Quotes of the Day

With my usual impeccable timing, I present an extended textual analysis of the movie nobody saw last weekend.

"Nobody," is, technically, a stretch. "Down With Love," a romantic comedy starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, did earn about $7.6 million in its first three days at North American theaters. But "The Matrix Reloaded" took in more than 12 times that amount in the same period. Even the lamentable "Daddy Day Care," in its second week, attracted more patrons.

Which proves, once again, how industry types overestimate the appeal that ironic pastiches of 40- or 50-year-old genres have for today's movie public. Last year, Todd Haynes' "Far from Heaven" extended and upended the plots in the 50s melodramas produced by Ross Hunter and directed by Douglas Sirk ("All That Heaven Allows," "Written on the Wind," "Imitation of Life"). It won lots of critics prizes, and it tanked at the wickets. Now comes "Down With Love," a saucy take on "Pillow Talk" and its genre of no-sex sex comedies that Rock Hudson made with Doris Day, or that each made with other stars, in the early 60s.

The reasons for the box-office failure of these retro romances are abundant. 1: Not many people remember the old movies these new ones are based on. 2: Most of the people who are old enough to remember them do so with more embarrassment than affection. 3: The few who do like them would probably prefer renting a video of the real thing to seeing a snarky interpretation of them. And 4: The minuscule number of people who would care to see a new version of the old movies don't rush to a theater on the opening weekend. They will be at a Senior Citizens' matinee when "Down With Love" hits the $2 theaters next month.

UP AND DOWN WITH "LOVE"

Nevertheless, "Down With Love" has interest, at least for the creaky curator of this column. To begin, it's often funny in the bright, brittle fashion of the better sitcoms. Adult romantic comedy, a defining movie genre for 50 years, is dormant on the big screen; but it still flourishes on the small one, where its practitioners include the "Down With Love" writing team, Eve Ahlert and David Drake. They did time as writer-producers on "Will & Grace."

Ahlert and Drake know they can get away with randier double entendres than the old movies did, so they let McGregor and David Hyde Pierce, as his employer and friend, engage in banter about men's stockings that a secretary outside their office mistakes for penis talk. (Pierce: "How long does a man's hose have to be?" McGregor: "Sixteen inches. [And] I have two!") No question: the rampant sniggering should've earned the movie an R rating, instead of the PG-13 it received. Innuendo goes out the window here. But at least it's cleverer, by about 14 inches, than the potty and penis humor of the "Austin Powers" movies.

The writers did their homework here. "Down With Love" is so clogged with specific references to a half-dozen Rock-and-Doris-type comedies that it serves as definitive distillation of the genre (as we shall itemize, exhaustively, later on). This is apt, because, however naive these films seem today, they were occasionally self-referential: they teasingly alluded to earlier films in the genre. The second Rock-and-Doris comedy, "Lover Come Back" features in its underscoring the song "Inspiration," which Rock had sung three times to different women in "Pillow Talk." And in "That Touch of Mink," Cary Grant wants Gig Young to find a mate for Doris, but Cary's picky. He looked at a list of eligibles for Doris, says Gig, and "He even turned down Rock Hudson."

Ahlert and Drake show a nice understanding of the essential absurdity of romantic comedy plots. When McGregor suddenly pretends to be someone else, even though he is known all over Manhattan, he tells a maitre d': "I'm Major Zip Martin. Spread the word to other doormen, theater owners and taxi drivers." And at the climax of the film, Zellweger launches into the longest, most convoluted explanation of duplicity since the death of Agatha Christie.

I also like the wit of the decor and costumes — a cunning mix of period and parody — as well as a few visual jokes, which may be the work of director Peyton Reed. (Example: we know Zellweger likes McGregor at first sight because her hair-ends flutter, and there's no breeze.) Pierce is on-key in the ineffectual-best-friend role that Tony Randall and Gig Young used to play. From his years on "Frazier," he appreciates the supporting character's poignance: serve the script; serve the star.

Still, as much as "Down With Love" wants to be ever-so-1962, it is locked in 2003 — from its aggressive disapproval of cigarette smoke to the over-exercised tone of the stars' bodies. McGregor, with his ropy slimness and Scots accent, looks to be attempting to channel early Sean Connery (including the line "Something [big] just came up," from an early James Bond film). Odd that he could be so convincing as the innocent in "Moulin Rouge," yet here, with the same huge fake moon hanging over similar penthouse apartments, and the same love-lust he needs to radiate, he can't get inside the character.

