1960s, Comedy, Drama, Greek cinema

Zorba the Greek (1964)

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Director/Screenwriter: Michael Cacoyannis

By Roderick Heath

My father Douglas Heath died late in 2018 at the age of 71. Dad was a lifelong cinephile. Many of the films he held in fierce affection were movies he saw during his late teens and twenties, a time when he was often homeless and constantly adrift in life, but also intellectually voracious and consuming culture in any way he could. He told me he knew my mother was the woman for him when he took her to see Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade (1967) at a revival screening and she loved it (a previous girlfriend had walked out during the opening credits). Later in life when asked what his favourite movie was, he tended to name one of two films as his favourite. One was the Robert Wise-directed, Val Lewton-produced The Body Snatcher (1945), which he held in particular esteem in part because of its dreamlike evocation of the Scotland he’d been forced to leave as a child when his father decided to emigrate. But the movie he most consistently named was Michael Cacoyannis’ Zorba the Greek. It’s not hard for me to see why Dad was so particularly passionate about Cacoyannis’ film. Like Zorba, my father had done every job known to humanity, could make friends in an empty room, had talents he wouldn’t sell, and those he did usually left him rolling amidst the wreckage wondering what went wrong. I remember the first time I watched the film with him, as a kid, and being confused at the switchbacks of high tragedy and knockabout comedy throughout. I asked him what kind of movie this was. Dad responded, “It’s life.”
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Cacoyannis’s oeuvre in general and Zorba the Greek in particular perhaps need revival these days. Alongside American blow-in Jules Dassin, Cacoyannis captured the world’s attention for Greek film, well before the arrival of Theo Angelopoulos and the current brace of figures like Yorgos Lanthimos and Rachel Athina Tsangari. If Zorba the Greek still has any cultural cachet it’s certainly thanks to its famous theme by composer Mikis Theodorakis, which became emblematic for the post-WWII Greek diaspora and introduced something of the spirit of Greek rembetiko music to the world at large. Ironically the theme’s popularity might have done the movie few favours, perhaps making it seem like escapist exotica from another age along with the likes of Black Orpheus (1959). Cacoyannis’ reputation meanwhile never quite recovered from the bruising reception to his follow-up to Zorba the Greek’s great success, The Day The Fish Came Out (1967), a film which, in spite of its gutsiness in trying to be a queer-themed comedy at a time when that was still pretty outre, still can’t even claim cult status. But Cacoyannis’ career also included great, highly underappreciated adaptations of Euripides, including Elektra (1962) and The Trojan Women (1971), and he reunited with Zorba the Greek star Alan Bates in the early 2000s for a version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
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The film was an adaptation of the novel The Life and Times of Alexis Zorba by Nikos Kazantzakis, (called Zorba the Greek in English-language editions), who had earned international interest for contemporary Greek writing up until his death in 1957. Kazantzakis’ art was built around apparently contradictory precepts, contradictions that gave his books their feverish sway. As a Marxist writer Kazantzakis wanted to dig into the authentic character of Greece’s working and peasant classes, and he initially annoyed cultural watchdogs by writing in demotic or popular modern Greek. But Kazantzakis was also compelled by a defiantly personal religious sensibility, which gave birth to his other best-known book, The Last Temptation of Christ, filmed by Martin Scorsese in 1988: the infamy that met Scorsese’s film had already been anticipated by the reaction of religious authority to the novel. Zorba the Greek was Kazantzakis’ attempt to summarise the vitality of the national character, so long buffeted by poverty and oppression since the ancient glory days, presented through the title character who’s uneducated but possesses great wisdom after a long, hard-knock life, and sufficient unto himself. Somewhat ironically, the character was bound to become synonymous with the Mexican-Irish actor cast in the film role, Anthony Quinn.
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Quinn was another man who identified deeply with the character nonetheless, as an actor who’d lifted himself out of a childhood of grinding poverty through creative talent and achieved a career as one of Hollywood’s perennial supporting players, in large part thanks to his ready capacity to play any ethnicity under the sun. Quinn owed some of his early career traction to marriage to Cecil B. DeMille’s adopted daughter Katherine, and the filmmaking titan gave Quinn a lot of work, eventually producing Quinn’s lone directorial outing, a remake of his father-in-law’s The Buccaneer (1958). Quinn eventually captured two Oscars in the mid-1950s for Viva Zapata! (1952) and Lust For Life (1956), playing the more degraded brother of the folk hero in the former and Paul Gauguin opposite Kirk Douglas’ Vincent Van Gogh in the latter. But it wasn’t until Federico Fellini cast him in La Strada (1954) that Quinn gained traction as a leading man and became a popular figure in European as well as Hollywood film. Often cast as a Latin roué in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the grizzled and thickening Quinn became exalted for his ability to play strong, earthy, eruptive personalities, usually with a brutish streak, who thrive at the expense of the more neurotic, delicate, or victimised people they orbit. By playing Zorba, Quinn tried to revise his screen persona in inhabiting a similar role who nonetheless tries to pass on some of talent for life to others.
