Word: phaedra
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...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...
...fall comes swiftly, as one by one, the characters in Phaedra plunge into the vortex of tragedy, stark and classic...
...Phaedra is, says Graham candidly, "a phantasmagoria of desire." The dance tells the story of Phaedra (danced by Graham herself), who is cursed by Aphrodite with an unnatural lust for her stepson Hippolytus. The spectator is left in no doubt about the nature of her passion-Hippolytus is first seen as only a pair of spotlighted, near-naked loins. Frenzied when Hippolytus rejects her advances, she tells his father that the youth had raped her, and the dance's high point is the visionary enactment of this lie in all the vividness of Phaedra's inflamed imagination...
...dancers writhe in sinuous embraces, quiver with rage or horror, or flash through the remarkably flexible configurations characteristic of Graham. But sheer movement alone is not enough to trace Phaedra's tangled web of emotion. Too dependent on narrative for which it could not always find a language, Phaedra was consistently interesting, not consistently successful...