Film review

  • Pillow Talk

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Gordon (1959)

    I thought I liked Pillow Talk more than I do – more than I did anyway on this latest TV viewing.  It was the first and is generally accepted as the best of the three romantic comedies that Doris Day and Rock Hudson made together (it was followed by Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964)).  The script – by Stanley Shapiro, Maurice Richlin, Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene – won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar and Doris Day’s performance brought her the sole Oscar nomination of her career.  I’m afraid to say she was the chief obstacle to enjoying Pillow Talk this time around.

    The set-up is a good idea.  Jan Morrow (Day), an interior decorator in New York City, is a professionally successful, self-confident single woman.  Brad Allen (Hudson), a songwriter, is a womanising bachelor.  He and Jan share a telephone party line; she gets infuriated picking up the receiver to hear Brad sweet-talking, sometimes serenading, one girlfriend or another.  Jan files a complaint, unsuccessfully.  One of her clients, millionaire Jonathan Forbes (Tony Randall), keeps asking Jan to marry him; she keeps saying no.  Jonathan happens to have been Brad’s buddy since college days.  When Jonathan points Jan out to him, Brad likes what he sees.  He’s still miffed, though, by her complaint about him and, since they’ve not been introduced to each other, decides to play a trick on her.  He poses as a wealthy but romantically inexperienced Texas rancher, name of Rex Stetson, and starts to court Jan.  She likes the look of Rex, too.

    I know I always make the same points about Doris Day but it’s hard not to.  As a comedienne, she’s so technically accomplished that she’s almost scary, sometimes creepy, to watch and listen to.  When Day puts on a sexy voice, as she occasionally does as Jan, it is sexy but somehow subordinated to her competence.  The single-minded walk she gives Jan – a kind of martial mince – is like no other human walk you’ve ever seen, unless from Doris Day.  She needs absolutely no help in dominating the screen yet Michael Gordon is determined to reinforce her intimidating pep with relentless use of Frank De Vol’s bouncy, geddit score.  The leading lady’s vast collection of outfits and, especially, hats seems designed to do the same:  no one could accuse these costumes of not being eye-catching.  Compared with his co-star, Rock Hudson is less accomplished but, as a result, more likeable and almost restful, especially when Brad is playing Rex:  Hudson’s Texan accent is nicely, because only slightly, awkward.  In the supporting cast, there’s some strenuous overacting, though both Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter, as Jan’s dipso housekeeper, aren’t in that category – both are cleverly entertaining.

    Once she discovers Rex’s true identity, thunderstruck Jan refuses to see him again – until Alma suggests that Brad commission Jan to decorate his apartment.  She accepts the invitation as a way of getting her own back:  the garish redecoration ridicules Brad’s playboy tendencies.  The funniest moment in the film comes when a neighbouring cat gets into the new apartment, takes a look and beats an instant, yowling retreat – although this deliberately hideous décor is not the only set decoration that makes your eyes water.  The whole look of Pillow Talk – the day-glo colours, the cartoonish titles, the jokey editing – now seems quintessential of its time.  The famous split-screen sequence, in which Jan and Brad-as-Rex chat on the phone in their respective bathtubs, has a deal of charm – Rock Hudson does most of the talking and Doris Day is more relaxed than usual.  But the script’s risqué lines make you uncomfortable; they’re a goody-two-shoes’ idea of innuendo.

    16 June 2024

  • The Kid Detective

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Evan Morgan (2020)

    Abe Applebaum was always going to be a detective.  By the time he was twelve, he’d developed a local reputation for solving minor crimes and mysteries, and become something of a celebrity in the small Canadian town of Willowbrook.  A major mystery changed things.  His friend, Gracie Gulliver, went missing – her disappearance left Abe (Jesse Noah Gruman), as well as upset, stumped.  The local police couldn’t do any better but Abe lost self-confidence though not his sense of vocation.  Twenty years later, Abe (now Adam Brody) still lives in Willowbrook, where he runs his own detective agency.  It’s not a flourishing concern – just him, a bored secretary (Sarah Sutherland) and next to no assignments coming Abe’s way.  It doesn’t help that he drinks too much, does drugs, and sometimes oversleeps.  One day, high-school student Caroline (Sophie Nélisse), an orphan who lives with her grandparents, walks into the agency.  Her boyfriend has been murdered; the police are investigating the crime; but Caroline asks Abe to help, too, and he agrees.  He’s never had a murder before.

    The Kid Detective is the first feature written and directed by Evan Morgan.  I watched it on television without the benefit of subtitles; struggling to catch the dialogue was sometimes frustrating but didn’t stop me from enjoying and admiring the film.  Morgan balances skilfully a distinctive character study and an essentially conventional crime mystery – as well as the droll and the unhappy elements of his story.  It’s a big help to him that Adam Brody’s performance strikes a perfect balance between those elements, too.  Abe straddles – is stuck between – childhood and the grown-up world.  His parents’ attitudes reflect, in different, familiar ways, how their son, years ago, ground to a halt.  The solicitude of Abe’s mother (Wendy Crewson) is infantilising; his father (Jonathan Whittaker) wants to know when Abe will grow up and get himself a proper, paying job.  (No time soon:  Abe takes on the murder investigation free of charge.)  The romantic isolation of a good-looking man in his early thirties, although Abe’s predicament might seem to mean this doesn’t need explaining, is striking nonetheless – and The Kid Detective‘s ending is powerful.  Abe solves not only the murder of Caroline’s boyfriend but also the disappearance of Gracie Gulliver yet his dual success leaves him feeling desolated rather than vindicated.  In the film’s closing scene, sitting with his parents, Abe cries like a child.

    If the truculent secretary stands out as an obvious, cartoonish character, it’s because The Kid Detective, for the most part, does such a good job of avoiding the obvious.  The opening titles are accompanied by Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Sugar Town’.  That song’s pretty simplicity could be used with blunt satirical intent – as a means of depicting Willowbrook as nowheresville or as a seething cauldron of vice – but Morgan takes care to ensure the place isn’t any one thing.  By the end of the film, ‘Sugar Town’ seems to refer, touchingly, to Abe’s arrested development – perhaps, too, to the reward for one of his childhood sleuthing successes:  free ice cream for life from a grateful local store owner (Alan Catlin).  The linked explanation for the vanishing of yesteryear and the recent murder is a bit melodramatic; the gruesomeness of the suicide of the person behind both crimes is jarring; but neither of those things is a serious flaw.  The film is good enough to set up a fresh mystery:  how come the writer-director isn’t better known and seems not to have done anything since The Kid Detective?  It’s to be hoped the mystery is solved soon by way of Evan Morgan’s sophomore feature.

    7 June 2024

Posts navigation