New DVDs - "Pillow Talk," "Girl on a Motorcycle" - NYTimes.com In the 1959 movie "Pillow Talk," which Universal has just reissued as a digitally enhanced Blu-ray as part of its studio's 100th anniversary home video promotion, Doris Day and Rock Hudson play prosperous Manhattanites - she's an interior decorator, he's a Broadway songwriter - who meet cute by means of a shared telephone line. As a plot device party lines were pretty hoary even then (reviewing the film for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called the notion "a quaint convenience"), but "Pillow Talk" remains a richly suggestive combination of old and new: one of those films that seems to move the conversation forward while clinging in many ways to the past. That combination is often a recipe for success, and it certainly was in this case. "Pillow Talk" was a hit that redefined Ms. Day - a musical star whose genre was dying out from under her - as the proto-feminist heroine of a series of romantic comedies, including two more (the 1961 "Lover Come Back" and the 1964 "Send Me No Flowers") with Hudson. By the standards of 1959, the year in which Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" included a frank discussion of rape, and Jack Lemmon was discovering the joys of cross-dressing in Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot," there is nothing particularly audacious about "Pillow Talk" apart from its tacit acknowledgment that sometimes people have sex for reasons other than romantic love, a notion that mainstream Hollywood movies had been obliged to suppress since the Production Code began being enforced in earnest in 1934. But maybe that was enough. As a screenplay "Pillow Talk" had been around since 1942, when the screenwriters Russell Rouse and Clarence Green first sold it to RKO. The party line premise most likely dates from then. A rewrite by Stanley Shapiro and Maurice Richlin brought the project into the Playboy era, with Hudson's character, the generically named Brad Allen, conceived as a highly Hefneresque swinging bachelor. His pad, lined with shelves of unread books and vaguely modern paintings, is a virtual theater of seduction, complete with a remote-control device that switches on the stereo, locks the front door and causes a double bed to unfurl from the living room couch. Brad has women hanging all over him, whom he serenades on the party line, much to the disgust of Ms. Day's Jan Morrow, with slightly personalized versions of a romantic ballad of his own composition. Jan complains to the phone company, convincing Brad that she's a sexually frustrated old maid. But when circumstances, in the form of a mutual acquaintance played by Tony Randall, bring them face to face, Brad falls hard for Jan's frosty beauty and sets out to lure her into bed, hiding his real identity behind the hastily contrived persona of a shy Texan. Jan - a self-reliant professional, with a strong identity of her own - is a sterling example of the postwar career woman, and with only slight alterations the character has endured as the chick-flick staple we know today (though now she's more likely to be a magazine editor or a television reporter). For all the evident satisfaction her work gives her, a not-so-indefinable something is missing in her life, as her salty housekeeper (Thelma Ritter) is quick to point out. As the aw-shucks "Rex Stetson," Brad seems to be the answer to her dreams: a man who isn't only interested in getting her into bed but also respects her for herself. It's this role-playing aspect that has made "Pillow Talk," directed with no distinguishing marks by Michael Gordon, a staple of gender studies programs. Here's a vivid illustration of sexuality as performance, given an extra dimension today by Hudson's AIDS-related death in 1985. In a brief but much-discussed sequence, Hudson, as Brad, suggests to Jan that Rex might be gay, or at least the kind of man who "collects recipes and little bits of gossip." This information prompts Jan to go on the offensive. Rex hasn't made any moves on her, so she'll make one on him. By such convoluted routes do we arrive at Hollywood's long-delayed rediscovery of female sexuality, and when Jan offers to accompany Rex for an unchaperoned weekend in the Connecticut countryside, a distant sound of breaking barriers can be heard. Universal has given "Pillow Talk" a thorough going-over for this new release, using digital techniques to intensify the hues in what had become a badly faded Eastman Color negative. Purists