Word: mercouri
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...into the government election center and lifted both hands high in the classic V sign. At their old headquarters building in the commercial and student section of Exarheia, youthful, bearded PASOK workers joyfully embraced as they heard the news about notable new Deputies who had won election: Actress Melina Mercouri (Never on Sunday), comfortably elected-to a seat representing the port of Piraeus-after an unsuccessful try in 1974; and Lady Amalia Fleming, widow of penicillin's discoverer, a bacteriologist and a political prisoner under the junta...
...most famous movie, "Never on Sunday" was her credo, but Melina Mercouri is now on the streets seven days a week-campaigning for election to the Greek parliament. In 1974 Actress-Activist Mercouri was defeated as a Socialist candidate from Piraeus, which includes the red-light district in her 1960 film. Back on the hustings again, she is confident of victory this time. Says Mercouri, 52: "They trust me not as a star, but rather as a woman with dynamism who knows how to fight, how to go on strike. I want to be a thorn in parliament...
Anne Meara manages to chew gum and act at the same time as a Gerald Ford figure; her role is amusing, but it fits poorly into the narrative. Playing Kissinger with a Greek accent, Melina Mercouri advises Jackson from abroad, using a portable phone to check on the abbess' progress. It is funny once or twice, but not as a running gag. Still, there are few problems with the acting save the occasional air of embarrassment from the nuns who deliver the poorest lines...
...imperceptibly into sanctity or into sanctimony as her plotting requires. Sandy Dennis has some moments of dimwit charm as a John Dean-like scapegoat who has none of Dean's shrewdness, or anybody else's either. But a running gag in which a globetrotting diplomatic nun (Melina Mercouri) periodically uses her briefcase radio-phone to coach Jackson in Kissingeresque Realpolitik falls rather flat. And the Gerald Ford figure is a football-playing nun (Anne Meara) who is always-guess what?-falling and bumping into things. That joke has long since been exhausted in TV sketches...
Movie audiences remember her best as that bighearted hooker who worked with gusto but Never on Sunday. In Athens these days, Actress Melino Mercouri has been trying her luck in a classic role-as Euripides' Medea, who slays her sons rather than surrender them to her philandering husband. "When she kills, she does so not for vengeance, but so that her sons will not be slaves," asserts Melina, 50. "There is nothing more to say, today or tomorrow, about a woman who believes in human and women's rights...