5 minute read
Pillow Talk
TEXT: BARBARA EICHHAMMERILLUSTRATION: CAROLA KOBERSTEIN
The Film
1959, Director: Michael Gordon
In this »SEX COMEDY« with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, a party line triggers a lot of romantic trials and tribulations. With its sexual allusions and frivolous double entendre Pillow Talk caused quite a stir at the box offices in 1959. From a formal level important: The ten intimate split screen scenes. A short overview.
New York, 1950s
The telephone provides the basis for the romantic trials and tribulations in this popular romantic comedy by Michael Gordon. Interior designer Jan Morrow (Doris Day) and songwriter Brad Allen (Rock Hudson) have to share a socalled party line. Not unusual in New York during the 1950s. The shared line also meant, however, that the involved users do not know each other in person but can listen to each other’s telephone chats and cut into their conversations.
The Problem
Womanizer Brad is constantly on the phone with his ever-changing girlfriends, so that Jan can no longer make any telephone calls. Jan is so annoyed about him, that she starts to argue with Brad with increased frequency. When they finally meet in real life, he introduces himself as a cowboy from Texas on a New York
tour, which triggers a series of romantic trials and tribulations, especially with mistaken identities. The film title is programmatic: With its sexual allusions and intimate double entendre, Pillow Talk caused quite a stir at the box offices. The film ranks among the three most successful blockbusters of the year 1959 from the film studio Universal. Pillow Talk is also an intermedial film, because it reflects and depicts the technological peculiarities and novelties of the medium telephone.
Technique
Eroticism on Screenfilm
In 1950s Hollywood films, it was actually the split screen technique that made it possible to imply eroticism and sexual attraction on screen during the rigid Hays Production Code. Pillow Talk encompasses ten split-screen scenes, which show the intimate telephone conversations between Doris Day and Rock Hudson
Those scenes appear less frequently during the course of the film, when Brad and Jahill get to know each other better in real life. According to film critic Hans Wulff, split screen means those »filmic image forms … which, show separate single images in several image sectors« (own translation). Generally speaking, the filmic image is divided up into several single images which present multiple settings simultaneously. Thus, split screen is the ideal stylistic device to portray the communication situation of a telephone conversation – with its situation of spatial distance and communicative nearness.During the 1950s and 1960s, an optical printer generated the cinematic effect, which can today be realised with digital technology. At the beginning of Pillow Talk the shared party line is introduced via a three-fold split screen. Very striking: The synthetized single images all show a characteristic V-form which is reminiscent of Weber and Phillips Smalley's film "Suspense" (1913), which inscribes Pillow Talk immediately into the tradition of split screen movies. For the short silent film Suspense was the first film ever to showcase split screen technique and in a particular V-form.How much the split screen symbolises implicit eroticism and the separation of the sexes in Pillow Talk is made clear in the bathtub scene, in which Jan and Brad have a telephone chat with each other while lying in their own bath tubs.
In this scene, the film image is subdivided into two separate images, which show Jan’s and Brad’s bathrooms respectively. Both are lying (separated by split screen on a formal level of the film image) in their own bath tub. The image cadre, lighting, miseen-scene and colours, however, evoke the impression that Jan and Brad share the same bath tub. Such an erotic-intimate double entendre is supported by the fact, that the boundaries of the filmic image seem to blur, when Brad’s naked foot is touching the tiles and Jan quickly withdraws her foot (because of the seeming body contact). The subdivided screen is attributed with a decidedly tactile border according to film critic MALTE HAGENER. The aesthetics of the split screen turn into an erotic stylistic device, which helps to create intimacy and sexual allusions during the rigid Hays Production Code. Thus, the film uses the split screen to depict premarital sexuality in a legitimate way. Brad and Jan are, for instance, also shown together in bed with the help of a split screen mode. The boundary between split images is on the one hand separating but can also be understood as one coherent space. It is exactly this double function that Pillow Talk plays with on a formal and narrative level.
Sex
From the mid-1950s to the mid- 1960s, the split screen technique was programmatic in Hollywood film for a specific subgenre of romantic comedies: the so-called »Sex Comedies« like "Lover Come Back" (1961; Doris Day and Rock Hudson) or "Indiscreet"(1958; Ingrid Bergmann and Cary Grant). The »sex comedy« experienced its heyday for about ten years: For with the emergence of the Swinging Sixties and their liberal sexual mores, the romantic comedies of the fifties seemed rather old-fashioned and obsolete. The release of the Playboy-magazine in November 1953 and the Alfred Kinsey report on female sexuality triggered the sex topic also for Hollywood films. The term »sex comedy« is in fact a bit misleading: A better term would be »battle of the sexes comedies«. For in the films, there is actually no sex at all. The Hays Production Code prohibited a liberal representation of sexuality on screen. The films were rather full of implicit allusions to eroticism, sexual double entendre, discreet fade-outs and visual metaphors. Sex comedies are usually situated in the modern milieu of US-American cities and show contemporary work world of the 1960s.
Actors
From today’s perspective it is difficult to imagine the stir that "Pillow Talk" caused after its release: Doris Day with her image as eternal »screen virgin« could be seen for the first time in an intimate role with sexual allusions. The film was both risky and ground breaking for her image. Producer Ross Hunter, who persuaded her to take the role, even said that he had been responsible »for taking Doris Day out of the kitchen and into the bedroom«. Nonetheless, Pillow Talk depicts relatively conservative gender roles: Although Jan is a working woman, her profession as an interior designer locates her in the private sphere, since she is professionally responsible for making a home more comfortable. Furthermore, the film features some sexist sayings that cement patriarchal gender conventions and are from today’s point of view politically incorrect, e.g. when Thelma Matter says to Doris Day:
