ANY WEDNESDAY (1966)

Businessman Jason Robards lives in New Jersey and works in Manhattan, but every Wednesday, he stays overnight to enjoy some extramarital pleasures, and fakes a long-distance phone call to his wife who thinks he's out of town on a business trip. One Wednesday night, at a cocktail party, he ropes lovely young Jane Fonda into helping him by calling his wife and posing as a long-distance operator, so his check-in call will seem as if it's coming from Chicago. They flirt but she resists becoming his mistress, and when he offers to send her flowers, she says she hates watching flowers die and wishes someone would send her balloons instead. When Fonda winds up in the hospital with hepatitis, Robards sends her balloons, and she finally relents. Two years later, the two are still meeting every Wednesday at her apartment, which Robards has had his company buy as an overnight executive suite, which only Robards uses. But this Wednesday, Dean Jones, the owner of a company that Robards has bought, has been sent by Robards' secretary to use the suite. Arriving that afternoon, Jones is surprised to find Fonda there and assumes that she is a prostitute present for his use. As the two argue, Robards' wife (Rosemary Murphy) arrives, also sent by the unwitting secretary. Assuming Jones and Fonda to be a couple, Murphy insists they join her and Robards for dinner. Complications ensue.

This is a fairly entertaining sex farce, from an era filled with such films, and it's largely Jane Fonda's delightfully light performance that makes it work so well. She pulls off a kind of naughty innocence that is central in keeping the audience on her side. The underrated Dean Jones (who got stuck playing fairly flat characters in Disney movies) goes for a kind of sexy Jimmy Stewart thing and it mostly works. Robards is the weak link; he's a little too crusty to be effective, and he doesn't make the character very sympathetic. Rosemary Murphy is much better as the wife who rolls quite well with the punches. Based on a stage play, there's only one other character of note, the secretary, played by Ann Prentiss, the look-alike (and act-alike) sister of Paula Prentiss. Jack Fletcher has a brief scene (that some today might find offensive) as a shriekingly gay interior designer. Though the film is largely stagebound, the director (Robert Ellis Miller) occasionally uses split-screen to good effect, even comically splitting the split screens. Fun line, from Murphy about the possibility of an affair with her gardener: "No woman has had any luck with gardeners since Lady Chatterley." This is fun, but at 110 minutes, it feels about 20 minutes too long. Pictured are Fonda, Jones and Robards. [TCM]