Never on Sunday (1960)
An odd movie—odd partly because people still watch it despite its painful artifice. Nothing is quite right, and a lot is quite wrong, including the humor, the gender assignments (sexist stuff), and the larger plot, what there is of it. It's set in Greece, and has a painfully dated and almost naive tourist view of Greek "culture" on the docks of a fishing village.
Director Jules Dassin, born in Middletown, Connecticut just as Homer, the leading rather clueless character of this movie, loved Greece. He was not Greek, but Russian Jewish, but he died there after his up and down career as a director. Dassin has a following of sorts for other films, mainly noirish pieces like "The Naked City" with its debt to Weegee. Here he goes for a thin drama about a prostitute who everyone loves (all the men, of course, especially because she works for free, but the women, apparently, also, how nice!). He's an uneven director, and a not so compelling actor, but apparently no one had the heart to tell him this.
There is some sharp acting here, not what you would call naturalistic, but colorful, especially from the leading woman, Melina Mercouri. And all the location shooting is fun, for sure.
So you can get yourself in the mood for this kind of European old school film, but for 1960 it's weirdly out of date, and it lacks the punch of other true Euro productions of the time (and I'm not just talking French New Wave, but all kinds of great post-war movies). I'm usually willing to go with the flow because I like old styles and am willing to shake off some of the weird and imperfect quirks. But I had trouble doing that here, and so it ended up being a chore, and almost an embarrassment.
An odd movie—odd partly because people still watch it despite its painful artifice. Nothing is quite right, and a lot is quite wrong, including the humor, the gender assignments (sexist stuff), and the larger plot, what there is of it. It's set in Greece, and has a painfully dated and almost naive tourist view of Greek "culture" on the docks of a fishing village.
Director Jules Dassin, born in Middletown, Connecticut just as Homer, the leading rather clueless character of this movie, loved Greece. He was not Greek, but Russian Jewish, but he died there after his up and down career as a director. Dassin has a following of sorts for other films, mainly noirish pieces like "The Naked City" with its debt to Weegee. Here he goes for a thin drama about a prostitute who everyone loves (all the men, of course, especially because she works for free, but the women, apparently, also, how nice!). He's an uneven director, and a not so compelling actor, but apparently no one had the heart to tell him this.
There is some sharp acting here, not what you would call naturalistic, but colorful, especially from the leading woman, Melina Mercouri. And all the location shooting is fun, for sure.
So you can get yourself in the mood for this kind of European old school film, but for 1960 it's weirdly out of date, and it lacks the punch of other true Euro productions of the time (and I'm not just talking French New Wave, but all kinds of great post-war movies). I'm usually willing to go with the flow because I like old styles and am willing to shake off some of the weird and imperfect quirks. But I had trouble doing that here, and so it ended up being a chore, and almost an embarrassment.