The same with Zellweger. The bitter truth is that this once-appealing actress hasn't looked attractive in a film since "Bridget Jones's Diary." She's now prim and puffy, which will be serve her well if she's cast as the middle-aged Hillary Clinton (whom she increasingly resembles) but won't do for her "Down With Love" character, who is told by the first person she meets, "My, you're gorgeous!" Zellweger also wiggles her hips in a few scenes, as if she's Jayne Mansfield trying to be Doris Day. She seems utterly outside and beneath this well-written role. She's not a city girl, wearing the fine material; she's a farm girl, milking it.

"Down With Love" tries hard and honorably to summarize and satirize the "Pillow Talk" films. But it mainly demonstrates a truism that applies to life as much as to movies: The present can't be the past; it can only "do" the past.

A "DOWN WITH LOVE" CONCORDANCE: ACT I

Let's see how meticulously "Down With Love" does the old Rock-and-Doris films. Here's the movie's plot [with bracketed annotations that indicate the borrowings from earlier films]:

It's glamorous Manhattan in 1962 — or 1963; the movie isn't sure. Anyway, it's that balmy, blinkered time just before the Beatles, the American "advisers" in Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, Fellini's "8-1/2" and the demolition of Penn Station ripped holes in the fabric of our complacent post-Eisenhower culture. Barbara Novak (Zellweger) strides out of Grand Central Terminal, across the street to the United Nations Building (which is actually nearly a half-mile away) and past it to the offices of Banner House, which is about to publish her first book. It's called ... "Down With Love," a survey of modern romance that instructs women to divorce sex from love and achieve equality with men — if only they "can enjoy it the way a man does: à la carte."

[For comparison, you'll want to see "Sex and the Single Girl"; Ahlert and Davis certainly did. That 1964 frolic, based on the title of Helen Gurley Brown's non-fiction best-seller, is the story of Helen Brown (Natalie Wood), a young woman who has written a Kinseyesque survey called ... "Sex and the Single Girl." Its aim, says the author, is "to help the unmarried women in this country: to stop being ashamed of sex or being single. And I want them to stop behaving like mice and start behaving like men."]

In the lobby, Barbara meets perky Vikki Hiller (Sarah Paulson), a senior editor at Banner House and the guardian angel of Barbara's book. They dash into a meeting of the firm's executive editors. All are men, all are dressed in identically sober suits, all are dismissive of women — including Vikki, whom they peremptorily ask to get them coffee. Their boss is the company's crusty president, Theodore Banner. [Why, it's Tony Randall, now 83, who played Hudson's foil in all three Rock-and-Doris movies. He's the implicit Seal of Approval offered by those films to this one.]

Barbara explains the Three Levels of her book's premise: 1. abstain from men and seek self-pleasure in chocolate; 2. sorry, I forget the second level; and 3. achieve equality with men. The response of Banner and his boys is resistant, belligerent, threatened. [In a similar board room in "The Thrill of It All," Doris has trouble persuading ad-agency executives that she, and not a bimbo starlet favored by the men, should be selling Happy Soap.] But their curiosity is piqued when Barbara explains, "I said when you refrain from love. Not sex." They agree to go ahead with the book.

Cut to another publishing house, for Know Magazine, "for Men in the Know," a racy magazine that apparently blends Playboy with Confidential. [In "Sex and the Single Girl," Tony Curtis is the managing editor of Stop Magazine, whose editors take a perverse pride in being called "the most disgusting scandal sheet the human mind can recall."] Know's owner is the ineffectual neurotic Peter MacMannus (Pierce), who languishes in the shadow of his late father, founder of the firm. [In "Lover Come Back," Randall, who owns an ad agency, is similarly cowed by the memory of his late, founding father.]

Now Peter is ready to dress down his star reporter, Catcher Block (McGregor), for not getting a journalistic scoop; he's heard Catcher was at a Manhattan night club instead of down south on a big story. But as Catcher explains, he got the scoop, with the help of a few lady friends. He knows how to use sex as a lure for business. [In "Lover Come Back," Rock gets a potential client drunk and hooks him up with easy women, thus snatching the new account away from prim Doris' firm.]

