A few nights ago we finally finished watching the classic Zorba the Greek (1964), starring Anthony Quinn. Without a doubt, Quinn deserved the Oscar nomination for Best Actor, as his Zorba displays and embraces character faults that might sink a lesser man. The film is luxurious, never hurried, exploring nooks and crannies that a lesser work would have shunned as superfluous; through these metaphorical treks, Zorba’s lack of education may limit him in some ways, while letting him see reality so much more clearly in others, and this we get to see in all the nauseating detail one might imagination. We squirmed in our chairs and sighed away the disappointments.
And the film is … bothersome. The gentle sex gets short schrift in this slightly maniacal commentary on Greek tribalism, as one woman is stoned and then has her throat fatally slashed, while another, the gentle Boubalina, is mislead, misused, and ultimately dies of a fatal fever. As she lingers, the vultures gather: the old ladies of the village, clad in black cloaks from brow to toe, some even worse clad in apparent dementia, wait with little patience for the demise of the gentle B, and even as she sings her final swan song, the bald birds begin the clatter of greed and disagreement, fighting in their old women ways over towels, rugs, frocks, and other incidentals, shrieking and cackling with no regard to the woman from whom they steal, for she is not of their village, not of their island, indeed, a consorter with foreign Admirals, is she not?
It is an impressively repulsive scene, worth catching for its wonderful staging.
Zorba works for an Englishman, a withdrawn writer with some Greek in his background, who has come to Greece to claim an inheritance: a plot of land containing important minerals. He hires Zorba on impulse to run the mine, and then compulsively clings to his view of life as something to fear and handle with extreme care; Zorba, his opposite, plunges through life like a mad bull chasing a cap clinging to its horn, spinning and kicking as men, women, and mad Englishmen fall into its path, feel its pummeling feet, and drag their battered bodies back to the walls to watch him continue his dance. For but a moment a drag on a cigarette, and a play on the Greek mandolin, and then back to the dance, the drink, and the women.
In the end, Zorba outplays his boss in this movie; the English repression is too strong, even if he finally relieves himself of its reins in the end. Did the failure of the mine mean anything? Did it mean anything to work it, to dream of riches? Was it all an illusion, the illusion of material riches when people are dying around you from the illnesses of the day? Even Zorba cannot know all the answers.
But we watched in dribs and drabs; some of it was genius, some of it was hard to watch, and some was both.
