Zorba the Greek
by Mihalis Kakogiannis
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Actor: Alan Bates, Anthony Quinn, Irene Papas, Lila Kedrova, Sotiris MoustakasDirector: Mihalis Kakogiannis
Brand: Fox
Producer: Anthony Quinn
Cinematographer: Walter Lassally
Editor: Mihalis Kakogiannis
Producer: Mihalis Kakogiannis
Writer: Mihalis Kakogiannis
Writer: Nikos Kazantzakis
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Anamorphic, Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dubbed
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 142 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-08-03
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: International Classics
DVD Reviews of Zorba the Greek
DVD Review: Toothless Crones Cracked Nuts When Young
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is one of the all time classics. It should be never remade, particularly never in colour, nor with foreign actors like Penelope Cruz (unconvincing as a Greek) and Nicholas Cage! The Zorba film succeeded as most of the roles were played by well-known Greek movie actors of the early 1960s. Anthony Quinn is one of the very few foreign actors who could successfully imitate a Greek character. The black and white format is essential to the black comedy/drama aspects of the movie. The novel must have been very difficult to adapt to the screen and yet it was exceptionally well-handled.
I first watched the movie when it came out in a London theatre and bought the LP sound track as soon as it became available. Anyone who was enthralled with the film should try and get hold of the book (available in French and English) or if able to read Greek the original version as inevitably some things get lost in translation. The film has a few minor flaws (as opposed to goofs) which may not be apparent. For example, careful viewers who watch the scene on the ship when Zorba rants against Alan Bates over a dolphin is incomprehensible unless one has read the book. There must have been some bad editing of the script or the footage and essential lines needed for the interaction to make sense are missing.
Many people, even Greeks I know, are convinced that the story's Zorba was a Cretan. Not so, the book makes it very plain that he was a miner from Makedonia (not to be confused with the former Yugoslav republic of the same name) who in his own words was born under the heights of Mount Olympus, Greece's highest peak. Many viewers, and some of the Amazon reviewers, wince at the violence and the crude manners of the Cretan peasants as depicted in the film. The setting of the book, however, is in the late 1920s. The old French courtesan refers to events that happened in Crete during its revolution against Ottoman rule many years before the setting of the film. Zorba, the Makedonian, claims that he played a combative role in that revolution.
Zorbas's straight man in the film is played by a young Alan Bates as a person of mixed British-Greek parentage who inherits a mine. In the book the role is played by the narrator, a writer, who is purely Greek and who would have little trouble in a Cretan setting except that he is a college-trained intellectual, one who is gradually won over by Zorbas's natural philosophy. The actual Greek title of the novel "Vios kai Politeia tou Alexi Zorba" , which cannot be satisfactorily translated, conveys this. He does not inherit the mine, he rents it to occupy himself and get over the loss of his best frend killed in some remote war with the Turks near the Black Sea. The screen adapatation was right to omit the complex reasons for his trip to Crete which unecessarily interrupt the book's first chapter that really begins, as in the film, in a Piraeus quayside cafe during a storm.
The awful violence associated with the film's act of revenge, and the separate scenes of the looting of a dying woman's house would be more credible back in the 1920s but very unlikely to have occured some eighty years later. However, even today, a film director would have little problem in finding toothless crones in black for extras in any Greek village. Greek peasants are not very careful about their teeth and women often crack nuts with their jaws.
Description of Zorba the Greek
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