[On November 17th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]
One
interesting AmericanStudies layer to each of the three romantic comedies Hudson
made with his friend
Doris Day.
1)
Pillow
Talk (1959): The premise of Hudson and Day’s first film together, which
became one of the biggest box office hits of the decade, is itself an
interesting window into a fascinating American history: Hudson’s Brad Allen and
Day’s Jan Morrow don’t know each other but share a party line,
a telephone line shared by multiple customers who have to wait for the line to
be free to make calls. But the more enduring AmericanStudies context for Pillow
Talk is that its director, Michael
Gordon, had spent years on the blacklist due to his membership in the
Depression-era Group
Theatre, and this was his first Hollywood film after getting the chance to
return to the industry (thanks to an invite from influential producer Ross Hunter). Gordon likely sympathized
with Hudson’s character’s desire to be someone else, a central facet of the
romantic comedy’s hijinks.
2)
Lover Come Back (1961): The
success of Pillow Talk almost ensured that there would be a follow-up
film, and Hudson and Day (who both served as producers on Lover) made doubly
sure of it. Not surprisingly, the plot of Lover Come Back is strikingly
similar to that of Pillow Talk, right down to Hudson’s Jerry Webster pretending
to be someone else in his initial interactions with Day’s Carol Templeton. But
what I do find very interesting is the profession of both those main characters—they
are two high-powered advertising executives at a pair of rival Madison Avenue
agencies. I’m far from the
first commentator to note that Lover is set in the
exact historical moment on which Mad
Men would focus decades later, making
for a compelling comparison between Hudson’s womanizing ad exec and Don Draper
and colleagues. Even more intriguing is that in the 1961 film Day’s character could
be a high-powered exec, while the same role took Mad Men’s Peggy Olson many seasons to
achieve.
3)
Send Me No Flowers (1964): The
third Hudson-Day film was also the last, perhaps because it was the least
well-received and successful (there was talk
of a 1980s sequel to Pillow Talk, but unfortunately it didn’t happen
before Hudson’s illness and passing). Based on Norman
Basarch and Carroll Moore’s 1960 play of the same name, Send Me No
Flowers has a pretty odd premise for a romantic comedy: Hudson’s George
Kimball is married to Day’s Judy, is a hypochondriac who wrongly believes he
has a terminal illness, and tries to set her up with various other men (with
hijinks ensuing, natch). But what’s more interesting to this AmericanStudier is
that the film was directed by Norman Jewison, the
great social issues filmmaker who just three years later would make the
groundbreaking In
the Heat of the Night (1967). Directors worked a lot in this era—Jewison
made 9 films in the 1960s, for example—so it’s not necessarily surprising that
their output would be quite varied. But I do wonder if revisiting Send Me No
Flowers with an eye for Jewison’s trademark social commentary might yield something
new.
Next Rock
Hudson post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?
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