Move Over Misconceptions - Doris Day Reappraised

In December 1980 Diana Simmonds and I organised a full retrospective of the films of Doris Day at the National Film Theatre. Derek Malcolm reviewed our season and Day's films and this article is from The Guardian Archive.

“I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin,” a wag once remarked. It was a fair cop. But not all that appropriate. The well-scrubbed star, who made 39 movies in a 20-year career, was not just the prime fifties example of the Girl Next Door. She was also an ace professional who was once offered the part of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate because she could be relied upon to fight hard against her Hollywood image.

No, Doris Day wasn’t just goody two-shoes with a furniture polish voice. But there were tremors of shock all round when the National Film Theatre decided to mount a season of her films under the inspired title of:
Move Over Misconceptions - Doris Day Reappraised. 
Surely the NFT had something better to do with its time?

Jane Clarke and Diana Simmonds are the perpetrators of this alarming deed, and support it with an imposing Dossier which states the case for their favourite. Both would regard themselves as feminists, but don’t press the point too heavily.

What they imply was that Day was very often very sexy, that she was no push-over in the fifties sex war and that her films show quite clearly that she often actually subverted the squashy Hollywood values of the day.

“Mention Doris Day,” they write, “and you’re likely to get one of two responses. She is the subject of amused contempt among what we would describe as the post-68 generation; probably because she is remembered as the Constant Virgin - the sexual tease who hung on to her virginity through thick and thin.

“On the other hand, the post-war generation is more likely to remember Day with nostalgic affection as the Girl Next Door who exemplified a reassuring and uncomplicated sexuality. We would argue that both these memories are partial and symptomatic.”

Doris Day and Howard Keel in Calamity Jane 1953 

And with most of this I agree. To see Day as a girl enmeshed in the bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan in Storm Warning, or as the teacher of journalism in Teacher’s Pet who gives Clark Gable’s cynical city editor more than he chauvinistically bargained for, makes nonsense of her “professional virgin” tag. So does the taut thriller Midnight Lace, or Love Me Or Leave Me, the biography of Ruth Etting, the twenties torch singer who started in a brothel.

But the reputation of Hollywood’s stars isn’t made by their most exceptional films. It is their most characteristic that form their real persona. And Day’s, according to the film books, were all those sex comedies with Rock Hudson. All those comedies? Actually, there were only three - Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers.

Doris Day and Rock Hudson  in Pillow Talk 1959

But were even these as anodyne as popular memory has it? Here’s Ross Hunter, producer of Pillow Talk, quoted in the Dossier:

“For Doris, it was an enormous departure from the kind of films she’d been doing for a dozen years. A sophisticated sex comedy. Doris hadn’t a clue as to her potential as a sex image, and no one realised that under all those dirndls lurked one of the wildest asses in Hollywood.

“I came right out and told her. You are sexy, Doris, and it’s about time you dealt with it. Oh, Ross, cut it out (she said). I’m just the old-fashioned peanut-butter girl next door, and you know it.

“Now listen, if you allow me to get Jean Louis to do your clothes, I mean a really sensational wardrobe that will show off that wild fanny of yours, and get some wonderful make-up on you, and chic you up and get a great hairdo that lifts you, why every secretary and every housewife will say: “Look at that - look what Doris has done to herself. Maybe I can do the same thing.”

The truth is that Day only slowly recognised herself as something more than the sweetie-pie Hollywood would like us to remember, and her agent husband, in his highly effective anxiety to make a big career for her, didn’t help much to bring out the steel in her. But it was there, and only deflected by such titles as “The Girl We Would Like To Take A Slow Boat To The States With” (Korean Serviceman, circa 1950).

Besides, those Servicemen would hardly have wanted to take that slow boat with a professional virgin, or the girl next door. And, as Jane Clarke and Diana Simmonds point out, her rejection of the part of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, was done for what now seem impeccable reasons.

In her view the depiction of sexual relationships in the film was exploitative, as it undoubtedly now appears. She also had the last word about the virgin tag. In an interview she gave 10 years ago, she said: 

“When men call you a professional virgin, it usually means you won’t sleep with them, and I’m happy to be regarded as someone strong enough to resist all that. I’m also rather flattered - it sounds as if they want to. Women shouldn’t mind insults if it means they are respected. It means you’ve won the battle.”