Best of all is what the movie does with the split-screen scenes in Pillow Talk, in which Day listens in irritation on the party-line while Hudson sweet-talks his harem, or else coos directly to the soft-mannered cowboy he pretends to be. Here the split-screen phone conversation between Zellweger and Ewan McGregor turns into an extended series of visual double entendres, as if Penthouse magazine had a fold-over back page like Mad's. Good, open raunch works miracles for suggestive material like this, rooting it recognizably in our bodily experience on this planet. I laughed without embarrassment. (Pillow Talk does strike some burlesque notes with Ritter's commentary, but she's kept on the side, pickled.) And I prefer this "blue" sequence to the tart-romantic one in which the stars dress for their date to Astrud Gilberto and Frank Sinatra's contrasting versions of "Fly Me to the Moon," which is a little too elaborate for the notion the moviemakers are playing out. (It was done with more effective simplicity in the Margaret Sullavan-Henry Fonda picture The Moon's Our Home (1936).)

The handling of homosexuality is the clumsiest aspect. In Pillow Talk Hudson "pretends" to be homosexual to lull Day into a sense of security, a sick in-joke for the moviemakers. In Down with Love, David Hyde-Pierce in the Randall role is accused by the girl he wants to marry of being gay, but the director hasn't shown us her suspicions mounting so the scene doesn't have much impact. (Plus, Hyde-Pierce seems even gayer than Hudson did, so we still feel as if we're being treated like hicks who can't be told everything that big city folks know.) The moviemakers signal to the hip crowd with an openly gay art director, but his material is considerably less than hip. Altogether the normally terrific Hyde-Pierce is too on top of the material. He makes the script look very TV indeed and it returns the favor.

The script is clever enough, both parody of and homage to the older movies. And when Zellweger explains in a long monologue to McGregor what she's been up to, it turns into an even sillier kind of meta-self-parody. The script relies on a character's being able to guess how the other characters will react--the plot turns out to be an entire chess game conceived in advance--which makes it similar to Doug Jung's script for James Foley's Confidence except that it acknowledges the artifice. If only Zellweger's monologue were a little more entertainingly manic. She needs some of Carole Lombard's breathlessness when she explains to William Powell what a scavenger hunt is in My Man Godfrey (1936), one of the comedies from the 1930s that make Pillow Talk look so bloated, like a dead purple cow in the middle of the road.