Pillow Talk: contexts, genre and narrative — Eduqas GCSE Film Studies C670
Eduqas GCSE Film Studies · C670
Pillow Talk: contexts, genre and narrative
Pillow Talk
What you need to know
Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959): interior decorator Jan Morrow shares a telephone party line with the womanising songwriter Brad Allen, who meets her and pretends to be a polite Texan, Rex Stetson, to win her, while his friend Jonathan, who wants to marry Jan, tries to stop him.
A Universal film of 1959, in colour and CinemaScope, the first of the Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies.
A 'sex comedy' made under the Production Code, so innuendo, split screens and jokes take the place of anything explicit.
The independent working woman in late-1950s New York, and attitudes to marriage at the time.
Romantic comedy conventions: the couple who clash before they fall in love, mistaken identity, comic supporting characters such as Jonathan and the housekeeper Alma, and marriage at the end.
Narrative: Brad's double identity as the engine of the plot, dramatic irony, and themes of deception, identity and gender roles.
A short worked paragraph linking a context to a specific moment in the film, as the comparison question rewards.
Worked answers with their marks, and practice questions to try, each headed 'Practice question' with its marks.
Quote only short lines of dialogue you're sure of, a few words at a time, and base every point on what happens in the finished film.
