10:30 P.M. Summer

Melina Mercouri was absolutely delightful in Never on a Sunday. Then I saw Phaedra and she worked my last nerve. It wasn't her fault. It was a terrible script and badly miscast. It did have high camp value. The love scenes were so bad they decided it best to film through fogged up Windows.

I started watching this film and Mercouri started to bug again. This time it really wasn't her fault. She plays an unhinged dypso. Melina has to carry the entire film. Finch and Schneider do nothing but have extremely dull love scenes. The child's voice is badly ovetdubbed. The kid sounds like a cartoon character.

The filming locations, sets and ambiance of the film are beautiful. The script and acting stink to high heaven.

There's not much information available about this film, but it appears to have been shot in English by Jules Dassin, who had directed Melina Mercouri in the international hit, Never On Sunday, and had gone on to make the equally popular Topkapi. This film is a decidedly smaller and artier affair, based as it is on a Marguerite Duras novel. The look of the film is distinctly 60s, and Romy Schneider never looked more beautiful. Mercouri is excellent as an alcoholic who has fallen out of love with her husband (Peter Finch) and tries to find solace by helping a murderer escape from the Spanish police. Much of the action of the film goes unexplained. There is some truly remarkable photography by Gabor Pogany, an otherwise unheralded Hungarian cinematographer who plied his trade in the Italian film industry of the 50s and 60s to little acclaim. His work here is quite revelatory, at times bringing to mind the German expressionism of the teens and twenties. Overall, an abstract delight not a million miles away from Antonioni's Blow-Up.

A sexually frustrated Maria (Mercouri) is traveling through Spain with her husband and a younger woman Claire. Maria's husband is carrying on with Claire and Maria an alcoholic is sexual with every man who chances her way including a murderer in the town they are stuck in.

The murderer had committed a crime of passion with which perhaps Maria (Mercouri) identifies. She helps the murderer get out of town and falls in love with him in the process although they are together for perhaps a half hour and exchange three words...

This film is arty erotic the final flamenco dance looks like a surrogate drugged out orgasm involving all the actors and extras.

60s middle age sexual sequence....lots of these made= Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf... Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.... etc etc... this one was briefer with less story to it.

I only watched it to see Mercouri (did any actress have a deeper voice?)

Trust me this thing is boring.

I just saw this film (at LACMA) after having seen it when it first came out. Wow! I didn't remember it that way at all! I guess when you're 19 this kind of stuff seems hot stuff, or very very deep. Now that I'm 56, I think it's just kind of pretentious but full of wonderful acting, nice cinematography and lighting, and very pretty actors! Romy Schneider looks beautiful in this, yes. But I have seen her looking even better (mostly in French films). She did, though, have some very early-50s kind of makeup, which was perplexing, considering this was '66. Melina, unbelievably, looks very contemporary; she could have just stepped out onto Rodeo Drive in 2004. I had forgotten how STRIKING her looks are. And her emoting is, well, breath-taking. Peter Finch looked so slender and drop-dead elegant. His face took MY breath away. God, what a face! (No wonder everyone supposedly from Vivian Leigh to Danny Kaye fell in love with him!) Note: Topkapi came before this film, not after. As to the plot, maybe I'm just dense, but I didn't really see the point. I just wanted to be a part of the party! Altho' Melina played, supposedly, a horrible drunkard, I felt she acted like a reasoned lady at all times and don't see what the husband and the lover were "tsch tsch"ing about. She seemed to keep it together pretty darned well for a supposed alcoholic. The whole bit about the murderer was just a turn-off to me, and I thought it kind of spoiled the fun (some of you smarties will say, Duh, that was the POINT!), but I didn't WANT the fun to stop! In sum, pretty people in exotic locales. Lots of this film was very engrossing. The actors are everything here.

I would say it is a typical movie of its time showing a rift in a marriage while the couple travel in a strange country (see the Italian movies of the early sixties). Romy Schneider looks radiant, this is a couple of years before her breakthrough as a French movie star in the Seventies. The movie is in b/w and colour.