Catcher is everything Peter wants to be — "ladies' man, man's man, man about town" — and isn't. But Peter usually defers to his friend and idol. [Randall did the same to Hudson in "Love Come Back" and "Pillow Talk," in both of which he was technically Rock's boss.] Indeed, as he tells Catcher, "You are the best friend any man with 20 diagnosed neuroses could ever have." Block replies: "Well, we've been together for a long time. I knew you when you only had 12." [In "Pillow Talk" Randall is in bondage to his analyst. So is Gig Young, who takes the Randall role in "Lover Come Back."]

Peter begs Catcher to do a Know story on Barbara, not just for the news value but because it will help Peter cozy up to Vikki. But Catcher sees no allure in interviewing an uptight feminist. Peter arranges three meetings for the author and the journalist — lunch, dinner and breakfast — each of which Catcher dodges to be with a more pliant, pre-"Down With Love" woman. He is, of course, gentleman enough to phone Barbara each time, where their conversations are shown on a split screen. [Rock and Doris had split-screen phone chats in all three of their films, especially and famously in "Pillow Talk."]

As his excuse for missing lunch, Catcher sweetly, bogusly, explains that he had to rescue "an English fox" (while he's making out with an English stewardess at a "Camelot" matinee). In his dinner call, he says he's helping "a French poodle" (kanoodling with a French stewardess at a night game at Yankee stadium). [In "That Touch of Mink," Cary takes Doris to a Yankees game; they sit in the home-team dugout, where Doris' derisive shouts at the umpire get Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra ejected from the game.] In the next morning's breakfast call, he tells Barbara he's nursing "a Swedish wolf hound" (in bed). Barbara, now onto the ruse, is furious. Why, she'll never give that scoundrel an interview!

Soon, the book is a smash best-seller, thanks to Judy Garland singing the Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg tune "Down With Love" on "The Ed Sullivan Show." The book has a volcanic effect on women readers: they are encouraged to throw off the shackles of domesticity and make their husbands do the cooking. Over at Know, even Peter's mousy, submissive secretary is avidly consuming a copy. [In "Sex and the Single Girl," a secretary at Stop Magazine is seen reading Helen's book.]

A "DOWN WITH LOVE" CONCORDANCE: ACT II

Now Catcher's interest and ire have been raised. Dammit, he'll write an exposé on this woman, because he suspects she lacks the sexual experience and expertise she trumpets in her book. [In "Sex and the Single Girl," Stop Magazine publishes a nasty article on sex-book author Helen Brown. But Curtis wants to go further: "a personal exposé right from her own lips. ‘Does she or doesn't she?' And I promise to deliver this one personally."]

The problem is, Barbara hates Catcher. The saver is that she's never met or seen him. If only he could pretend to be someone else, someone who's just the opposite of the snake she reviles... So in Barbara's dry cleaner's he introduces himself, in a syrupy Southern accent, as Astronaut Zip Martin. [In "Pillow Talk" Rock dons his "Giant" Texas accent and pretends to be rich, innocent Rex Stetson. In "Lover Come Back" he masquerades as Dr. Linus Tyler, a Nobel Prize-winning naif.] With shy sweetness, "Zip" acknowledges he doesn't know who Barbara is — see, he's been in outer space lately. It's instant attraction for Barbara, whose sudden notoriety has scared off potential suitors.

A brisk montage shows Barbara and "Zip" enjoying the glamour of the Big Apple at its ripest. [In "That Touch of Mink," plutocrat Cary proposes a first date to unemployed Doris by saying, "It's a beautiful night, and New York's a wonderful city. What would you like to do with it?"] They see all the shows, catch Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen and Bill Cosby at the comedy clubs, go to nightclubs and dance the Twist till dawn. [The getting-to-know-you-in-Manhattan montage is straight out of "Pillow Talk," where "Tex" and Doris spend the day at the 42nd Street Public Library, the 42nd Street Automat and the State of Liberty, then at night go to Broadway shows, Roseland, Madison Square Garden, the Latin Quarter, etc.]

Barbara and "Zip" are getting along splendidly. In one phone conversation, as they do isometrics in their separate apartments, each snuggles up to the near end of the split screen to suggest that their affair has ripened more rapidly than we knew: she seems to be giving him a blow job, he's apparently performing cunnilingus on her, now they're having sex missionary-style, now they're doing 69. After these exertions, each collapses supine on the floor and smokes a post-coital cigarette. [Rock and Doris never had anything like the phone sex in "Down With Love" [EM] they would have been arrested [EM] but in the Jan-and-"Tex" part of "Pillow Talk" each is in a bathtub facing toward the center of the split screen. Rock puts a foot up on the porcelain wall, Doris does the same, so their feet look to be in romantic contact. When he appears to tickle her undersole, he quickly removes her foot. She may be in love, but she's still a good girl.]

