A tribute to a golden age of romantic comedy

Rock Hudson and Doris Day starred in only three movies together, but their names are forever conjoined in the cultural memory, signifying the guilty pleasures of a supposedly more innocent era. The comedies they made for Universal from the late 1950's to the mid-60's -- with each other and with surrogates ranging from Cary Grant to Gina Lollobrigida were the product of a moment when the incipient sexual revolution collided with the moribund Hollywood Production Code in an explosion of bright color, lush music and naughty innuendo.

These entertainments (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers) were at once dopey and ingenious, wholesome and sophisticated, teasing their audiences, as the romantic principals teased each other, by pretending to be what they were not: subversive when they were in fact conventional, and vice versa.

Down With Love, Peyton Reed's buoyant homage to the Hudson-Day pictures, wears its affection for that bygone era on its sleeve. And also on its collars, ties, hats, cuff links, dressing gowns, slim tuxedos and curvy sheaths. Every inch of every Cinemascope frame -- from the zippy title credits to the geographically absurd Manhattan sets to the modular furniture to the glass martini pitchers -- is designed to plunge you into a fairy-tale 1962. Marc Shaiman's score deftly blends finger-popping lounge jazz with velvety orchestral swoons, while Jeff Cronenweth's cinematography approximates the bold, viscous tones of old-fashioned Technicolor.

The Hudson-Day roles are taken up by Ewan McGregor and Rene Zellweger, unflappable veterans of the recent campaign to revive the movie musical. They demonstrate together, as they did (separately) in Moulin Rouge and Chicago, a thoroughly charming immunity to embarrassment. They also remind you that the real Rock Hudson and Doris Day flourished in the days before personal trainers, Diet Coke and the Atkins Diet turned Hollywood into the land of ropy biceps and flat tummies. McGregor's wiry, wolfish energy is more like the young Sinatra than the bulky, slow-moving Hudson, but never mind. His high-flying playboy, a magazine writer named Catcher Block, is a lithe Lothario, a woman's man, a man's man, a man about town.

And if Zellweger puckers where Day might have grimaced, she manages, as Day did, to swivel engagingly between goofiness and sex appeal, and to look her grown-up age even when she is called upon to be utterly childish.

Like Civil War enthusiasts in a Virginia cow pasture, Zellweger and McGregor don period costumes to re-enact a legendary skirmish in the battle of the sexes. Their fidelity to the past is impressive, but it is hard to see the point of the exercise, or to feel that much is at stake.

Zellweger is Barbara Novak, who arrives in Manhattan from Maine to oversee the publication of her book, Down With Love, an antiromantic manifesto that argues for the equality of the sexes in matters sexual and professional. Her smart, neurotic, chain-smoking editor, Vicki Hiller (Sarah Paulson), wants Barbara to be profiled by Catcher, a prize-winning gadabout journalist for a men's magazine called Know.

After a deliciously contrived setup, Catcher decides to write an expose, which he will clinch by making Barbara, who is dogmatically committed to casual sex, fall in love with him. This he does through the elaborately offhand ruse of pretending to be an astronaut, which involves putting on glasses, covering his Scot's burr in a mock-Texas twang and swapping his gadget-filled bachelor pad for the fussy digs of Peter McMannus (David Hyde Pierce), his editor and foil.