Always on Sunday: Never on Sunday

Sundays feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, Never on Sunday.

Public service (in this case better termed servitude) calls on me to review the movie that inspired the title of Sunday's regular column. Some of my readers will never have heard of the 1960 movie Never on Sunday. It's no great loss. In the movie's failure to reward the effort of watching lies the servitude.
    Netflix provided me the movie by instant download—in all the imperfection of its uneven soundtrack and incomplete subtitling, the clumsiness of its story, and its excess of silly scenes of people supposedly having fun (but giving the impression of only performing rituals to celebrate having fun). Here's Netflix's citation:

Never on Sunday 1960 TV-PG 92 minutes
Pote tin Kyriaki [title in Greek]
    When Homer (Jules Dassin)—a would-be philosopher from the States—takes a trip to Greece, he meets free-spirited prostitute Ilya (Melina Mercouri) and arrogantly decides to "save" her in this internationally celebrated classic. But Homer may wind up learning a few lessons from his protégé. Dassin also wrote and directed the movie, which garnered several Oscar nominations, snagging a win for Best Song.
Cast: Melina Mercouri, Jules Dassin, George Foundas
Genre: Comedies, Dramas, Foreign Movies, Romantic Movies
This movie is: Romantic, Feel-good

The pairing of "romantic" and "feel-good" to describe a contemporary movie would offer fair warning that you'd be better off skipping it. If used to describe a black-and-white movie mostly in a foreign language (about half Greek, much of it without subtitles—the rest English)  released over half a century ago, the pairing should be in block, bold, italicized letters: the romance is silly and it won't make you feel good.
    Ilya likes her work so much that she doesn't have a fee schedule. She loves men, some more than others. If one man offers her 50 drachmas and another 100, she'll go with the first if she likes him better. The song, "Never on Sunday," would seem to be her anthem:

Oh, you can kiss me on a Monday a Monday a Monday
    is very very good
Or you can kiss me on a Tuesday a Tuesday a Tuesday
    in fact I wish you would
Or you can kiss me on a Wednesday a Thursday a
    Friday and Saturday is best.

But, of course, even a girl who finds it very very good needs to have a day of rest.
    Anyway, her way of doing business somehow interferes with the interests of the mysterious "No Face," whose business of renting one-hour rooms to the other prostitutes (so far as I could gather; he doesn't seem to be a pimp, exactly) is suffering and who would like to get Ilya to retire from competition.

The plot suggested by the Netflix citation involves Homer's seeing Ilya as having fallen from grace, from the ideal of truth and harmony represented by the Golden Age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Ilya won't listen to Homer's logic. In fact, when he tells Ilya that logic was invented by Aristotle, she immediately rejects it because "Aristotle looked down on women."
    Homer sets out to show her the illogic of her ways. She doesn't think that Medea in Euripides's play killed her children. No, no mother would kill her children; she was just trying to manipulate Jason. She thinks that Oedipus and his mother go to the shore, not for Sophocles's tragic ending, but for a picnic. Of course, he loves his mother very much and they are so very happy.
    When Homer for a moment lifts the veil from Ilya's eyes, she is alarmed that she can never enjoy Greek plays again and doesn't want to talk with Homer any more.

At this point, with Homer's project seeming to stall, Mr. No Face subsidizes Homer with cash that enables him to get Ilya to agree to participate in a two-week crash course in classical education, at the end of which she is indeed ready to retire to the harmonious life.
    I'm not quite sure what happened at this point. I fell asleep and wasn't willing to back up again in order to try make sense of developments.
    Suffice it to say that she rushes off to organize the other prostitutes in a strike, successfully negotiates a new contract for them with Mr. No Face (half the amount to rent a room), and decides to marry Tonio (George Foundas) and become a one-man woman, something he has wanted from the first time he laid eyes on her in the opening minutes of the movie.
    And Homer? Well, he admits that he too has really wanted to make love to Ilya from the start himself. Of course, it's too late now.
    So he has a few drinks, smashing the glass on the floor after each one like the other men, and joins the celebration of having fun.

Having fun is what this column is for, to recommend movies for you to have fun watching.
    But you've been warned: You won't have much fun if you watch Never on Sunday.