Cinema: Executive’s Sweet

Any Wednesday is a kind of sexual string quartet arranged for four players, each assigned a key to the same flat. The flat is on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and the wicked rejoinders wafting through the premises kept Broadway playgoers bouncing happily into the high-priced upholstery for a couple of years. Alert to the undertones of Muriel Resnik’s comedy, even a prude could relax and enjoy it, secure in the knowledge that every vibrant innuendo was just a homily in disguise. Nobody is perfect, after all—and problems have a way of working out. If an industrial giant (presented as a TIME cover subject) keeps a mistress, she is apt to be a glorious scatterbrain who ultimately meets a fellow of her own age and sends the giant back to his wife.

Wednesday’s girl of the hour is Jane Fonda. Looking tempting and wholesome, she cries a lot but wears her teardrops like costume jewelry. Produced on cue, the drops are merely decorative, unrelated to any real passions or real truths about the plight of a 30-year-old spinster who has a sneaking fondness for bright balloons, babies and a big business tycoon. Abristle with private enterprise, Tycoon Jason Robards has filled an open date on his calendar by installing Jane in a company-owned apartment, where he can write her off as a tax loss and drop over once every week to compound his interest. Then Dean Jones stumbles onto the scene as a gamesome competitor, and right behind him comes Rosemary Murphy, playing her Broadway role as the wronged wife, a woodwind still adither with genteel echoes of Bryn Mawr and Short Hills, N.J.

Between them, the foursome manages to get through the piece roughly as written—with a few soppy sequences thrown in to justify everyone’s moral lapses. The more sparkling passages, alas, lie smothered under Hollywood’s big-screen Technicolor treatment. The tone is too strident, the color too bright, the running around from rooftop cafes to picturesque playgrounds too aimless.

The corporate energy expended to produce each tiny bit of titillation raises questions not of taste but of waste. Sex ought to seem less work, more fun.