Sherry Chandler » Zorba the Greek
Zorba the Greek
Back in 1964, the man with whom I went to see Zorba the Greek disliked it so much he walked out in the middle of it. I, having no other way to get home,* went with him. My favorite role, the little woman trailing along three steps behind the big strong irate man.
So there is that piece of long unfinished business checked off the list.
Beyond the twinkle in Anthony Quinn’s eyes, however, and despite its 7.8 IMDb rating and three Oscars, I found the film a pale shadow of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel of the same title.
And, alas, even the novel is one of those works in which women, however vividly portrayed, are only foils to the important male actors at the center. (It is the problem, or a variation on the problem, I find with The Road.)
No doubt the novel is a true reflection of the way things were at that time in that place. And the way things have been in many times in many places. But I would like to have known more about those wizened toothless women of Crete.
So, in the end, neither the novel nor the movie has any more to teach me than did that man in the first paragraph.
Except maybe to stay away from sensitive, bookish young men because they can get you killed.
*The movie was showing at one of the palatial long-razed movie theaters on Main Street in Lexington, Kentucky, a good fifty miles from my home in Owen County.
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