and deriving pleasure from it. Rear Window pokes fun at our own voyeuristic curiosity, but it also indicts us in the process.

What struck me about seeing Rear Window with an audience was how much of its wittiness still survives. The humorous aspects of the neighbors--who have very little dialogue and must restrict themselves almost to pantomiming their roles--come through gloriously, and you begin to develop odd little attachments to them. They become endearing or bothersome, the way neighbors do in real life, and Jimmy Stewart, the Everyman of the classic movie days, becomes us...and we him. Hitchcock employs the reaction shot exhaustively in this film (something happens, we see Stewart react, something happens, Stewart reacts, and so forth). That rhythm of shooting was perhaps never more apropos than in Rear Window, which is purely the cinema of reaction (often reaction based on no real knowledge, merely assumption). The visual becomes the hyper-real, rendering communication unnecessary and frankly undesirable.  

Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter deserve mention in this. Kelly of course never looked better, but she also turns in a marvelous performance. She's head-over-heels in love with Stewart. He loves her too, but he thinks their social and vocational differences are insurmountable. Yet she pursues him with reckless tenacity, and becomes a willing pawn in his sleuthing--often risking her own safety--in order to enter into his world. She's trying to prove that she's not just frivolous, that she's game, and I think her performance works because Kelly possessed both qualities: she was glamorous but also tough, and smart. Thelma Ritter is a character actress who I don't think ever got her due. She spices up just about any movie she's in with her dry wit. These three form some kind of bizarrely funny mystery-solving trio. Without them Rear Window would have been a lesser entertainment.