Lover Come Back

In the original ending, Carol and Jerry got drunk at the VIP and checked into a hotel. Doris Day insisted that the ending be rewritten so that Carol and Jerry get married while drunk before sleeping together.

INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

All of Doris Day's close-ups are shot in soft focus.

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About a year and a half after completing this film, its twice-Oscar-nominated costume designer Irene jumped to her death from the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. In her 1975 autobiography, Doris Day suggested that Irene's suicide may have stemmed from the designer's secret, unrequited love for Gary Cooper and Cooper's recent death from cancer.

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Donna Douglas was cast as Tony Randall's secretary and took on the role she is best remembered for: Ellie Mae, Jed Clampett's daughter on the long-running CBS sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies (1962). Because the screenplay was co-written by Paul Henning, the creator of "Hillbillies," casting her was a fairly safe bet.

CHARACTERS & CAST · SOURCED

Hollywood legend claims that during the filming of the swimsuit scene with Rock Hudson and Doris Day (set on the beach of the sound stage), one of Hudson's testicles kept popping out of his swimsuit. At the next afternoon's daily screening, the crew laughed until they cried, especially when the projectionist found a way to run the film back and forth so that Hudson's testicle appeared to "dance."

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The colors of the smoke in the explosions in Dr. Tyler's chemistry laboratory correspond to the final colors of the candy wrappers on the final VIP product.

INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

In a 2001 DGA interview, Delbert Mann discussed his overall experience of making this film, the first of his two with Doris Day: "I never knew how I got Lover Come Back in the first place, because I had never done comedy in films, only on television. But it was a special, sophisticated kind of comedy that looks quite tired today but has really held up incredibly well. Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Tony Randall and a really clever screenplay by Stanley Shapiro. It's the usual follow-up job. Doris and Rock were playing together so often and there was all the innuendo and complexity on screen. Doris was worried about how she looked and fired the cameraman and brought in a new one. But after that things settled down. Rock and I got along very well with them, so it went to Radio City Music Hall and broke records."

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With Donna Douglas's death on January 1, 2015, Doris Day became the longest-living member of the cast, until her own death on May 13, 2019, 58 years later.

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Edie Adams's (Rebel Davis) husband, comedian Ernie Kovacs, would die tragically in a car accident two weeks after this film's premiere. Mrs. Adams did not know how much Mr. Kovacs owed and could not mourn; she had to work nonstop, first to pay her husband's IRS bills, but also to have the money to support herself.

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Like her previous film Pillow Talk (1959), this film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Unlike Pillow Talk (1959), it lost.

EASTER EGGS & REFERENCES · SOURCED

This is Jack Oakie's last feature film appearance.

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Carol speaks of trust and of a woman's instinctive knowledge of when a man can be trusted while she is at Dr. Linus's (actually Jerry Webster's) aquarium; they stand before a tank mock-up that looks like a big fish trying to catch its prey, which looks like a small worm. Just as Carol says, "and doctor, you can be trusted," it is revealed that the "little worm" is actually part of a large anglerfish, whose huge jaws open to draw in its prey.

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The offer two men from the liquor industry make to Jerry, giving him 20% of the 60 million dollars the liquor industry spends on advertising each year (12 million dollars in 1961), is now worth 97,122,494.43 dollars a year.

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Lover Come Back was among the 500 films nominated for the American Film Institute's 2000 list of the 100 Funniest American Films.

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As in Pillow Talk (1959), Rock Hudson's character has a relationship with a Southern woman working in New York. Here she is Asi Davis (Edie Adams); in Pillow Talk (1959) she is Marie (Julia Meade).

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Carol Templeton (Doris Day) drives a powder-blue 1961 Plymouth Fury convertible with a square steering wheel, push-button transmission and side-mounted rocket-shaped taillights. As in most of Day's films, all the cars were supplied under a promotional agreement between Chrysler Motors and Day's Arwin Productions, headed by her husband/manager Martin Melcher.

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Rock Hudson takes his client to the "Bunny Club," a parody of the Playboy Club located on 59th Street, just off Fifth Avenue in NYC. It was a subsidiary of Playboy Magazine, and the waitresses who wore short uniforms with bunny tails were called "bunnies."

INTERESTING FACTS · SOURCED

The story is similar to Pillow Talk (1959) in that it uses mistaken identity as a key plot device. Though less well known than "Pillow Talk," the screenplay by Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

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Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Tony Randall appeared together in three films; the others were Pillow Talk (1959) and Send Me No Flowers (1964).

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The film was co-produced by Rock Hudson (through 7 Pictures Corporation), Doris Day (through Arwin Productions) and Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning (through Nob Hill Productions).

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Lover Come Back (1961) is an American Eastman color romantic comedy released by Universal-International Pictures and directed by Delbert Mann. Starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, it is their second film together. The supporting cast includes Tony Randall, Edie Adams, Ann B. Davis and Donna Douglas.

CHARACTERS & CAST · SOURCED