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i said the same thing to a friend when i was telling him about this movie earlier today. here we go again, western folk telling others how they should live. oh well.

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This film is even more pertinent and poignant with Greece's current financial difficulties. Homer Thrace is now German.

Away with the manners of withered virgins

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In watching this film recently, I couldn't help but think that it is an excellent allegory for the current situation in the world. - pmamolou

Actually, at the time Never on Sunday was made, it could have been an allegory of Greece's recent history, specifically the Greek Civil War, which erupted just after World War Two.

In that civil war, the United States supported the Greek government against the communist insurgents, with the Greek government eventually triumphing thanks to the financial support of the Truman Administration. In fact, Greece was the first stage in what became the Truman Doctrine, the policy of containment that, along with its competing policy of rollback, came to define American actions during the Cold War: Greece was the first of several countries in which the US backed right-wing and/or anticommunist forces or governments against popular and/or communist or socialist forces or governments, all in the name of defeating global communism.

However, it should be noted that it was Greek communist partisans who provided the greatest resistance to the Nazi/Axis occupiers of Greece from 1940 to 1944; in fact, the Greek resistance was one of the most effective indigenous resistances of the war, while the Nazi occupation of Greece was one of the most brutal of the war--no small achievement. As a result, Greece was left deeply divided between the political left and right in the immediate postwar period with sentiment high for the resistance while elements of the right included those who collaborated with the Nazis. And if the prevailing perception now is that communists are de facto evil, please note that the Western Allies were allied with the communists, most notably in the form of the Soviet Union, to defeat the Nazis in particular and fascism in general during the war, and that after the war that sense of fellowship still lingered at least for another year or two.

As a side note, during the Greek Civil War, an American journalist working for CBS named George Polk was murdered in Greece, and an American award for outstanding radio or television journalism, the Polk Award, was subsequently named in his honor. Polk was critical of both sides in the civil war, and initially it was reported that the communists had killed him. But an investigation at the time by former Office of Strategic Services members (the OSS was the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) concluded that it was more likely that Polk had been killed by right-wingers, particularly as Polk had, just before his death, alleged that members of the Greek government had embezzled $250,000 from Truman Administration funds given to Greece as part of the Doctrine.

Thus, given that Dassin was blacklisted from Hollywood pretty early on, I am sure he was aware of American involvement in the Greek Civil War a decade before he made Never on Sunday. However, given that the film is a light-hearted, although clunky, look at culture conflict, I don't know that I'd call it a full-fledged allegory; I'd say that recent events "slyly inform" it.

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"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

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