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Doris finally got out of Manhattan in Move Over Darling, set in LaLa Land, a remake of the thirties screwball classic My Favorite Wife, which starred Cary Grant and Irene Dunne (and which was set in Manhattan). Jim Garner is the leading man once more, in court to have Doris declared legally dead, since she’s been missing at sea for seven years. Jim goes through a carwash in a Lincoln Continental convertible in this one.
In Man’s Favorite Sport? with Paula Prentiss,1 Rock took a break from both Gina and Doris. Directed by Howard Hawks, though you’d never know it, Man’s Favorite Sport? is a straightforward, not very interesting, early sixties sex comedy. Rock is a top-flight salesman of outdoors sporting goods, but actually knows nothing about fishing, boating, etc. His boss enters him in a fishing contest, which naturally puts him on the spot. Paula, in the meantime, has fallen in love with him, and tags along to make his life miserable.
Since Paula and babe girlfriend Maria Perschy2 (as Isolde "Easy" Mueller) are both pretty damn gorgeous, the film can rely on good old-fashioned skin instead of innuendo to heat things up. The pair have an affinity for thin dresses that keep getting wet, much to their discomfort. When Rock’s fiancée3 shows up, they contrive a variety of embarrassing coincidences that eventually shatter Rock’s engagement, causing him (of course) to fall in love with Paula.
In 1964, Doris and Rock got together for the third and last time, in Send Me No Flowers, a film that is half California and half New York. Doris and Rock are married, living in the burbs with neighbor Tony. Tony and Rock work in LA but ride to work on what must have been the last commuter train on the West Coast.4 In contrast to the earlier films, Doris has pretty much given up on the glamour thing. When we first see her, she’s wearing a housecoat and furry slippers. Then she further degrades herself by wiggling her butt and stepping in eggs.
Once we get past that, the film improves, for awhile. Rock, an incurable hypochondriac, pays another of his innumerable visits to his doctor, who rambles on about what a fool he was to become a GP. All his med school classmates are specialists who "work banker’s hours and get banker’s pay." Naturally, Rock misinterprets an overheard conversation and thinks he has only six months to live. "I’ve got something to tell you, and I don’t want you to breathe a word of it to anyone," he tells Tony on the ride home. "This won’t affect property values, will it?" says Tony, instantly on the alert.
There’s more fun as Doris amusedly rejects Rock’s indirect suggestions that she might want to learn a useful skill like accounting, so that she could support herself. "Why should I want to do that, darling?" she says, as if trying to reason with a child. Later, Rock buys a cemetery plot from Paul Lynde5, located in a massive necropolis that Rock describes as "a sort of Levittown for the Hereafter."
The film falls apart when Clint Walker6, Doris’s college sweetheart turned millionaire oilman, shows up. Naturally, it makes sense for Rock to pair the two off, and naturally he gets jealous, but one has the feeling that Clint just didn’t mesh with Rock and Doris. There’s a strong smell of rewrite in the air. Clint appears and disappears abruptly in the picture and there’s no real payoff for his role. Instead, we get lots of Tony acting wacky, apparently tuning up for his role in The Odd Couple.
Strange Bedfellows was the last gasp of the Rock/Doris saga. Doris, of course, is long gone, but Gina is back. The seismic sixties event, the assassination of JFK, had occurred, and the times they were a-changing. Most of the cliches are still in place: once more Rock is a successful businessman; once more he has an adorable weakling sidekick (Gig Young, again filling in for Tony); once more there is a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Gina is a tempestuous artist, living in London, who loves to demonstrate against the established order.7 She and Rock were briefly married in their student days, and now, five years later, it turns out they’re still married! Rock goes back to London to get a divorce but naturally gets involved in a demonstration against the U.S. Embassy. His company insists that he denounce Gina and all her works. In a surprising twist, he defends "my wife’s right to say whatever she pleases, on whatever subject."8 Not exactly, "we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it," but a start.9
Pillow Talk and its successors will soon be 40 years old. These films, so glossy, so expensive, and so successful, are almost forgotten. The age that produced them can scarcely even be imagined, let alone understood. But looking at them now, one tantalizing question still lingers, a question that, since Rock Hudson is dead, can never be answered: Who was the bigger lady, Doris or Tony?
