The New Pictures

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.

Instantly Dassin's name was added to the Hollywood blacklist, and for five years hand-running he was out of work. Even in Europe, moviemakers were afraid to hire him: U.S. theaters might refuse to show a picture Dassin had directed. He lived in Paris, writing plays and poems, going into debt. But the years, he insists, were not wasted. "I had time to think and feel. I began those years as a technician. I came out of them an artist."

In 1956 Dassin got a chance to show what he had learned. A French producer, remembering Brute Force, assigned him to direct a thriller called Rififi--which sent both critics and audiences into conniptions. With profits in pocket, Dassin took a crew to Crete and transformed Novelist Nikos Kazantzakis' The Greek Passion into a movie (He Who Must Die) that proved to be one of the most powerful religious statements ever put on film. At that United Artists offered to finance four Dassin films in seven years, with Dassin to have complete freedom of topic and treatment. A reflective, unshowy showman, Dassin is pleased with his second Hollywood success but not bitter over his years of enforced obscurity. Says he: "Now people here look me in the eye. They used to look at my cheekbones. But very often it was because they thought I was uncomfortable and not because they were hostile."'

Hell to Eternity (Atlantic Pictures; Allied Artists). Guy Gabaldon, a Los Angeles boy of Spanish descent, went to live with a Japanese-American family when he was eleven. At 17, even though he had a punctured eardrum and his height (5 ft. 3 1/4 in.) was short of the Marine minimum, Gabaldon was accepted for World War II service with the Corps because he spoke fluent Japanese. Sent to Saipan, Gabaldon promptly went over the hill--toward the Japanese lines--and returned with several enemy soldiers he had persuaded to surrender. Night after night thereafter he snaked through the Japanese positions until his grand total of prisoners by persuasion rose to about 2,000. After Saipan's fall, he was awarded the Silver Star for actions that, in the words of his commanding officer, "unquestionably saved many lives and substantially shortened the [campaign]."

Gabaldon's exploits would probably satisfy almost any appetite for adventure except that of a Hollywood producer. In any case, they seemed not nearly adventurous enough to Producer Irving H. Levin, who is responsible for this film biography of Gabaldon. The usual big sex orgy--the one in which dancing girls bump and marines jump as though hit with a .45 slug--was stuck in where it obviously doesn't belong, along with the usual improbable battle scenes. Casting note: the undersized hero is played by 6-ft. 2-in. Jeffrey Hunter. This time it seems to have been Gabaldon, retained as a "technical adviser" on the picture, who was persuaded to surrender.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.