domino harvey wrote: ↑Thu Jun 23, 2016 11:09 pm
Sunday in New York (Peter Tewksbury 1963) Screwball Comedies didn’t die, they just became Sex Comedies in the late fifties and early sixties. Sex Comedies of course are the last clearly identifiable Hollywood genre to form and play out before the studio system’s demise and the mix of old fashioned morality with newfound sexual liberation (such as it is) rarely disappoints in producing fascinatingly disjointed and contradictory entertainments.
Sunday in New York is on the whole conventionally moralistic, as in Shakespeare’s comedies, everyone ends up married and domestic. Yet, before they get there, the film manages to be legitimately shocking in its candor. Now, it’s pretty clear that most of the source material has been scrubbed down to the bare minimum of what allowable on American screens at this time, but even as a seasoned vet of movies like this I was genuinely impressed with what the filmmakers were allowed to get away with here.
Jane Fonda plays in many ways the flipside of her
Tall Story character, a young woman who flees her relationship because her boyfriend wants to sleep with her without marrying her. Virginal Fonda drops in unannounced on her brother Cliff Robertson in the Big Apple and grills him on whether its normal for guys to always want sex so much. She tells him her boyfriend is, and I quote here, “Tired of going to the gymnasium and playing handball three times a week.” Protective of her virtue, Robertson gives her a lie about his own moral prowess, fidgeting around his apartment all the while as of course his girlfriend was about to drop in for some quick morning sex!
Through a series of absurd screwball plot contrivances, Fonda leaves the apartment and keeps running into Rod Taylor, and the two eventually end up back at her brother’s place. The scene is set for the film's centerpiece sequence in which, clutch the pearls everyone, Fonda decides to throw herself at Taylor, a perfect stranger she'd only just met hours prior, and… the film doesn’t cut away once the lovemaking begins. She even teasingly says in the middle of making out that this is the part where the screen always fades to black in the movies, a knowing wink to the audiences watching as the seduction and sex continues, but also an acknowledgement that Fonda herself doesn’t really know what comes next.
The film does of course have to cut away at some point, as things may be evolving for the era but we’re still at least a couple years away from being able to show Fonda having sex on-screen! Once we’re back, we see the situation has been complicated: Fonda and Taylor are pacing around the room naked (in robes, but still). Turns out Fonda interrupted him before he could consummate their speedy courtship, off screen, and informed him of her virginity, to which he of course cannot impugn with sex! She tries to convince him to take her virginity (biggest leap of faith in history of cinema is required here: Jane Fonda circa-1963 having to broker with any cognizant human being to sleep with her?), arguing against his phony morality (one that mirrors her brother’s), “Who do you think you're talking to, a sixteen year old girl you’re selling into white slavery?” As you can see, the film is refreshing and
brazenly racy.
Things get farcical, as they often do in these movies, with the inopportune introduction of the fiancee and the brother and so on. The film settles into a more conventional but still frequently funny idiot plot where characters have to pretend to be each other and it’s all very silly and quite a distraction from the best thing here, which are the intriguing and provocative interactions between Taylor and Fonda. Still, even with a bagful of sex farce crutches, the film is a lot of fun.
Director Peter Tewksbury CV’s basically this, some Elvis movies, a Disney flick, another sex comedy, and over a hundred episodes of
Father Knows Best (all unseen by me, but not promising on the whole), but I have no idea how that can be when this film adaptation of Norman Krasna’s Broadway smash is so cleverly visualized and laid out with such intelligence and comic deftness that I was sure it was the work of a master and I just didn’t recognize the name. I especially liked the visual gag in the second bus scene, which instead of giving us a traditional shot-reverse shots plays out without cuts the delayed and looping reaction of an extra to events that transpired in the prior scene without comment in the conscious framing of the left third of the screen as Fonda and Taylor prattle on:
The film is smartly and elegantly made, so much so that I came to dread the heavier farce bits in the second half, even though they made me a laugh a lot (especially Robertson’s deadpan response to being inducted into the stupidity of the plot), because I wanted to see the craft put to better use on the salacious sexual politics the film handles far better and not the sillier and more familiar situational comedy of the genre. Still, even with caveats, this is a provocative and entertaining film with lots of laughs and comes Highly Recommended. (24)