AFTERWORDS
Doris Day was a well-established big band singer long before she broke into pictures. Her first, Romance on the High Seas (1948), is in many ways her best, a real blast from the past with Doris as a good-natured gal who likes to have fun. (She even admits to being a bottle blonde!) Unfortunately, Doris quickly reformulated her on-screen personality, using the all-sugar, no-spice recipe that so irritated her critics. She is, of course, still alive and well, running the Doris Day Animal League, which sponsors "Spay Day." (February 23, in case you missed it. "No Nuts Week" is coming up, so be sure to wear a cup.) To learn more, and to get a Doris Day Animal League Visa Card, among other things, check out http://www.ddal.org/ on the web.
For more about Doris the person and star, try The Doris Day Page. If you really, really like the way Doris sings, visit Bear Family Records, a German outfit that offers three boxed sets of her work, totaling 16 CDs. You also get a hardbound book (or Buch, as they say in German) with each set. If you’re really, really weird, you can also get a two-CD set featuring the soundtrack of Pillow Talk, along with another hardbound Buch. If you’d like to visit a website that puts the final nail in the vicious rumor that Doris once got it on with Sly Stone, check out http://www.slyfamstone.com/dorisday.html. And if you are absolutely, absolutely, absolutely nuts about Doris, check out the Australian Doris Day Society, where, among other things, you’ll be able to obtain videos of all 39 of her films, plus videos of all 128 episodes of her TV show, which ran from 1968 to 1974.
Rock Hudson’s death from AIDS in 1985 helped shape modern attitudes toward homosexuality in the U.S. "Remembering Rock Hudson" pays homage to his memory. "The Rock Hudson Joke Page" does not.
NOTES
1. Paula moved up fast in Hollywood. Man’s Favorite Sport? was only her second film. Her first was the kitsch classic Where the Boys Are. Sadly, she married Richard Benjamin and spent most of the rest of her career appearing in films with him, which was almost certainly more than he deserved.
2. Maria Perschy may be a stranger to most Americans, but she’s been in German film and television for 40 years, starting in 1958. She followed Man’s Favorite Sport? with Die Banditen vom Rio Grande (1965). You may remember her from Witch Without a Broom (1967) or Torture Chamber of Fu Manchu (1969).
3. The film is so loosely plotted that we don’t even learn that Rock is engaged until about the fourth reel.
4. Rail fans will enjoy a few brief exterior shots of a Santa Fe streamliner in full "warbonnet" regalia.
5. The presence of swishmeister Lynde on the same set with Rock and Tony must have made things lively.
6. Walker was the star of another early Warner Bros. TV western, Cheyenne. Walker’s role emphasized beefcake to the extent that his contract required him to take off his shirt at least once in every episode. He’s best remembered for his role as the country-boy killer in The Dirty Dozen.
7. Gina’s advocacy was probably inspired by the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in the early sixties, the first national manifestation of that era's campus militancy. Gina demonstrates on behalf of such noncontroversial causes as unwed mothers, who were considered hysterically funny back in the days when there weren’t so many of them. In That Touch of Mink, Doris is mistaken for an unwed mother.
8. In another surprising twist, both he and Gig lose their jobs as a result. In an unsurprising twist, they both get them back. In Hollywood, you can only afford your ideals if you don’t have to pay for them.
9. After Strange Bedfellows, Rock was clearly tired of the chick thing and switched to guy pictures, where a man could be a man and you didn’t have to worry about your costar stealing your eyeliner. He appeared in The Undefeated with John Wayne and starred in Ice Station Zebra as a submarine commander whose boat is almost sunk by Ernie Borgnine’s Russian accent.
April 1999 | Issue 24
Copyright © 1999 by Alan Vanneman
ALSO: Alan Vanneman on Whoopee (1930) and Words and Music (1948)
