mark.waltz Melina is Maria, a beautiful wife and mother who happens to be an alcoholic, as well as extremely neurotic. On a trip to Spain with her husband (Peter Finch) and their close friend (Romy Schneider), they end up in an overcrowded hotel whose city is dealing with rolling blackouts and a murderer on the run. After witnessing Finch and Schneider making out, an already drunk Maria finds the hiding killer, a young Spaniard who killed his wife in a fury after finding out she was the town tramp. She takes him out of town and promises to return, a promise of course that ends up in tragedy.There is so little plot, but Mercouri gives a sensitive and earthy portrayal, playing a woman whose problems only begin with the bottle. This could have been wrapped up in an hour long anthology TV show, but the film stretches out to just under 90 minutes, fortunate because any longer, it would become more grating than Mercouri's neurotic character, a woman I sympathized with, but only for so long. Finch and Schneider are secondary to the plot; It's more a character study for Maria. It gets a bit erotic in one sequence when Mercouri and Schneider shower together, but the promised eroticism between Mercouri and the Spanish killer (saying not a word) never comes out, which makes the lonely Maria's obsession with him seem pointless unless she's just on a suicide mission. As the film draws to a close, Finch wanders through the streets of Madrid calling out his wife's name ("Maria!"), I half expected him to break into the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim song of the same name.

Karl Ericsson Don't get me wrong, I'm not unsympathetic against Mercouri, who, in private life, may be or may have been a most charming person. What I want to say is: If that lady isn't hamming it up and acting beyond all tops, then there is no such acting! I'm afraid that lady must have been a hysteric when not drunk in real life, which comes across pretty obvious here. Nice colours throughout the film. Nothing wrong with the framework, in other words. But what is it framing? Maybe just everything was so much more innocent before. Happier times come to life in which we were still learning and everything was still becoming better for the poor and for me this film is therefore worth so much more. Otherwise, it's a bore, if it weren't for the beautiful pictures.

Pamela-5 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.

John Seal 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.