Word: phaedra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jules Dassin has made the best film noir I have ever seen." Dassin's Euro-movies had a vogue among middlebrow U.S. reviewers, who might have thought he was French. (Pronounce it Zhool Da-saaan.) The hipper critics knew better. He was "strained seriousness" to Andrew Sarris. On seeing Phaedra - an updated Greek tragedy that threw Anthony Perkins into the arms of stepmother Mercouri - Pauline Kael compared it invidiously to a Bette Davis weepie. Both were making the same point: that art isn't only what comes from Europe, and that kitsch wasn't a Hollywood monopoly...
...Film, "they made some of the most entertaining bad films of the sixties and seventies: pictures that outstrip their own deficiencies and end up being riotously enjoyable as one waits to see how far pretentiousness will stretch. In good company, and a little drunk, He Who Must Die, Phaedra, and 10:30 P.M. Summer might cure would-be suicides. There are those who found Never on Sunday charming, and Topkapi exciting. They must have been very drunk." Who, after reading Thomson, would dare say they enjoyed these movies sober...
...City, Thieves' Highway, Night and the City and Rififi. And when that film was briefly released in theaters in 2000, it won a special award from the New York Film Critics Circle. Yet a bunch of Dassin's major Euro-pix, including He Who Must Die, The Law and Phaedra, and his late-60s urban drama Up Tight!, remain unavailable on DVD. Some of his movies are so hard to find, they have not a single review posted on the Internet Movie Database...
...Tale Heart, Brute Force, Thieves' Highway, Rififi - as well as moments in many other films that shine like sapphires. And since this is a tribute to an unfashionable director, I'll end with an awkward confession, courtesy of my 17-year-old self. Once upon a time, I loved Phaedra...