1. Art Carney played Ed Norton on The Honeymooners TV show (he later won an Oscar for Best Actor, though his movie career was limited). Tony Randall played the part of Peter Ramsey in Lover Come Back (and also, Jonathan in Pillow Talk). Randall also played in other Rock Hudson and/or Doris Day comedies, but he was mainly a supporting actor. His character in Lover Come Back was basically a reprise of his character in Pillow Talk (millionaires who feel like failures and mainly support the main star).
2. Any student can see Pillow Talk in the library; there's no need for us to see it as a class. (Click on image, right, to hear the title song and see some clever split-screen cinematography.) Contrary to what one student said in a previous week's commentary, I try for as wide a vareity of film experiences as possible, the only exception being "genre," which of course can only be studied with at least two films. That explains why we have two gangster films scheduled in the next two weeks.
3. "Sex comedy" does not mean the viewer has to see the sex. The chief difference between a sex comedy and a romantic comedy is that in a romantic comedy the main goal is marriage (or romance in between); in a sex comedy, the main goal is sex. That's the point of a comedy like Pillow Talk or Love Come Back! Otherwise there would be no laughs! Jerry wants to bed as many women as possible. There's no need to show this, since it's assumed; and at the time censorship (or studio self-censorship) would have prevented such sex scenes, or included them at great cost at the box office (it would no longer have been considered a "decent" picture and suffered losses at the box office). And in Hollywood, the Box Office is always King.
4. As for the fish scene, that was a process shot. In other words, the fish were projected on a screen behind the couple, then timed for the exact moment to match the dialogue.
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