Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1959

The Contenders:

Audrey Hepburn: The Nun’s Story
Doris Day: Pillow Talk
Simone Signoret: Room at the Top (winner)
Katherine Hepburn: Suddenly, Last Summer
Elizabeth Taylor: Suddenly, Last Summer

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1959

The Contenders:

The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cent Coups)
North by Northwest
Operation Petticoat
Pillow Talk (winner)
Wild Strawberries (Smultronstallet)

Walking the Party Line

Film: Pillow Talk
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

When I think of comedies with a more sexual edge, I don’t generally think of the late 1950s as the go-to era. That is what we get with Pillow Talk, though. This is one of those “of its era” movies because the plot turns on something that simply has no real modern adjunct. I expected this to be squeaky clean in terms of sexual content and innuendo and I was pleasantly mistaken on that front. Oh, there’s no nudity here, but there’s a great deal of implied sex and at one point, an unmarried young woman goes off to a wilderness hideaway with a man. That seems forward for a film in Eisenhower’s America.

That old school conceit here is a party line telephone in New York. In this case, the line is shared by Jan Morrow (Doris Day) and Brad Allen (Rock Hudson). Brad, as is often the case in this sort of movie, is a wildly successful creative type. He’s a songwriter currently working on a new score for a Broadway show. In addition to being a successful songwriter, Brad is also quite the ladies’ man and has a habit of tying up the line talking to the women in his substantial little black book. He frequently plays these women a song he’s written “just for them.” It’s actually the same song regardless of woman, with the appropriate name tacked in at the end of each line.