By now Peter is desperate to get in on the action. Catcher offers his swingin' bachelor pad to Peter so that he may entertain Vikki. Alas for Peter, he doesn't know how Catcher's Playboy Mansion gadgets work. He pushes the wrong button and Vikki gets pinned under the pull-out bed: "Your couch was all over me like some animal!" [In "Pillow Talk," Rock's pad has two couch-side switches that turn the lights down, put mood music on the record player, bolt the front door and make the sofa sprint out into a bed with baby-blue sheets.]As Barbara keeps pursuing "Zip," he keeps postponing the magic moment, because he (Catcher) wants to expose Barbara as a girl who can't take her own book's advice. His charade is nearly revealed when, during a bohemian party at Peter's (Catcher's) place, Barbara finds "Zip" in the bedroom with a beautiful beatnik. He improvises a story about how the beatnik gave him a funny cigarette. "You mean she drugged you?" a horrified Barbara asks, and he nods sadly: "All the way to the bedroom." She gratefully accepts his lie. [In "Lover Come Back," Doris finds Rock, who's pretending to be Tyler the scientist, in his own apartment. He explains it away by saying he was drugged with a funny cigarette that "didn't have any printing on it." Doris gratefully accepts the lie.]

Catcher can't help himself: he's warming up to the "Down With Love" girl. [...as Rock did to Doris in "Pillow" and "Lover," and as Tony did to Natalie in "Sex."] But he's still a journalist: he has to get his story. [...as Tony had to conquer Natalie for his scoop.] Tonight's the Big Date, and they prepare for it while listening to separate, his-and-hers renditions of a song appropriate for both a writer and an astronaut: Bart Howard's "In Other Words," aka "Fly Me to the Moon." She dresses to the bossa-nova whisperings of Astrud Gilberto; he suits up to Mr. Sinatra's brassier version. [In "Pillow Talk," Doris and "Tex" have their first kiss in a night club where a jazz trio is playing a sort of astronaut's love song: "I need no rocket ship,/ No trip to the moon..."]

The nearly-lovers are in Peter's (Catcher's) bachelor pad, and the action is heating up. Finally Barbara declares what Catcher has been waiting to hear: "I want what every woman wants — marriage." Catcher, who's been documenting on this on a concealed tape recorder, drops the Zip mask and exults: "I got Barbara ‘Down With Love' Novak to fall in love!" The sheep is shorn. The wolf has won.

But that's just the end of Act II. Plenty more reversals and revelations are in store. And you wouldn't want us to force you to read the movie's ending, would you, gentle readers?

REVISING THE REVISIONISTS

"Down With Love" and "Far from Heaven" are what the upmarket reviewers call revisionist movies. Revisionism is a critical attitude — a way of looking back, with both indulgence and impatience, on old movies that have gone out of fashion. And what could be less fashionable than the Rock-and-Doris romances, whose sexual mores were outmoded at the time the films were released? Or the forthrightly square weepies in the Hudson-Hunter-Sirk canon, themselves remakes of novels and films from the even more benighted 30s? Even when they were released, the films were their own anachronisms.

Confusing movies with sociology is one of the mistakes writer-director Todd Haynes makes in "Far from Heaven,' which to me was last year's most overrated film. Haynes created a handsome simulacrum of 50s costumes and interior decoration (as "Down With Love" does for the 60s), but he was too busy making political points — husbands uncaring, wives passively abused; white suburbanites bad, black gardeners good — to put flesh and shadings on the characters. The camera style also labored to deny viewers' emotional involvement with the story. (Haynes mostly used a static camera, framing each scene like a picture on a museum wall, instead of quietly creeping closer to the action, as Sirk and other classical directors did.) The whole enterprise was as frigid as a doctoral dissertation. It was a movie for movie critics and, as its financial failure indicated, movie critics only.

Both "Far from Heaven" and "Down With Love" offer distanced, often derisive takes on old genres. They say that 50s movies — hatched in the last years of comfortable sexism, implicit racism and explicit queer-baiting — provide winking or unwitting peeks into a postwar society that was placid on the outside, roiling at its heart. America knew something was wrong, but its popular culture hadn't yet found the means to define and expose the problems. Forty and more years on, these films could appear to us as quaint, or heinous, as the silent-era racist epic "The Birth of a Nation" must have looked to liberal folks of the 50s.

