Not Always a Never

10:30 P.M. Summer. As the faithful friend, longtime Svengali, and now the husband of Melina Mercouri (they were married last May), Director Jules Dassin periodically attempts to trap some of her wild Greek energy on film. His tempestuous Trilby, in her sixth Dassin movie, proves just one thing: the family that plays together does not alway make a Never on Sunday.

A Greek bearing gifts of a Mercourial nature can only squander them in this lurid, leaden adaptation of a novel by Marguerite Duras, who also wrote Hiroshima, Mon Amour. While the screen moodily changes color, turning from light sepia to silvery grey and all but blushing with shame, Melina plays up the purple of her role as a sort of sick Samaritan. "How do you stond dee pain?" she wheezes, speaking of life itself. "Geev me a dhrink, Paul." But liquor is the least of her problems. Voyeurism and incipient lesbianism are enough to make any young matron restive.

Neurotically out of love with her husband (Peter Finch), she tries during a trip through Spain to stir the embers of eroticism by packing him off to bed with her best friend (Romy Schneider). One memorable night, as a storm rages outside, she sees Romy and Peter on a balcony in an alfresco embrace, heedless of wind, rain and lightning. Meanwhile, a murderer fleeing a crime of passion appears on an adjacent roof, and Melina decides to help him. Why? To that question there is a multiple-choice answer: 1) she is desperate for excitement, 2) she is romantic and immature, 3) she is a fanatic sexistentialist, or 4) 10:30 P.M. Summer hits the high mark of silliness. Pick 'em all.

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