TCM Film Fest: Romantic Couples - The Shop Around the Corner, Send Me No Flowers & Lady Sings the Blues

by Christopher James

Billy Dee Williams was present at a screening of Lady Sings the Blues for a Q&A as part of a tribute to him at the TCM Film Festival.It wouldn’t be a trip to the TCM Film Festival if I didn’t catch some of the great romances of yesteryear.

In particular, the enemies to lovers romantic comedy troupe was alive and well. Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner provides the foundation for this trope. Decades later, Doris Day and Rock Hudson would use this dynamic to great success in many collaborations, including the bonkers comedy Send Me No Flowers. Romance isn’t all fun and games though. The Billie Holliday biopic Lady Sings the Blues borrows less from the biopic genre and focuses more on the troubled relationship between Holliday (Diana Ross) and Louis McKay (Billy Dee Williams, an honoree at this year’s festival).

Did all these pairs sell us on their celluloid love? Find out after the jump...

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Doc Corner: 'Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed' and 'Wham!'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Rock Hudson’s story has been told many times either through his films, or more broadly, alongside Old Hollywood tales. Other times, it’s been shared through the stories of his collaborators and closefriends such as Doris Day or Elizabeth Taylor. Most prominently to modern audiences, the story of Rock Hudson has been told through the larger stories of AIDS and the inadvertent role that Hudson would play there as the first famous person to openly reveal they had acquired it in the mid 1980s. It is nice then to see him get the story all to himself, this time, in a film that celebrates rather than mourns...

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Counter-Point: The 50 “Best” Rom-Coms (Pre-’90s)

by Mark Brinkerhoff

That sound you heard this week? It likely was #FilmTwitter collectively reeling from reading The Ringer staff’s list of the 50 “best” romantic comedies of all time. What prompted such a breathless response, however, was that only one of the films on the instantly infamous list pre-dated the 1980s, and it *wasn’t* Annie Hall. No, that Best Picture-winning, genre-redefining classic didn’t make the top *50*, Harold and Maude did. 

Now far be it for me to quibble about anything the late, great Hal Ashby made (namely Harold and Maude) but the otherwise ignorance of literally more than half a century of not only the very best rom-coms, but some of the finest films of all time—period—can’t go unnoticed. So with that, here’s a non-exhaustive, chronological list of the “best” rom-coms from the genre’s Golden Age in the ’30s through its modernization in the ’70s/’80s with links to where you can watch them...

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Doris Day @ 100: "Pillow Talk"

By Christopher James

Doris Day had the biggest hit of career with "Pillow Talk," which was her first movie with Rock Hudson

Doris Day’s sole Oscar nomination came for Pillow Talk. If this isn’t the best performance of her career, it’s at least the most iconic version of her persona. For those looking to get a sense of her star character, this is the best place to start. Pillow Talk was the highest grossing movie of Day’s career, and the start of her most bankable period. According to the Numbers, Pillow Talk was the fifth highest grossing film of 1959 with $18 million box office (roughly $182 million adjusted for inflation). In addition to acting, Day also sings three songs in the film, most notably the titular song that plays over the delightful opening credits.

It’s impossible to resist the pairing of Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk. While Down with Love most infamously used this film for reference, so many modern romantic comedies and sitcoms mine from Pillow Talk, which effectively wrings laughs from miscommunications, mistaken identities and odd couple dynamics...

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Doc Corner: A comeback for 1992's 'Rock Hudson's Home Movies'

By Glenn Dunks

Subtext is a funny thing. The very idea of it revolves around the idea that some people just don’t get what’s being shown on screen. That for some, there’s nothing there at all. For others, there is a whole other world bubbling away told through code, gestures, innuendo, and subtlety. In today’s very connected world, this isn’t a good thing. Where once artists and scholars may have been revered for being the smartest person in the room—when did you last see anybody credited as an “intellectual” on television news anymore? —nobody today likes to be told “you just don’t get it”. How else could we have multiple online discourses at once about the artistic merits of Spider-Man: No Way Home versus (of all things) Drive My Car? Curiosity with art by the masses seems more or less gone completely.

Perhaps that is why Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog has frustrated so many viewers. That film, like many Rock Hudson films, plays with the ideas of masculinity and femininity in ways that don’t immediately leap out. But once they do...

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