Movie Review: Sunday In New York (1963)

A romantic comedy exploring the changing rules of sex and relationships, Sunday In New York has enough courage to tackle its subject matter with a good degree of frankness, and a cast in fine form to tease out effective moments of comedy.

Eileen (Jane Fonda) comes to New York to visit her brother Adam (Cliff Robertson), a dashing airline pilot enjoying the bachelor life. Eileen has just broken up with her long-time boyfriend Russ (Robert Culp), because she refused his advances to have sex before marriage. She is now wondering if her old-fashioned attitudes need an overhaul. Adam goes out on a date with Mona (Jo Morrow), one of his girlfriends, while Eileen has a chance encounter on a Fifth Avenue bus with the handsome Mike (Rod Taylor). Their first attempt at a chat over coffee is a disaster.

But fate brings Eileen and Mike together again, and a rainstorm means that they end up soaking wet back at Adam's apartment. Eileen decides this is her opportunity to finally lose her virginity, but her plans will meet an unexpected hurdle. Meanwhile, Adam and Mona face troubles of their own, with his on-call pilot duty severely disrupting their romantic pursuits. The day in New York gets much wilder when the oblivious Russ shows up, wanting to win his girl back.

Directed by Peter Tewksbury and written by Norman Krasna (adapting his play), Sunday In New York reflects its era: an airline pilot as a magnet for women, a tide of sexual liberation challenging long-held attitudes, and feminism taking hold and allowing women to ask previously unthinkable questions about relationship rules. The film leans towards lauding more conservative views, but earns points for airing out emerging topics.

Tewksbury does well in breaking out the story from its stage confines, and finds reasons for his characters to go out and about in a vibrant New York. Despite the generally sharp dialogue, some scenes are talky and go on longer than necessary. But for the most part the film achieves the requisite balance between idealized romance and screwball comedy.

And the laughs do register. Once Russ shows up in New York to reclaim Eileen's affections and propose to her, an intentional mess of mistaken identities sparks the film into some excellent comic moments. Cliff Robertson, Rod Taylor and Robert Culp create a watchable trio of men uncomfortably pushed outside their normal boundaries. The side story of the airline pilot Adam and his would-be lover-of-the-day Mona contriving to always end up apart - far apart - also creates some good manic moments.

The romance also works well within the confines of the genre, and the two leads quickly find the requisite chemistry. Jane Fonda shines in an early role, and succeeds in portraying a confident yet searching 22 year old charting a new course on the fly. What Eileen needs most is a navigator for a brave new world filled with untested rules for relationships between men and women, and Rod Taylor creates in Mike the ideal man, handsome, assured, vaguely available, world-wise but still chivalrous.

Sunday In New York is a day to relax, laugh and try to disentangle the increasingly convoluted guidelines for courtship.

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Movie Review: Hannie Caulder (1971)

A British-made revenge Western with a mashing of Spaghetti sub-genre elements, Hannie Caulder attempts to capitalize on Raquel Welch's comely assets but is betrayed by an uneven tone and underdeveloped ideas.

Frontier woman Hannie Caulder (Welch) is violently raped and her husband is killed by the Clemens gang of three brothers (Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin). Hannie vows revenge, and teams up with bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price (Robert Culp). Together they travel to Mexico and visit legendary gun-maker Bailey (Christopher Lee), who forges a gun for Hannie. Price then teaches her the finer points of killing men in a shootout. Hannie and Price catch up with the Clemens brothers in a nearby town, but Hannie will find killing her tormentors more difficult than she imagined.

The project was conceived as a star vehicle for Ms. Welch, and co-funded by her Curtwel production company. Directed by Western veteran Burt Kennedy and filmed in Spain, Hannie Caulder boasts a decent cast and a traditional if tired premise. But the film collapses from neglect, due mainly to what appears to be a hurriedly written script by Kennedy under the pseudonym Z.X. Jones.

The tone is fundamentally unbalanced, leaving the film spinning between coarse humour, grim revenge, and attempts at gory violence. The Clemens gang resemble the Three Stooges on a bad day, the ruffians trading insults that are meant to be funny. The bad humour sits uneasily next to the rape and murder that they nonchalantly dole out, and the large gobs of bright red blood that sprays out of every victim of a gun shot.

Even worse, some key events and characters drift in and out of the film with no explanation. A small army of Mexican bandits attacks Bailey's beachfront house, triggering a mass shootout with dozens of casualties. Who these bandits are and what they wanted is never even tangentially explained. And there is a dark, mysterious gunman who makes a couple of critical interventions during Hannie's journey, including the small matter of saving her life. His identity and motivation are left up to the imagination.

Welch does as best as can be expected. Her extremely limited range is kept under the wraps of a character who does not need to say much. Towards the end of the film she starts trading snappy one-liners, and does so with a dull trace of conviction. Meanwhile, her figure is coyly hinted at through some clever fashion choices, including a poncho with not much underneath for much of the film.

The surprisingly strong supporting cast rides along for the pay cheque. Borgnine, Elam and Martin are noisy, dirty, and annoying. Lee is unsure what he is doing in the film; Hannie Caulder must be the only Western movie where characters cross borders and wait for weeks to obtain a pistol. Only Robert Culp as bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price is able to add any weight to the proceedings. On the plus side, the cinematography is decent.

Hannie Caulder is a third-rate Western for what was then a third-rate actress with first-rate looks.

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