Cinema: Pillow Replumped

Lover Come Back (Universal-International). Rock Hudson is a low-principled adman who has “sown so many wild oats he can qualify for a farm loan.” Doris Day is a high-powered adwoman who never gets behind in her work. They both go after the same account. Doris concentrates on the client’s business; Rock pays attention to his pleasure, and he gets the account. Furious, Doris vows to steal an account from Rock—the Vip account. What she doesn’t know: there is no such product as Vip. Rock made it up to please a chorus girl (Edie Adams), who swore she’d make a scandal if she couldn’t make TV commercials. Released by accident, the commercials create a tremendous demand for a product that does not exist.

To invent a product to satisfy the demand, Rock hires a brilliant, wacky chemist (Jack Kruschen). Doris sneaks in to see the chemist, finds Rock instead, thinks he’s the chemist, starts to play up to him. Rock plays along, pretends to be a shy, high-minded scientist who knows plenty about chemistry but has never managed to learn anything about biology. Doris, taken in, offers to teach him. “I’m going to give you confidence,” she declares. “Be gentle,” Rock says in a small, scared voice.

And so on. Lover is just a stock-situation comedy, but the situation has been worked out as elegantly as a chess problem: opening gam bit, queen’s sacrifice, knight rooked, mate. The same game, more or less, was played in Pillow Talk, an amusing and lucrative farce turned out in 1959 by the same scriptwriter, Stanley Shapiro, a onetime gag writer for Fred Allen who is now one of the sharpest word boys in the movie business. But this time the interiors are even more giltily decorative, the fashions more spectacularly inconsequintial, the colors more hormone-creamy, the lines more jerky-smirky (“A kiss is like lighting a stove. It doesn’t prove that you can cook”). Edie Adams and Jack Oakie provide bright bits. But Doris Day, 37, is filmed in soft focus to conceal her wrinkles, and sometimes unfortunately her features disappear too. Furthermore, Rock Hudson, the oversized, undertalented ex-postman from Winnetka, Ill., still has not learned to deliver the male. Best line is punched out by Tony Randall, playing as usual the sort of neurotic who, when hurt, hollers “Couch!” When the chemist cooks up a batch of intoxicating mints, Tony gobbles a fistful, gets drunk and belligerent. “Drunk!” he bellows. “Whaddya mean, drunk? I can (hic) hold my candy!”