Pillow Talk

Demand credit for a misdial if you've tried renting this phone-tag sex farce on videocassette. That's because on tape, the movie's sexy, central visual gag — a split-screen, wide-frame format that shows Doris Day and Rock Hudson's bickering over a party line — was cropped to fit square TV screens. As a result, shots of the stars side-by-side become choppy flurries of solo speeches. (The worst conversus interruptus comes when the leads, lounging toe-to-toe in seemingly adjoined bathtubs, are instead shown one at a time.)

This letterboxed disc edition patches things back together, so you get to see Day simmer while Hudson purrs coy come-ons into his receiver, not afterwards. Tony Randall, as a whiny friend, and Thelma Ritter, as Day's sloshed housekeeper, never get edged out of the picture either, at last making Pillow Talk on video the group affair it's meant to be. A-