Cinema: The New Pictures, Oct. 31, 1960

Never on Sunday (Melinafilm; United Artists) is a rambunctious little politico-philosophical fable about The Virtuous Whore and The Quiet American. Written, produced and directed by Jules (Rififi, He Who Must Die) Dassin for a sum ($125,000) that would scarcely pay the light bill on the average Hollywood feature, Sunday has been playing to packed houses in Paris since last May. The title song of the picture is one of Europe's top tunes these days, and for her work as the leading lady-of-the-evening Greece's Melina (Stella) Mercouri was proclaimed 1960"s best cinemactress at the Cannes Film Festival.

The plot of the picture seems at a glance no more than a reroast of an old chestnut: the tale of the reformer reformed. The hero (portrayed by Director Dassin himself "because I couldn't afford to pay an actor to play the part") is an intellectual Boy Scout from Middletown, U.S.A., who takes a trip to Greece in the wide-eyed expectation that in the cradle of Western philosophy he will "find the truth." He finds instead a warmhearted, disrespectful prostitute (Actress Mercouri) who tumbles only for the men she likes, charges only what they are willing or able to pay, and never does business on Sunday.

The Boy Scout, horrified to find the glory that was Greece reduced to such sordid circumstances, decides to do a good deed. With the secret financial assistance of the local vice czar, who fears the prostitute's casual price policy will ruin his market, the hero initiates a program of cultural aid to the heroine's underdeveloped area: the mind. Obligingly, the heroine at first abandons the pleasures of the body, discovers the pleasures of the intellect. But in the denouement she also discovers that when nature is denied, spirit suffers too. The film ends with a blare of strumpets as the heroine leads a rousingly hilarious red-light revolution and the luckless hero sails home sadder but wiser.

Dassin's satire is obviously directed at the U.S., but his touch is light and his affection for the object of his satire unmistakable. Unlike his hero, Dassin is not trying to save anybody. He merely wants to suggest that the missionary mentality, which he believes to be an American complex, is at best childish and at worst ineffective. The idea is scarcely original, but Dassin expresses it in a wonderful rush of animal spirits and earthy humor. (Best bit: a scene in which an aging trollop recounts her favorite dream. "I get married to a man 84 years old," she says wistfully. "He has a little money, and—do I get a rest!") Dassin himself, a man with the curious, worldly-otherworldly face of a middle-aged elf, is always amusing to watch. And mercurial Mercouri, a sort of Levantine Carmen Miranda, embodies with phenomenal vitality the philosophical premises of the film: 1) know-how is not necessarily power; 2) money cannot buy anything that really matters; 3) the only way to save the world is to love the people in it and accept them as they are.

On the morning of April 25, 1951, the name of Harlem-raised Jules (Brute Force, Naked City) Dassin was one of the hotter properties in Hollywood. By late afternoon of that day his name was mud. The difference was made in the few moments it took one of his fellow directors to tell a congressional committee (TIME, May 7, 1951) that Dassin was a Communist.