Jules Dassin takes another stab at modernizing an ancient Greek legend, maybe in hopes of rectifying the earlier attempt that resulted in arguably his biggest debacle, Phaedra. Here, a glamorous international star of stage and screen (Melina Mercouri), who looks like Catherine Deneuve from the back of her luxurious blonde head but more like Broom Hilda from the front, is having trouble interpreting the role of Medea, and receives a jolt of inspiration when, for a publicity gimmick, she visits a real-life child-murderer (Ellen Burstyn) in prison. (One could take the cynical view, and suppose that it is Burstyn's shamingly superior acting in their encounters that spurs Mercouri to try harder.) This sort of parallelism between theater and real life is not uncommon fodder in movies: Cukor's A Double Life, Rivette's L'amour Fou, Zetterling's The Girls, and Dassin's own He Who Must Die, the only other movie in his career that is arguably his biggest debacle. In this movie of artlessly blunt lighting and framing, Dassin adopts a sort of elbow-rubbing approach to High Art. As if it weren't enough that the cast recites sizable chunks of Euripides, Dassin also shows them studying a reel of Bergman's Persona, analyzing Brando's performance in Last Tango, and uttering quotable quotes from the likes of Tennessee Williams and W.C. Fields. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd
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