We can all agree that the old movies were less interesting for what they expressed than for what they repressed. But, jeez, give them a break. Of course they have aspects that we find squirm-making. They were made Back Then! It would be creepy if their social and aesthetic prejudices somehow coincided with ours, which will surely seem every bit as goofy to audiences 40 or 50 years from now. Try these two tests: Track down "Written on the Wind" or "Pillow Talk" in a video store or on Turner Classic Movies, and see if they don't engross you as much as they amuse you. Then put "American Idol," "Jackass" and "Malibu's Most Wanted" in a time capsule, and wait for the cackles of your grandchildren.

THE AGES OF ROCK

That anyone in Hollywood even wants to make new versions of "All That Heaven Allows" and "Pillow Talk" marks a posthumous vindication for Rock Hudson, who died in 1985 — the first celebrity AIDS casualty.

As a kid, I didn't pay much attention to the Rock-and-Doris movies. I saw most of them, but they didn't stick with me; like any ordinary moviegoer with an ordinary film, I consumed them and eliminated them. The hints of homosexuality went over my head or through it. The innuendo didn't intoxicate me. If I wanted titillation, I went to Playboy, or to foreign films; if I wanted robust laughs, there was Billy Wilder at the peak of his comic acuity. "Some Like It Hot" came out seven months before "Pillow Talk," "The Apartment" eight months after.

Besides, in the Wilder films, women were represented by Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine: plausible, personable extremes of sexy and cute. Doris Day, though... what was she about? Oh, she had a Pepsodent smile and a warm voice; like Hudson she was an expert line-reader. But her starchiness struck me, still strikes me, as school-marmish. She listened to men with a cool stare that came close to castrating. And the way she was photographed (usually by Russell Metty or Arthur Arling) put her in a pastel fog. Day was only 35 when "Pillow Talk" came out — a year older than Zellweger is now — but she or her cinematographers must have thought she was getting creaky. Thereafter she'd be spouting her sampler sentiments from behind layers of gel. Textually and texturally, it was soft-pore cornography.

The minor revelation in the "Pillow Talk" films is Hudson. He was much better than I realized at the time. I didn't know, and neither did Hollywood, that he represented the end of an acting line the movies had taken for granted since the coming of talkies 30 years before: the soft-spoken, well-spoken hunk. Because the Brando Revolution consigned that kind of movie man to the junk heap, or to the small screen, Hudson's work seems all the more laudable. Using that rich baritone voice like Pan's seductive pipes, he always got the meaning of a line without overselling it. His close-mouthed smile (Perry Como, another 50s icon, had it too) could suggest warmth or irony or a closely guarded secret. He did it all, made acting look easy and attractive.

In this sense, the Oscars, which ignored Hudson's comedy work, were less accurate a gauge of quality than the Golden Globes, which voted him World Film Favorite: Male for 1959, '60, '61 and '63. I'd translate those awards by saying he was the ideal exponent of domestic machismo. Tall, strong and handsome, he didn't push his good looks; he wasn't the letch McGregor plays in "Down With Love." Could he help it if, in movies, women fell for him?

That may sound like a joke today, when Hudson is remembered as the most prominent of Hollywood's hidden homosexuals, and the first one "outed" by his disease. Seven years after his death, director Mark Rappaport assembled Hudson movie clips into a provocative video essay, "Rock Hudson's Home Movies," which tried making every Hudson role a subtextual cry from the closet. I'm not convinced, but I do see — there's no avoiding — the gay references in some of the romantic comedies Ahlert and Drake drew on for their "Down With Love" script (while not using any for the Catcher character).

In "Pillow Talk," Rock-as-Brad phones Day to plant suspicions about her new beau, Rock-as-Tex. "Well," he says, "there are some men who are just, uh, well, they' re very devoted to their mothers. You know, the type that likes to, uh, collect recipes or exchange bits of gossip." (Doris' reply: "You're sick!") The movie also has a running gag about an obstetrician who believes Rock is somehow pregnant. In "Come September," in which Rock spends the entire film waiting to have sex with his inamorata Gina Lollobrigida, he is seen wearing Gina's pink hat. In "Lover Come Back," circumstances force Rock to walk through a lobby in a woman's fur coat. Two onlookers, who throughout the film have been admiring Rock's way with the ladies, are flummoxed. Says one: "He's the last guy in the world I would've figured."

