Pillow Talk (NR, 1959)

Strong cocktails, lots of dating and sex talk, and a single woman living in the city: No, it's not Sex and the City. It's the HBO show's decades-earlier forerunner, PILLOW TALK. Jan Morrow (Doris Day) is a smashingly dressed single career woman in New York City desperate for her own phone line. As it is, she must share her line, which she uses for work, with suave lothario Brad Allen (Rock Hudson), who sings the same song to every woman who calls him cooing at every hour. By the time Brad sees Jan, out on a grudging date with a 21-year-old would-be date rapist, she already hates him. But Brad is determined to have Jan as a conquest too. So he comes up with an alter-ego -- the sweet-tempered oil magnate, Rex Stetson -- and suddenly finds he has more than a simple conquest on his mind. After falling for her, will he be able to right his wrongs, say goodbye to his throngs of ladies, and convince Jan that she's the only woman for him?

Rock Hudson gets the best of this film. Not only does he get to play two totally different characters, but he's clearly having fun. And the viewer does, too, as he plays mind games with Jan, both as Brad and as Rex. Knowing what we know now about Hudson's closeted homosexuality, it's surprising and hilarious when Brad tells Jan, of Rex not trying to take advantage of her, "He could be one of those men -- you know, loves his mother; likes to cook…." The smile on Hudson's face tells us it's OK to laugh with him at this inside joke.

All of this almost makes the essential sexism of the film -- that all Jan needs is some sex to make her not care anymore about her stupid business and phone time -- forgivable. (Teens today, in the world of individual cell phones, may have a hard time imagining a time when the telephone was so new that unrelated people had to share a single phone line if they wanted one at all.) And from a distance of decades, Pillow Talk is smart and funny with its send-up of modern masculine norms.