Never on Sunday (1960)

Stuart's Nite

Jules Dassin obit via NYT:

Mr. Dassin left the United States for France in 1953 because, he said, he was “unemployable” in Hollywood. In Paris, unable to speak much more than restaurant French when he arrived, he encountered hard times and remained largely unemployed for five years. In need of money, he agreed to direct “Rififi,” a low-budget production about a jewelry heist. A memorable sequence is of the robbery itself, lasting about a half-hour and filmed without music or dialogue.

Mr. Dassin also acted in the movie, under the name Perlo Vita, playing an Italian safe expert. He won a best-director award for the film at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. By the time he wrote and directed “Never on Sunday,” a comedy about a good-hearted prostitute (Ms. Mercouri), the anti-Communist witch hunt in the United States had been discredited, and he had been accepted again.

Mr. Dassin also had a role in the movie, as a bookish American from — like Mr. Dassin himself — Middletown, Conn., who tries to reform the prostitute. His directing and screenwriting were nominated for Academy Awards.

The movie was a moneymaker and its title song was a hit, though some critics found the script predictable. Ms. Mercouri became Mr. Dassin’s second wife in 1966, two years after he directed her in “Topkapi,” another film about jewel thieves, the prize in this case being gems from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.

Jules Dassin was born in Middletown on Dec. 18, 1911, one of eight children of Samuel Dassin, an immigrant barber from Russia, and the former Berthe Vogel. Shortly after Jules was born, his father moved the family to Harlem. Jules attended Morris High School in the Bronx.

He joined the Communist Party in 1930s, a decision he recalled in 2002 in an interview with The Guardian in London. “You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant,” he told the newspaper. “You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it’s a very natural process.”

He left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.
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He had always been demanding of himself and often critical of his own work. In 1962, with his best films largely behind him, Mr. Dassin told Cue magazine: “Of my own films, there’s only one I’ve really liked — ‘He Who Must Die.’ That is, I like what it had to say. But that doesn’t mean I’m completely satisfied with it. I’d do it all over again, if I could.”

Encyclopedia Britannica on Melina Mercouri:

Mercouri came from a politically prominent family. She graduated from the Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece. Her first major role, at the age of 20, was Lavinia in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, but perhaps her most memorable parts were Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and the good-hearted prostitute in the film Never on Sunday (1960). This film gained her an international reputation that would serve her well in politics. Her involvement in politics was triggered by her indignation over the military coup that brought a handful of army colonels to power in Greece in 1967.

Married to the French-born American film director Jules Dassin (who directed most of her films), she was abroad when the coup occurred. She dedicated herself to stimulating opposition against the junta in Europe and the United States, to the extent that she was deprived of her Greek citizenship by the colonels’ regime. After the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, she returned to Greece and promptly joined Andreas Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). She ran unsuccessfully that year for deputy from the same Piraeus district that had made her famous in Never on Sunday, but she was elected when she ran a second time, in 1977.

Reelected in 1981 when Pasok won a general election, she was appointed by Papandreou to be his minister of culture. One of her major efforts was an attempt to persuade the British government to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece; she also increased government subsidies for the arts. She served in the post until 1989, when PASOK lost power; she was reappointed after their electoral victory in 1993. In 1971 Mercouri published an autobiography, I Was Born Greek. In 1997 UNESCO created the Melina Mercouri International Prize for the Safeguarding and Management of Cultural Landscapes; the prize is awarded every two years.