Never on Sunday

Many-sided musician though he was, the Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis will always be associated above all with the Jules Dassin film Never on Sunday. Set in a Greek port and starring Melina Mercouri, as a prositute who works only from Monday to Saturday, the film received two Oscar nominations (for Mercouri and Dassin) in 1960 but won its major distinction with the Oscar awarded to Hadjidakis for best song of the year. With its raunchy tune and its witty lyrics, both of them written specially for Mercouri, Hadjidakis’s “Never on Sunday” was something that the jury of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences clearly could not resist.