Never on Sunday

Never on Sunday (1960) is a Greek comedy you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Jules Dassin. He also appears onscreen as Homer — an earnest American academic who arrives in Piraeus to study ancient Greece and ends up fixated on Ilya (Melina Mercouri), a cheerful streetwalker who takes Sundays off without exception and refuses to apologise for a thing.

Homer decides Ilya needs saving, educating, redirecting toward higher culture. Ilya disagrees. She knows exactly who she is, has more friends than Homer has read philosophers, and treats her day off as sacred. Dassin plays the whole culture-clash as farce, but the film's sympathies are entirely with Ilya from the opening frame.

Mercouri took Best Actress at Cannes. Manos Hadjidakis picked up the Oscar for Best Original Song with the title theme, which became one of the most widely heard melodies of the early 1960s. Stream Never on Sunday (1960) on iFILM.