Passion in Hellas

Phaedra proves a number of things: that Jules Dassin knows how to direct a movie; that antique Greek tragedy can be done as modern cinema brilliantly and meaningfully; that Melina Mercouri is as achingly believable as a tragedienne as she was believably zany as a comedienne (in Never on Sunday); and that Tony Perkins had better go back to making thrillers for Hitchcock.

Taking a classic myth that had been dramatized already by Euripides, Seneca and Racine, Dassin and Margerita Liberaki have fashioned a new Phaedra that is honest, beautiful and quite terrifying. Mercouri, as Phaedra, is the second wife of an Onassis-like ship tycoon, played with bouncy virility by Raf Vallone. Tony Perkins, Vallone's son by his first marriage, is bumming around London, dabbling in paint and nursing a grudge against both father and stepmother.

When Vallone dispatches Mercouri to London to persuade Perkins to come to Greece for the summer, the iron gate of tragedy begins creakingly to close. She falls in love with him; later, in Paris, she abandons her Joan Crawfordish role of older-woman-attracted-to-younger-man and seduces him with Hellenic thoroughness. It happens on the floor, and the camera chronicles the event with a mixture of cinematic symbolism and Aubusson-scorching realism.

By the time Perkins gets to Greece, Mercouri is desperate. His ardor for her has cooled; he feels she has tricked him into coming to visit his father; she can no longer bear for Vallone to touch her. She watches as Perkins' affection for his father grows, shutting her out of their lives. Lurking always in the background is the sinister figure of her maid, a mannish mystic possessing an unnatural affection for her mistress. The maid warns Mercouri: "Put that boy out of your heart or everything will fall."

The fall comes swiftly, as one by one, the characters in Phaedra plunge into the vortex of tragedy, stark and classic.

> Scene: Wives of the crew members of Vallone's newest ship, the S.S. Phaedra, standing mutely in the corridor outside his office to await news of the shipwreck that has killed most of their husbands. The women are swathed in rusty black, and Mercouri, a vengeful virago in white silk, elbows her way savagely through the crowd as she seeks out Vallone to tell him that she and Perkins have been lovers.

> Scene: Vallone, already torn with grief over the ship disaster, hears Mercouri's declaration, summons Perkins into his office. In a rage he sweeps the objects on his desk to the floor, slaps him viciously again and again, slashing Perkins' face with his ring. Vallone: ''Get out of Greece! Carry my curse wherever you go!'' Perkins, leaving, with blood covering his face: "I loved you."

> Scene: Perkins in his sports car. the radio blaring Bach organ music, careens along the coast screaming "Phaedra! Phaedra! Phaedra . . ."

Dassin's black-and-white photography, like his direction, is lean and fluid. Only Perkins seems too Ivy to wear Greek laurels, too shrill to be quite convincing at the moment of his terrible doom. The film is full of symbolism, rich in parallels to the original Phaedra myth: in Racine's version, Phaedra's stepson is killed racing his chariot on the beach, where he is attacked by a sea monster; in Dassin's film, Perkins swerves to miss a huge truck, plunges into the sea. Still Dassin manages to make the present-day setting and characters--a microcosm of rich Greek society--entirely credible and wholly worthy of the theme, and in doing so has succeeded in bringing to the screen that most treacherous of all dramatic forms: high tragedy.

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