![]() ![]() By “middle-class jeopardy”, I mean movies in which the trappings (pun intended) of the middle-class American dream become instruments of torture that threaten to dissolve its inhabitants. This truth is most strongly illustrated in her loose trilogy of “middle-class jeopardy” thrillers, of which Midnight Lace is the last. In film after film, it’s really the men who are insecure, and their insecurities aret projected or transferred onto Day’s character. In other words, Day was the star persona used by postwar Hollywood most consistently to negotiate growing female power with male unease and confusion. It’s the kind of movie that knows it’s being written in a time of evolving moral standards it must acknowledge this while still affirming the primacy of the traditional. The script never condemns either of them for their willingness to have sex outside marriage, but it manipulates social (or cinema) acceptability in such a way that marital values triumph. By that point, he’s developed deeper feelings for Day’s character, Cathy Timberlake, and he becomes the refuser because he wants her to be more than a notch on his bedpost. We tend to forget that once she develops personal feelings for Cary Grant’s character, Philip Shayne, in That Touch of Mink, she decides to accept his sexual advances. From this point of view, it’s clear that in sex comedies like Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk (1959) or Delbert Mann’s That Touch of Mink (1961), her response to the wealthy, entitled men who make passes at her isn’t that of a frightened or frigid virgin but of a woman who’s been burned, someone with enough experience not to be impressed by the flash of the first guy who comes along and snaps his fingers. Sometimes she played married women without children, and sometimes she played successful unmarried businesswomen.īecause she was always self-supporting and self-possessed, her characters surveyed the suitors around her with bemusement, from a position of security. Sometimes she played married mothers, who usually also worked outside the home. She was the only actress of her era and stature who consistently played working single mothers, starting with her second film. Day almost never played a virgin, except for her teen roles like Roy Del Ruth’s wonderful On Moonlight Bay (1951). This impression falls apart as soon one commences a marathon of her films. In a sexist society, such behavior is often judged from a male point of view as being cold or frigid or man-hating (many of her roles are tomboyish), or of being a bashful virgin afraid of sex. That sort of witticism stuck because Day’s onscreen persona was always negotiating society’s sexual standards from the standpoint of a strong, independent woman who was prepared to fall in love but wasn’t desperate for it, and who was critical and circumspect of the supposed charms of the men who tried to woo her. The famed wit Oscar Levant, who appeared in her first movie, Romance on the High Seas (Michael Curtiz, 1948), once quipped that he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin. Before discussing the movie, it’s appropriate to rescue Day from a longtime canard that surfaced in some of her obituaries. This fact makes Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray of her 1960 thriller, Midnight Lace, in which her character is constantly threatened with an untimely end, an occasion for reflection. Doris Day died in May of this year at age 97. ![]()
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