Phaedra

Euripides paroxysm, La Dolce Vita treatment. She (Melina Mercouri) barely musters a frozen smile at the launching of the gargantuan ocean liner bearing her name, "all of Athens is at your feet and you're sad," the priceless ring presented by her tycoon husband (Raf Vallone) will find its way to the bottom of the Thames. Her stepson (Anthony Perkins) is a footloose painter in London, they meet at the museum before the headless Aphrodite. "I don't call you Mother, do I?" "If you do, I'll kill you." The forbidden urge is consummated via a pulsing montage (flesh, flames, rain), jealousy and obsession make for quite the awkward homecoming. At the crossroads of the immemorial and the faddish, of elemental anguish and jet-set swank, Jules Dassin piles the mélo high. Hedonistic sensation reigns: Hundreds of skinny candles encircling a dinner, an Aston Martin zipping across rocky roads, party plates hurled like Olympic discuses into the sea. Lounging on the veranda, the heroine can't help sensing the weighty mythological machinery at work. "I think I was condemned to some punishment before I was born." The patriarch is "a meteor," the scion warms to the family business, the cousin (Elizabeth Ercy) has budding wiles to practice. Phaedra's frazzled mind races in tandem with tunes at a zesty discotheque, noticed by none but her oracular confidante (Olympia Papadouka). "Put that boy out of your heart, or everything will fall." So it goes, all smoke and humidity until the vessel sinks and Mercouri in turban and shades elbows her way past a throng of sorrowing crones and a slashed Perkins floors the pedal and tragedy turns into camp. "A little banishment music, Professor!" Visconti (Sandra) and Bertolucci (Luna) show how it's done. With Tzavalas Karousos, Georges Sari, Andreas Philippides, Stelios Vokovich, and Nikos Tzogias. In black and white.