Circa 1960, the former Doris Kappelhoff was queen of romantic comedy. Pretty rather than glam, bustling and professional, inner yearnings expressed in those bell-clear, open-heart torch songs, she was forever busily single but with her eye on a rogue male.
By the end of the decade she was the epitome of square (and turned down the possibly career-changing role of Mrs. Robinson). Now her films look smart again, and we can see that Sex And The City or most Julia Roberts/Cameron Diaz movies basically rework the successful recipe of Day's best vehicles. And she could sing too.
The film that turned her from musical to comedy star was Pillow Talk (directed by blacklist survivor Michael Gordon], in which virile Rock Hudson pursues the reluctant Day through a series of misunderstandings and double entendres. The zippy title song and the match of Rock's granite jaw with Doris' equally solid hairstyle are as representative of 1959 mainstream style as finned cars and kidney-shaped coffee tables.
Tony Randall gets the lion's share of the laughter as the neurotic feeb who doesn't win the girl, demonstrating an effeminacy which supposedly contrasts with Rock's uncomplicated manliness and cues a succession of gags that in retrospect seem in-jokes at the expense of the leading man's actual sexuality.
