Word: dassins
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TOPKAPI. Melina Mercouri and Peter Ustinov make a jewel theft in Istanbul look like grand foolery in Director Jules Dassin's niftiest caper since Rififi...
Obviously, Director Jules Dassin isn't. In Topkapi, adapted from a tidy thriller (The Light of Day) by Eric Ambler, he has pulled off the niftiest caper seen on screen since the jewel job he engineered in Rififi. As in Rififi, unfortunately, the rest of the film seems a bit Dassingenuous. The director's jokes are often too laboriously explained, and the camera's adoration of Melina Mercouri, the great love of Dassin's life, is sometimes boring and always embarrassing...
...role of this modern-day version of an old Greek myth. Raf Vallone, as her ship-tycoon husband, is healthily Hellenic in a role with obvious overtones of Onassisism. Only Tony Perkins, as Vallone's stepson over whom all the trouble brews, seems not quite believable. Director Jules Dassin has sought to bring off cinematic high tragedy in a contemporary setting...
Phaedra proves a number of things: that Jules Dassin knows how to direct a movie; that antique Greek tragedy can be done as modern cinema brilliantly and meaningfully; that Melina Mercouri is as achingly believable as a tragedienne as she was believably zany as a comedienne (in Never on Sunday); and that Tony Perkins had better go back to making thrillers for Hitchcock...
Taking a classic myth that had been dramatized already by Euripides, Seneca and Racine, Dassin and Margerita Liberaki have fashioned a new Phaedra that is honest, beautiful and quite terrifying. Mercouri, as Phaedra, is the second wife of an Onassis-like ship tycoon, played with bouncy virility by Raf Vallone. Tony Perkins, Vallone's son by his first marriage, is bumming around London, dabbling in paint and nursing a grudge against both father and stepmother...