Usually, though, Randall got the gay gags. "Send Me No Flowers," the final Rock-Doris-and-Tony film, is otherwise off-topic — a hypochondriac (Hudson) convinces himself, his wife (Day) and his best friend (Randall) that he's about to die — but it's packed with nelly jokes about Randall's devotion to Hudson. Looking for help buckling a cummerbund, he pleads, "George, do me." He gets drunks and murmurs, "I love ya, George." And when the plot requires Rock to spend the night with Tony in the latter's bedroom (all the other bedrooms in Tony's large house are being "painted"!), Rock changes into a sports shirt that's way too small for his robust frame. As he walks past Tony, who' s sitting on the bed trying to open a champagne bottle, the cock - sorry, cork - pops out from between Tony's thighs. Then they go to bed together.

I never said these movies weren't weird.

THOU SHALT COVET

These movies didn't spring from nowhere. They were preceded a few years earlier by Broadway sex comedies, among them George Axelrod's "The Seven Year Itch," Leslie Stevens' "The Marriage-Go-Round," Harry Kurnitz' "Once More With Feeling" and Norman Krasna's "Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?" All these works, which were quickly made into movies, skinny-dipped in male fantasies of adultery, usually to stop just this side of total immersion. They were about breaking that favorite commandment of the 50s — the one about coveting. It's a great movie subject, because it's what movies are all about: watching something desirable. They're vicarious sex, lust in the dark, second-hand sinning.

The closest modern version of that 50s furtiveness is Stanley Kubrick's 1999 "Eyes Wide Shut," whose plot turns on whether Tom Cruise will surrender to infidelity or resist it. Kubrick makes us watch Cruise watch women, be drawn to them, then allow scruple or circumstance puncture the flirtation. In the end, he settles for passive cheating — coveting — but the movie wants us to be as fascinated and troubled (and, why not?, aroused) by what Cruise sees as he is. Kubrick knew a few things: that sex, and the longing for it, can be brutal, but in subtler ways; that, no matter how active we are, we think about sex more than we engage in it; that sex is what happens not between our legs but between our ears. This dreamy erotic impulse was made for movies. In a way, it's what movies are.

The Rock-and-Doris movies didn't go nearly that far into the naughty-wish fulfillment aspect of film. They were about the obsession with sex (the fantasy life) and the denial of sex (in real life). Their topic, like that of most comedies, was sexual anxiety: the eruptive frustrations of courtship, the enervating frustrations of married life. And, whether the characters are married or single, the sex act must ever be deferred — to prolong the dramatic tension, to satisfy the guardians of morality.

Doris was known for her roles as the perpetual professional virgin, but it wasn't that she couldn't convince herself to have premarital sex. The fates — and the Production Code, the industry's system of self-regulation — conspired against it. In "Pillow Talk" she goes with Rock to a Connecticut hideaway; they're making out on a couch in front of a raging hearth; then he goes out to get some wood for the fireplace, Tony barges in to say Rock's a fraud and the night is over. In "The Thrill of It All," Doris has three bedroom rendezvous with rich-but-considerate playboy Cary Grant before he can so much as touch her (and by then they're married). In "The Thrill of It All," in which Doris is married to James Garner, a movie-long series of contrivances (his job as a doctor, her sudden job as a TV pitchwoman) deprives the otherwise happy lovers of sex until the final fade out.

They were metaphorical versions of the screenwriters' tussle with the Production Code, which was founded both to keep movies from being too adult, too offensive, and to fend off local and state censors. By the late 50s, Hollywood was faced with competition from sexier foreign films. The studio bosses knew that code, administered by people whose salaries they paid, needed some wiggle room. At this time the Production Code was a corset of morality that was loosening but hadn't yet snapped. That would come later in the 60s, when everything changed — when the severe rules of sexual propriety (which we struggled against) were suddenly and forever overthrown, to be replaced by new rules or no rules (which we sometimes struggle against).

The Hudson-Day movies can't help being weathered monuments, as foreign and far away as Stonehenge. The characters in them abide by codes as peculiar as the ones in Jane Austen novels. More so, because the Austen stories are fairy tales about the grace with which people fight or submit to society's strictures; the "Pillow Talk" films are cautionary fables about the desperate strategies of people trying to subvert those strictures, before they acknowledge defeat and fall in love. That's why the Rock-and-Doris movies are less appealing to us, and less suitable for remaking, revising or reliving.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on 'Down With Love', a new movie that tries to rekindle the silly thrill of 'Pillow Talk'