OK, here’s the pitch for a new rom-com starring Matthew McConaughey and Katherine Heigl.
He’s a playboy and a playah. She’s a good girl, but a bit lonely.
They meet … and bicker … via IM, but end up meeting in real life. Only he doesn’t let on who he is, instead pretending to be an aw, shucks Texan. The big city girl falls, hard, for his old-fashioned charms, but he can’t keep up the charade forever.
Sounds plausible, right? Well, that story did get greenlit – 50-plus years ago.
The new DVD rerelease of “Pillow Talk” (April 14) shows romantic comedies haven’t come a long way, baby.
The genre still traffics in the same kind of miscommunications and hurried resolutions that are the hallmark of the modern-day rom-com.
But “Pillow Talk” had Doris Day and Rock Hudson, two big reasons to give it a fresh peek.
Day plays Jan Morrow, a beautiful interior designer who doesn’t have a beau. And that’s perfectly fine by her. She’d fit right in with Carrie Bradshaw and the gang, but she might need higher heels.
Enter Brad Allen (Hudson), a songwriter and playboy extraordinaire. The two meet via a party line – an ancient phone system in which several people share the same phone access. Brad hogs up their phone time by wooing a succession of ladies.
Jan wants nothing to do with a scoundrel like Brad, but a series of convoluted events bring them together.
“Pillow Talk” in many ways is superior to today’s typical rom-com – cue the faint praise alert.
Some of the dialogue crackles, and who could play the other man in Jan’s life better than Tony Randall?
The budding sexual revolution, capsulized by Jan’s insistence than she doesn’t need a man to be happy, is a time capsule moment to be sure.
But the duo share a wonderful chemistry – something that can salvage even the most desperate rom-com past … or present.
So check out “Pillow Talk,” an ageless reminder that the genre’s roots are still showing today.
(Photo: Doris Day and Rock Hudson suffer a failure to communicate in “Pillow Talk.”)
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I have always loved Doris Day, although I think “That Touch of Mink” is a better movie than “Pillow Talk.” Cary Grant, Gig Young, and Thelma Ritter – what could be better than that?