There was only one reason why I watched "10:30 PM Summer"--because it was directed by Jules Dassin. Dassin might just be among the most underrated directors of all time--with some amazing classics and hidden gems among his many films. Some of them are pretty famous (such as "Rafifi") but many others are just great films that somehow slipped through the cracks (such as "Thieves Highway" and "Brute Force"). Is "10:30 PM Summer" one of these hidden gems? It certainly is not considered a classic.I noticed on IMDb that the reviews for this film were all over the place and very inconsistent. One declared that the Melina Mercouri was 'the worst actress ever' while another thought she was 'magnificent' and one of the only good things about the film! And, scores ranged from 3 stars to 10! This film boasts a strange international cast with a Brit (Peter Finch), German (Romy Schneider) and Greek (Melina Mercouri) in the leads. The story is set Spain! It's a tale about a bizarre three-some--with a husband and wife and the husband's lover all on some sort of road trip. During the course of the trip, they wander into a town where a double murder just occurred--as a jealous husband shot his wife and her lover. This causes Mercouri's character to further lament her life and she spends most of the film drinking and talking and brooding. This is THE problem with the film. It is VERY talky and has very little in the way of plot. As a result, it felt very dull to me...very dull indeed. A rather lifeless and talky mess--a rare case where Dassin had a misfire.

Melina is Maria, a beautiful wife and mother who happens to be an alcoholic, as well as extremely neurotic. On a trip to Spain with her husband (Peter Finch) and their close friend (Romy Schneider), they end up in an overcrowded hotel whose city is dealing with rolling blackouts and a murderer on the run. After witnessing Finch and Schneider making out, an already drunk Maria finds the hiding killer, a young Spaniard who killed his wife in a fury after finding out she was the town tramp. She takes him out of town and promises to return, a promise of course that ends up in tragedy.There is so little plot, but Mercouri gives a sensitive and earthy portrayal, playing a woman whose problems only begin with the bottle. This could have been wrapped up in an hour long anthology TV show, but the film stretches out to just under 90 minutes, fortunate because any longer, it would become more grating than Mercouri's neurotic character, a woman I sympathized with, but only for so long. Finch and Schneider are secondary to the plot; It's more a character study for Maria. It gets a bit erotic in one sequence when Mercouri and Schneider shower together, but the promised eroticism between Mercouri and the Spanish killer (saying not a word) never comes out, which makes the lonely Maria's obsession with him seem pointless unless she's just on a suicide mission. As the film draws to a close, Finch wanders through the streets of Madrid calling out his wife's name ("Maria!"), I half expected him to break into the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim song of the same name.

I remember when this film opened in London in 1967. It opened simultaneously with 'Accident' by Joe Losey, and 'Accident' eclipsed this one, as they were considered too similar: mysterious, conveying ineffable unspoken currents between people, a pervasive air of unreality and aetherial suggestiveness of things that could not quite be seen. Of the two, this was the more difficult to describe and comprehend. So 'Accident' ran for a long time, while this closed in a week. It is only now that this neglected masterpiece, doubtless buried for decades because it was 'a commercial failure', has reappeared and I have been able to see it again. The colour has not faded and is as fresh as when it was first released. Jules Dassin surpassed himself with this masterpiece. It is his greatest work. Of course, it all relies heavily upon the genius of his wife, Melina Mercouri. It is the most subtle and understated, and hence probably the most powerful, of all her overwhelmingly brilliant performances. Mercouri was more than just a genius, she was a demented and Dionysiac genius, a genuine Greek maenad, a barefoot raver on the heights of Parnassus, in the best traditions of her culture. She is here well matched by Peter Finch at the top of his form, two years after he did 'The Pumpkin Eater' and 'Girl with Green Eyes', in both of which he had proved he was one of the leading film actors of his generation. Now in this intense film together, they speak the unspoken thoughts of a highly complex marriage and of emotional ties where two people have grown together at the root: but will the root snap? The beautiful and alluring Romy Schneider is part of a strange trio on a journey in Spain, where passion crackles in the air, and the flamenco hands clap, as a murderer aged only 19 comes into the story. I read the original novella by Marguerite Duras and thought it was poorly written and, although evocative, far from being a superior work. But it provided the atmosphere Dassin and Mercouri were looking for, a hothouse of semi-articulate and complex emotions, of raging currents of suppressed passions, a crisis of existential doubts, a veritable torrent or electrical storm, to match the real storm which lashes the stranded travellers in the film. Rarely has the invisible been filmed so successfully. This film was not really filmed in Spain, it was filmed in the ionosphere, and what appear to be buildings and people are really plasmas of charged particles. Dassin rose above reality, to film what lies behind it. These things are sometimes thought and felt, they are never seen. But here he reveals them to the eye, like a cloud parting. This is not mere cinema, it is something higher.

There's not much information available about this film, but it appears to have been shot in English by Jules Dassin, who had directed Melina Mercouri in the international hit, Never On Sunday, and had gone on to make the equally popular Topkapi. This film is a decidedly smaller and artier affair, based as it is on a Marguerite Duras novel. The look of the film is distinctly 60s, and Romy Schneider never looked more beautiful. Mercouri is excellent as an alcoholic who has fallen out of love with her husband (Peter Finch) and tries to find solace by helping a murderer escape from the Spanish police. Much of the action of the film goes unexplained. There is some truly remarkable photography by Gabor Pogany, an otherwise unheralded Hungarian cinematographer who plied his trade in the Italian film industry of the 50s and 60s to little acclaim. His work here is quite revelatory, at times bringing to mind the German expressionism of the teens and twenties. Overall, an abstract delight not a million miles away from Antonioni's Blow-Up.