With its lush interiors, lusher costumes and a witty, sophisticated screenplay, Pillow Talk was an enormous success for Doris Day and her partner-in-sex-comedy, Rock Hudson. It's still a feast, with the added attraction of being a time capsule of 1959--not the reality, mind you, but the dream. Time Magazine astutely noted, on the film's release, “When these two magnificent objects (Day and Hudson) go into a clinch, aglow from the sun lamp, agleam with hair lacquer, they look less like creatures of flesh and blood than a couple of 1960 Cadillacs that just happen to be parked in a suggestive position.”
Day plays a business-like interior decorator who happens to share a telephone party-line with sleazy songwriter Rock Hudson. Both need their phones for business--she for ordering slip covers, he for slipping it to potential sweethearts--so when he unknowingly hires her to redecorate his love pad, she declares war. Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter provide the sidekick action. Pillow Talk won an Oscar for Best Screenplay, and nominations for Day (Best Actress) and Ritter (Best Supporting Actress).
Much has been made of Doris Day's stock characteristic--virginity, or the image of the 35-year-old girl-next-door--but recent criticism takes another look. London's National Film Theater's Clarke and Simmonds write, “Day frequently plays an independent working woman who confronts the male and forces him to modify his attitudes and behavior. Moreover, saying ‘No' to manipulative sexual situations (a favorite plot device in the sex comedies) is not the same as clinging to one's virginity.” Critic Jeanine Basinger takes a more lighthearted attitude: “Actually, Day's characters were usually intelligent career women, full of spirit and independence, the logical grown-up offshoot of the tomboy. Her hold-out functions less as sexual ritual than it does as a plot device--or as an excuse for her to change her clothes oftener. (In Pillow Talk she makes fourteen costume changes and wears $500,000 worth of hard ice--just a typical basic wardrobe for the average working girl!)... Some of Doris Day's later films, directed by Frank Tashlin, offer a comment on their times which is a biting indictment of American materialism. In Pillow Talk, however, the fun is straight-