Dancing Down Memory Lane with Zorba the Greek

In 1964, the cool kids discovered Greece. Greek line-dancing was taught to enthusiastic hipsters at folkdance cafés across the country. Souvlaki was the snack of choice, and ouzo became a favored tipple. Everyone (even Joni Mitchell) wanted to go camp out on a lonely beach on some Greek isle. Why this passion for all things Hellenic? Chalk it up to the outsized success of a small film, Zorba the Greek.

 Zorba The Greek was directed by Michael Cacoyannis, a talented Cypriot who launched his career with works performed in Greek. In 1962 I first encountered his Electra, adapted from the classical text of Euripides, and I still remember its raw power. Years later I marveled at how he could people The Trojan Women with some of the world’s brightest international stars (Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Genevieve Bujold, Irene Papas as Helen of Troy), set them against the rugged Greek landscape, and vividly convey what Euripides’ anti-war tragedy was all about.

 I was an arty kid, willing to read subtitles and open to watching the playing out of a text that dates back to 415 BC. Admittedly, not everyone in my generation had my arcane tastes. But we all found it easy to adore Zorba the Greek, a film full of love and laughter, at the same time that it explored in heart-wrenching detail the tragedies of life. Adapted by Cacoyannis from a well-loved novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, a nine-time nominee for the Nobel Prize for literature, the film gave Hollywood’s Anthony Quinn (who also produced) his most iconic role. He’s a marvel as a man who functions as a life-force: passionate, roguish, someone who fights off tears by dancing his heart out on the sands of Crete.

 Quinn’s opposite number in the film is Alan Bates as Basil, the strait-laced young Englishman who must be taught to laugh at fate. Then there’s Lila Kedrova, who picked up an Oscar for her portrayal of a vulnerable Frenchwoman, the keeper of a shabby hotel in a small Greek village, The final main character, played by Cacoyannis favorite Irene Papas, is known only as The Widow. Her essentially non-speaking role calls forth all her beauty and dignity. She’s the solitary young woman, clad in black from head to toe, who moves silently through the town, hated by all the local wives, lusted after by their husbands. It’s clear enough to all of us that something dreadful is about to happen.

 As viewers, we never find out anything about the Widow, nor what became of her husband. In a sense, we in the audience are in the same position as Alan Bates’ character: we’re outsiders, learning about a culture we don’t entirely understand. Though the movie contains some brief conversations in subtitled Greek, mostly it’s in English, spoken by characters (like Basil, like Kedrova’s Madame Hortense, even like Zorba himself) who are not genuinely part of the local scene. In a film that acknowledges a language barrier as one of the things that separate people from one another, visuals are particularly important. And so they are here. The Oscar-winning black & white camerawork of Walter Lassally graphically highlights the stark drama that’s part of this town’s life. One moment I particularly recall captures the moments immediately following the death of Madame Hortense. The elderly crones of the neighborhood, all clad in widow’s weeds, steal into the bedchamber where her illness-wracked body still lies. Like the harpies in classical tales, they silently make off with every trinket she owns, leaving her room stripped bare..

 Then of course there’s Mikis Thedorakis’ evocative, dance-worthy score. Opa!

Michael Cacoyannis and Zorba the Greek: Shall We Dance?

Michael Cacoyannis? Not a name most people know. Zorba the Greek? Mention this title, and I feel like dancing. I suspect I’m not alone.

When I learned last week that Cacoyannis had died at the age of ninety, my thoughts immediately turned to the 1964 film that gave Anthony Quinn his last Oscar nomination. Quinn, the Irish-Mexican actor who grew up in the barrios of East L.A., played characters of many ethnicities, but found his signature role in Alexis Zorba, the part-time handyman/full-time life force who teaches repressed Englishman Alan Bates to celebrate the joy of being alive. On the beaches of Crete, Zorba sounds his barbaric yawp (to use an appropriately Whitmanesque phrase), staving off death, grief, and failure by lifting his arms skyward and dancing out his pagan emotions.

The film, based on the novel by perennial Nobel Prize runner-up Nikos Kazantzakis, was brilliantly filmed by Cacoyannis, who tightened the story, choreographed its dramatic moments for maximum impact, and brought to the screen the austere beauty of Crete’s landscape and its people. A huge international hit, it was nominated for seven Oscars (including best picture) and won three. The big winner that year was My Fair Lady, and the contrast between the glossy Technicolor musical and the small black-and-white art film could not have been more striking. Every young person I knew would have given the nod to Zorba the Greek, which we adopted as a statement of the kind of adult life we all wanted to live. Listen to Zorba summing up the young Englishman’s character: “You’ve got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else . . . he never dares cut the rope and be free.”

We of the Baby Boom generation, who were quickly approaching adulthood in 1964, yearned to be free. We wanted political freedom, intellectual freedom, sexual freedom. In 1964, some of us were traveling to the Deep South as Freedom Riders, trying to extend the freedom of the voting booth to those who’d been denied it for generations. Many of us would soon be marching in the streets in defiance of the military that was sending young American men to fight and die in Vietnam. The advent of birth control pill was changing the way we viewed our bodies. Not all of us were activists, but at least we could dance. And dance we did. Zorba the Greek launched a national movement that saw folk dance clubs spring up across America. There, to the lilt of bouzouki music—the kind we knew and loved from Mikis Theodorakis’s Zorba the Greek score—we could leap and sway and sweat, dancing out our youthful hopes for the future.

Michael Cacoyannis made films other than Zorba the Greek, fifteen in all. Two years before Zorba, I’d been galvanized by his Greek-language adaptation of Euripides’ classic tragedy, Electra, starring the soulful Irene Papas. It is visually arresting, using silence as powerfully as any movie I know. Cacoyannis was also gutsy enough to bring Greek tragedy to the American screen, by starring Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Genevieve Bujold, and Papas in The Trojan Women. I remember this as an unsparing rendition of the ancient tragedy, in which the defeated women of Troy lament the loss of their husbands, lovers, and sons. An impeccable film, but not fun to watch: I badly missed the exuberance of Zorba. Today I salute him and Cacoyannis: Opa!