"Me, Too!" in Arcadia

...no one outside the Cahiers du cinéma and in his right mind would consider these men artists...

...I am 24 years old-that's all...

...I haven't kissed her today...

...The chorus is now forgotten until nearly the very end of the picture, to return there as a bunch of keening banshees lamenting their drowned husbands...

...It could begin to be He Who Must Die, which, were it not such a sentimentalizing and tendentious rendering of the harder and more complex novel, could be reckoned a good movie...

...There is, lastly, that tenderest of all emotions, Dassin's love for himself, or, more precisely, for his genius-a gesture of sweeping munificence when you consider how gallantly in excess it is of mere rational appropriateness...

...What are these moaning Hecubas to us...

...Perhaps the most characteristic episode of the picture, and the one most revealing of Dassin's mind, is the one in which Perkins is racing into suicide with his sports car...

...Dassin's deadly pretentious way of aspiring to culture is to derogate to it...

...To make matters worse, the palpable chief purpose of Never on Sunday is to demonstrate that Miss Mercouri is truly the most gorgeous creature to cast her shadow on the Parthenon since Phryne and Lai's...

...Nor, I think, have there been so many lacrimose closeups in which glycerine and mascara indulge in a running battle...

...And there is the scene in which Perkins, after having made boyishly impetuous love to his stepmother (a not inconsiderable departure from the Greek prototype), lies on his back, smirking...

...In response to her friendly teasing, he repeats, "Yes yes yes an idea Dassin got from the end of Ulysses, but through which Perkins does not quite succeed in conveying Molly Bloom's rich femininity...

...The anti-intellectualism is particularly offensive coming from someone whose notions of intellect, as evidenced by the movie, are listening to some Bach records, displaying a few Picasso reproductions and mouthing platitudes about Greek culture...

...In any case, he is quite unsure about how to carry off his transposition...

...Repetition, too, is a device that the writers must have thought of as mightily Euripidean...

...Then back to the small talk and the to-and-fro of the party...

...and the nuzzling, fondling, kissing and rubbing up against are made, if anything, more poignant by the fact that they are, of necessity, one-sided...

...What are those drowned seamen to Euripides...

...bored lounging around on a luxury yacht that is straight-or, rather, diluted -L'Avventura...

...Just 24...

...Never before on film have there been so many shots of highly illuminated hair while the face is in total eclipse...

...or, in his despair before death, "I want you to die...

...Et in Arcadia ego: The words, as Erwin Panofsky has shown, are not spoken by the artist or shepherds, but by the grinning death's-head...

...The dialogue provides soulsearching non sequiturs like Phaedra-Mercouri saying, after the first fulfillment, "I'm a little cold" (repeated twice, for extra pathos...

...She who in Cacoyannis's hands had been an artist of perhaps limited range, but passionate persuasiveness, was now degraded to a hunk of raw carnality pruriently anatomized by a camera from whose vocabulary the word "candid" is egregiously missing...

...Perkins deprives his character of even the slightest suspicion of heterosexuality, but then, I suppose, the tragic actor must take his hamartia where he finds it...

...Melina Mercouri's performance verges on sheer exhibitionism, though she has an occasional quietly effective moment when, apparently, Dassin was not making her say "Cheese...

...There is Jules Dassin's love for his great, good friend, Melina Mercouri, whom he shows off ardently in such various aspects as her bosom and her French pronunciation: If she is a little too long on the one, she makes up for it by being somewhat short on the other...

...Raf Vallone invests the millionaire Theseus-figure with genuine charm and virility, but he should be discouraged from acting in English...

...A shipping magnate gives a harbor cocktail party to celebrate the launching of his newest vessel...

...Phaedra and Hippolytus start out passionately happy, but must presently, with hazy motivation, torment and betray each other...

...his words creep down his jaw like nasty little maggots...

...Suddenly, a static image: peasant women in black in a recherché grouping, entoning a pseudo-archaic chorus: "They are powerful...

...Before considering more closely Dassin's perfectly awful film, let us examine on what his widespread international reputation as a leading film-maker is founded...

...To prevent Hippolytus's marriage to another, Phaedra confesses...

...To this Hippolytus-Perkins replies, "You're my first love," thus betraying the Aston Martin model DB 4 about which, shortly before, he had rhapsodized, "There's my girl...

...and there is top-heavy symbolism, as when the grief-stricken Theseus collapses on a door showing the map of the world...