may find the approach too aggressive. The colors, the reds in particular, now have a lacquered hardness that gives the film a cartoonish feel, closer to a Frank Tashlin farce like "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1957) than the soft-focus requirements of a romantic comedy. Universal, Blu-ray/DVD combo $39.98, not rated Girl on a Motorcycle It didn't take long for forces of female desire unleashed (or at least, slightly loosened) in "Pillow Talk" to reach the high-camp dimensions of Jack Cardiff's "Girl on a Motorcycle" (1968), a Eurotrash oddity that has now appeared on Kino Lorber's Jezebel label. The singer Marianne Faithfull, still riding the success of her hit single "As Tears Go By," stars as the terminally bored wife of an Alsatian grade-school teacher (played by the aptly named Roger Mutton) who finds release in donning a black leather jumpsuit and mounting the great throbbing motorcycle given her as a wedding present by her lover, a pipe-smoking professor of philosophy (Alain Delon). Released in the United States under the more drive-in-friendly title "Naked Under Leather," the film was directed with no more polish than necessary by Cardiff, who, as a cinematographer, had been responsible for the Technicolor glories of the Powell-Pressburger "Red Shoes," among many other major films. The one trace of Cardiff's other career in "Girl on a Motorcycle" is the presence, as Ms. Faithfull's father, of Marius Goring, who had played the Roger Mutton role in "The Red Shoes." Here he turns his talents (he helped write the film and supervised its cinematography as well) to gauzy erotic reveries and pulsating psychedelia, realized the old-fashioned way with solarization effects rather than digital intervention. It's all good fun right up to the punitive ending, which suggests that whatever it is women have, they're better off keeping it zipped. Kino Lorber, Blu-ray $24.95, DVD $19.95, not rated CHRONICLE Three high school students find themselves blessed - and cursed - with telekinetic powers. Josh Trank directed from a screenplay by Max Landis, based on a story by Mr. Trank and Mr. Landis; with Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell and Michael B. Jordan. "It's a classic pop creation in that its hook - three teenage boys mysteriously acquire fantastic powers - seems fresh even if the whole thing feels inspired by someone's Netflix queue," Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times in February. Fox, Blu-ray/DVD combo $39.99, DVD $29.98, PG-13 THE GREY A plane crash leaves a group of oil-rig workers stranded in the Alaskan wilderness, where a wolf pack picks up their scent. Liam Neeson, Dermot Mulroney and James Badge Dale star; Joe Carnahan directed. Mr. Neeson "conveys a ferocious and absolute seriousness even when the going gets silly, and he finds the soul in each new angry-everyman cipher he is asked to play," A. O. Scott wrote in The Times in January. Universal, Blu-ray/DVD combo $34.98, DVD $29.98, R ALBERT NOBBS Glenn Close plays the title character, a woman who passed as a man to live on her own in 19th-century Ireland. Rodrigo García directed; with Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson and Janet McTeer. Ms. Close is "dazzling and infinitely resourceful," Mr. Scott wrote in The Times in December. Roadside Attraction, Blu-ray $39.99, DVD $27.98, R ONE FOR THE MONEY Working as a skip tracer for her uncle, a New Jersey bail bondsman, Stephanie Plum (Katherine Heigl), decides to go after the most wanted fugitive in his portfolio: a policeman wanted for murder who happens to be the guy who broke her heart in high school. Julie Anne Robinson directed; with John Leguizamo and Debbie Reynolds. The movie "is so weary and uninspired that it feels more like an exhausted end than an energetic beginning," Mr. Scott wrote in The Times in January. Lionsgate, Blu-ray $39.99, DVD $29.95, PG-13 RAMPART When he's caught on tape beating a suspect, a Los Angeles patrolman (Woody Harrelson) is forced to reconsider his complicated, compromised life. With Ned Beatty, Ben Foster, Anne Heche, Ice Cube, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Robin Wright and Steve Buscemi; Oren Moverman ("The Messenger") directed. "A sun-scorched noir, "Rampart" tells a familiar story with such visual punch and hustling energy that it comes close to feeling like a new kind of movie," Ms. Dargis wrote in The Times in November. Millennium Films, Blu-ray/DVD combo $34.99, Blu-ray $29.99, DVD $28.99, R