SEMINAR PROFILE

A07 -
Good Girls at the Movies, 1959: Pillow Talk and Some Like It Hot

At the height of the Cold War, one year before stolid Eisenhower made way for gallant JFK, Billy Wilder's farcical cross-dressing comedy Some Like It Hot and Michael Gordon's dapper comedy of sexual mores Pillow Talk set conventional American attitudes about gender roles and courtship on a very sharp and thrilling edge. Both movies get much of their comic force from reversing stereotypical gender roles in the mating game. How scheming, masquerading, fabrication, and various species of indirect action get traded back and forth between men and women in both films not only makes for great fun, but also casts ironic light on what being a good girl or a good boy meant, what it still may mean, in America's popular morality.

Scholar:

Theo Theoharis

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

12/3/2009, 12/10/2009

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A07 -	Good Girls at the Movies, 1959: Pillow Talk and Some Like It Hot

	At the height of the Cold War, one year before stolid Eisenhower made way for gallant JFK, Billy Wilder's farcical cross-dressing comedy Some Like It Hot and Michael Gordon's dapper comedy of sexual mores Pillow Talk set conventional American attitudes about gender roles and courtship on a very sharp and thrilling edge. Both movies get much of their comic force from reversing stereotypical gender roles in the mating game. How scheming, masquerading, fabrication, and various species of indirect action get traded back and forth between men and women in both films not only makes for great fun, but also casts ironic light on what being a good girl or a good boy meant, what it still may mean, in America's popular morality.

		Scholar:	Theo Theoharis
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	12/3/2009, 12/10/2009