...It it a high-fashion whirl with music and fireworks and mundane chitchat...

...JOHN SIMON, who has contributed to Hudson Review and Theatre Arts, often writes on the world of film...

...There are also pointless montages, like the lengthy superimposition of the inside of the British Museum on a London street scene...

...But it could certainly not be Never on Sunday, which owes its few good things (including two of its three principals) to Michael Cacoyannis's fine Greek film, Stella, and its multitudinous bad things to Dassin's rabid antiintellectualism, pretentiousness and lack of integrity...

...As for Dassin's direction, it is an album of plagiarism from all over: an arrival by plane on a photographer-infested airfield that is straight La Dolce Vita (as are also one or two other scenes...

...Under these conditions of abundance, it may seem a trifle ungrateful of me to call attention to the absence in Phaedra of a shred of love for Euripides, Racine, good sense or good taste...

...They speak many languages...

...and proceeded to do so with more passion than he ever musters for Miss Mercouri...

...In fact, not since Popeye put that famous corncob to Temple Drake was there such a publicly celebrated deflowering as that of Miss Mercouri by Dassin's lens...

...And they celebrate with fire in the sky...

...Theseus beats up his son and kicks him out...

...If a more sleazily arrogant film than Phaedra is ever made, it will have to be made by Jules Dassin...

...More often, however, the dialogue goes in for what in its simple-mindedness it mistakes for classic simplicity, such as TonyHippolytus, in his wrath, "You're ugly...

...There is the love of a man for a man, made even more fetching by the fact that they are father and son, which expresses itself in chastely male kisses and pawings, and those symbols of healthy masculinity, affectionate little punches in the biceps...

...Yet, even if it means making mincemeat of the classics, Dassin must elbow his way into Hellas...

...For we have a long sequence in which Miss Mercouri says nothing but a reiterated "I'm tired," while several other characters ominously mumble, "She looks tired...

...He turns on the radio, which is playing a Bach toccata, and lunges into a final soliloquy that so froze the blood in my fingers that I could get down only a few fragments of it: "A little banishment music, maestro, please Aha, nothing but the best for us, good old John Sebastian" And he continues to address "John Sebastian, old boy" with Dassin's characteristic condescension to that of which he is incapable-art...

...The screenplay by Dassin and Margarita Liberaki sets up a triangle involving an Onassis-like shipping millionaire and his sensual wife who, feeling neglected, turns to her artsy-craftsy stepson for consolation...

...Tony Perkins moves as if some power from within were picking at his nerves, one by one: His face twitches and scowls and occasionally contorts itself into a kind of double-jointed smile...

...But he did make her dub her part in English afterwards, with less than felicitous results...

...And this boastful dangling of Miss Mercouri in front of the audience is, again, one of Phaedra's many shortcomings...

...What connection here between the old and the new...

...There is also the high and pure love of a boy for his automobile, made exquisitely colorful by the fact that the automobile is a red Aston Martin and the boy a pallid Anthony Perkins...

...It could not be Rififi either, for what avails all that proficiency and suspense when the film is-in general outlook, main incidents and even a number of details-plagiarized from John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle...

...Dassin is either obtuse enough to suppose that by preserving a semblance of the Euripidean and Racinian outlines, drained of all the mythic urgency and poetic splendor, one still has a work of merit...

...There is the love of a woman for a woman, made ever so heart-warming by the fact that they are mistress and servant, which manifests itself in frenetic embraces, glowing caresses and sleeping together in a narrow bed...

...Phaedra is now eager to go off with the youth, but he rejects her, and they go to their separate suicides...

...It cannot be his American films, like Brute Force or Naked City, since they represent nothing more than what Howard Hawks or Otto Preminger have turned out time and again...

...a seduction scene between pouring rain on the windows and flamboyant firelight in the hearth that is right out of Devil in the Flesh (the uncut version, not shown here), with those naked, squirming bodies from Hiroshima, Mon Amour added for good measure...

...OF Jacques Natteau's photography, I need say only that it is the last word in fashion-magazine artiness...

...Nowhere else (except perhaps in Roger Vadim's unsavory pictures with his then wife, Brigitte Bardot) has the camera indulged in such unbridled concubinage with the heroine as in Never on Sunday...

...or crass enough to assume that by superimposing the mythic framework (though rather bent out of shape) on a lurid tale and banal dialogue, one could obtain a work of interest...