Cinema: Jane in Plain Wrapper

Sunday in New York is another brightly salacious Hollywood comedy about the way of a man with a maid who just may. "This motion picture," leers an announcement flashed on the screen as a teaser, "is dedicated to the proposition that every girl gets . . . sooner or later." As usual, winking wickedness turns out to be mostly eyewash, but the plot—more to be pitied than censored—gets a buoyant lift from Stars Jane Fonda, Cliff Robertson and Rod Taylor. All three abandon themselves to the film version of Norman Krasna's trite Broadway farce with disarming faith, as though one more glossy, glittering package of pseudo sex might save the world.

Jane, lamenting that she must be "the only 22-year-old virgin alive," treks down from Albany to New York to ask Robertson, her airline-pilot brother, a searching question about life and love: "Is a girl that's been going around with a fellow a reasonable amount of time supposed to go to bed with him or not?" Not, sniffs Robertson, a chaser who has remained chaste. Then his favorite dish (Jo Morrow) arrives for breakfast, and off they go into the wild blue of a running gag about brother and his broad in search of a bed. Meanwhile, Jane picks up Rod Taylor and decides that she had better start conforming without further delay to contemporary standards of morality.

Sunday scores on style. Director Peter Tewksbury has caught Manhattan in a mood of after-the-rain freshness —and the gags are all neatly paced and frequently funny. Even the obligatory we-were-just-drying-off-in-bath-robes scene squeaks by—probably because Jane, in a plain blue wrapper, looks so honey-hued and healthy that her most smoldering invitation somehow suggests that all she really has in mind is tennis.