Word: mercouris
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
When Vallone dispatches Mercouri to London to persuade Perkins to come to Greece for the summer, the iron gate of tragedy begins creakingly to close. She falls in love with him; later, in Paris, she abandons her Joan Crawfordish role of older-woman-attracted-to-younger-man and seduces him with Hellenic thoroughness. It happens on the floor, and the camera chronicles the event with a mixture of cinematic symbolism and Aubusson-scorching realism...
...time Perkins gets to Greece, Mercouri is desperate. His ardor for her has cooled; he feels she has tricked him into coming to visit his father; she can no longer bear for Vallone to touch her. She watches as Perkins' affection for his father grows, shutting her out of their lives. Lurking always in the background is the sinister figure of her maid, a mannish mystic possessing an unnatural affection for her mistress. The maid warns Mercouri: "Put that boy out of your heart or everything will fall...
...Scene: Wives of the crew members of Vallone's newest ship, the S.S. Phaedra, standing mutely in the corridor outside his office to await news of the shipwreck that has killed most of their husbands. The women are swathed in rusty black, and Mercouri, a vengeful virago in white silk, elbows her way savagely through the crowd as she seeks out Vallone to tell him that she and Perkins have been lovers...