Phaedra

Phaedra, the young second wife of a Greek shipping magnate, is sent to London to bring home her husband's son by his first marriage for the summer. She and Alexis meet in a museum and whatever passes between them starts in that first moment. Once they are back inside an arrangement that involves the island, the family and the fortune, the affair can no longer be hidden. The end is ruin for the father, the son and the woman alike. Jules Dassin carries Euripides' Hippolytus into the twentieth-century shipping dynasties, where the fate of tragedy operates as the pressure of money and family order. The pairing of Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins looks odd at first, and the film's instability comes from exactly there. Mikis Theodorakis wrote the score. The Aston Martin sequence at the close is the most cited and most argued-over thing in it: the question of where melodrama tips over into something else is still open.