Send Me No Flowers (1964)

Toronto Film Society presented Send Me No Flowers (1964) on Monday, August 26, 1985 in a double bill with Who Was That Lady? as part of the Season 38 Summer Series, Programme 7.

Production Company: Universal.  A Martin Melcher Production.  Producer: Harry Keller.  Director: Norman Jewison.  Executive Producer: Martin Melcher.  Screenplay: Julius Epstein, based on a play by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore.  Photography (Technicolor): Daniel Fapp.  Art Direction: Alexander Golitzen and Robert Clatworthy.  Set Deoration: John McCarthy, Oliver Emert and John Austin.  Costumes: Jean Louis.  Make-up: Bud Westmore.  Hair Styles: Larry Germain.  Music: DeVol.  Choreography: David Winters.  Sound Recording: Waldon Watson.  Ediotr: J. Terry Williams.

Cast:  Rock Hudson (George), Doris Day (Judy), Tony Randall (Arnold), Clint Walker (Bert), Paul Lynde (Mr. Akins), Hal March (Winston Burr), Edward Andrews (Dr. Morrissey), Patricia Barry (Linda), Clive Clerk (Vito), Dave Willock (Milkman), Aline Towne (Cora), Helene Winston (Commuter), Christine Nelson (Nurse).

Although Doris Day and Rock Hudson were only to co-star in three movies, they are as much thought of as a team as Loy and Powell, Astaire and Rogers, or MacDonald and Eddy.  With their clean, healthy, and rather perfectly plastic good looks, Rock and Doris were made for each other.  And, for a change, Doris Day had a co-star who carried as much box-office clout as she did.

The first Day/Hudson comedy had been the enormously popular Pillow Talk (1959).  Besides garnering many superlative reviews and five Oscar nominations–Doris Day for Best Actress; Thelma Ritter for Supporting Actress; photography and musical score; and winning for Best Screenplay–the film was one of 1959’s most commercially successful and pushed Day into number one at the boxoffice polls, with Rock Hudson as number two.  Two years later came Lover Come Back, which equaled Pillow Talk in critical approval and even surpassed it at the boxoffice.  Both of these films featured Tony Randall, as a sort of unofficial member of the Day/Hudson love team, and he continued in this complex relationship in the third and final Day/Hudson vehicle, tonight’s Send Me No Flowers.  This film followed the same winning formula that made the first two Day/Hudson farces exceptionally popular, except that here the two stars begin the film being married to each other, as opposed to the pursuit and courting involved in the earlier films.

Rock Hudson, trying to analyze what made the magic with Day work:  “I don’t really know what makes a movie team.  Gable and Lombard, Tracy and Hepburn.  I recently saw an old flick starring Joan Crawford and Spencer Tracy in a ‘team’ picture, and that was a glaring example of what didn’t work.  Absolutely no chemistry between them.  But when Tracy teamed with Hepburn, it worked like a charm.  I’d say, first of all, the two people have to truly like each other, as Doris and I did, for that shines through, the sparkle, the twinkle in the eye as the two people look at each other.  Then, too, both parties have to be strong personalities–very important to comedy so that there’s a tug-of-war over who’s going to put it over on the other, who’s going to get the last word, a fencing match between two adroit opponents of the opposite sex who in the end are going to fall in bed together.  God knows Doris is a strong personality–I used to call her Miss Adamant of 1959.  But the great thing that Doris does in a film is the way she plays hurt when she realizes that she’s been had–she is genuinely hurt and the audience’s heart goes out to her.  She’s not a revengeful woman, and when she plays hurt over what the man has done to her, she wins hands down.”

Notes by Jaan Salk