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Cacoyannis laid specific claim to the material with his emphases. Cacoyannis came from Cyprus and his father had been closely involved the British administration of the island at the time. Cacoyannis spent much of his youth in Britain, including a stint in the RAF during World War II, and so the novel’s narrator and viewpoint character Basil became a half-Greek, half-English intellectual trying to get back in touch with his roots. A subplot involving his ill-fated romance with a local widow was emphasised and refashioned into a tale within the tale close in nature to one of the classical Greek tragedies sporting a female figure of titanic suffering Cacoyannis was so compelled by. Basil, played by Bates, is on the way to Crete, having inherited a small property there that belonged to his father incorporating a seaside shack and a disused lignite mine. When the ferry to Crete is delayed by a storm, Basil waits with other passengers in the terminal; Cacoyannis offers the subtly weird touch of the sound of the storm abating as Basil senses a strange presence, and notices Zorba staring through the fogged glass. Zorba, on the lookout for an opportunity, quickly attaches himself to Basil, offering to serve him in any capacity he requires. Zorba seems initially a sort of vulgar, unctuous grotesque borne out of the storm, but Basil quickly takes a shine to his energy and gains increasing respect for him as he reveals surprising turns of personality, like his refusal to offer his talent for playing the santuri: “In work I am your man, but in things, like playing and singing, I am my own – I mean free.” Basil employs Zorba specifically to get the mine working again, and they board the ferry together.
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The corner of Crete where Basil’s land is proves poverty-stricken and defined by a finite balance the two arrivals find themselves doomed to disturb. The two men spend their first night in the town in a crumbling guest house amusingly styled the Hotel Ritz, owned by Madame Hortense (Lila Kedrova), an aging former dancer from Parisian nightclubs and courtesan who airily regales them with accounts of her once-wild life. She dances saucily with both men, although it’s Zorba who ends up in bed with her, after Basil, with the heedlessness of youth, humiliates her when he can’t help but laugh at her increasingly overripe anecdotes. After setting up home in the shack on Basil’s property, he and Zorba hire some workers and tackle the mine, but find the wooden props are too badly rotten to risk starting operations, after Zorba is almost buried alive twice. Spying a large forest down the coast, Zorba travels there and finds it’s owned by a monastery; after befriending the monks, he hits upon a plan to use their lumber to rebuild the mine, requiring a large zipline to be built down the side of a mountain. Basil sinks the last of his capital into supporting Zorba’s plan, whilst Zorba, who considers passion a veritably holy thing, in turn encourages Basil to romance a young and well-to-do widow (Irene Papas) who’s the object of desire for every man in the village, but only the young stranger has a chance with her after he aids her gallantly.
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Zorba the Greek revolves around fundamental oppositions, represented most immediately by Basil and Zorba, the difference between head and heart, reason and instinct, proletarian and intellectual, modernity and archaic lifestyles. Basil’s cautious and thoughtful manner stands in near-perfect opposition to Zorba’s gregarious, life-greedy sensibility, but the two men become inseparable precisely because they’re such natural foils, and has something to offer the other. Basil’s stiff Anglo-Saxon half wants to steer clear of intense and potentially unstable situations, whilst Zorba believes that’s the only way to go: “Living means to take off your belt and look for trouble.” The essence of Kazantzakis’ book, a dialogue of values and viewpoints between two long alienated ways of approaching the world represented by two mismatched yet amicable avatars, comes through. Zorba has plenty of literary antecedents, of course, as the voice of common wisdom, stretching back to Hamlet’s graveyard digger. Zorba the Greek never proposes that Zorba is a saintly character, although he also has aspects of a holy fool: he’s a sexist whoremonger and spendthrift, given to expansive inspirations and notions that don’t ever quite seem thought through. The main lesson he teaches Basil is that tragic moments in life can’t be avoided, and it makes more sense to celebrate living as something sufficient in itself than to live in fear of consequence or search for absurd designs behind it all.
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Zorba’s own melancholy history is grasped at intervals, as he memorably answers Basil question whether he ever had a family with the admission, “Wife – children – the full catastrophe.” Later, after one of his frenetic moments of incantatory dancing, he confesses to Basil that he danced the same way after his young son died. In a drolly comedic sequence, he becomes something like a literal Pan figure, as he goes to take a look at the monastery’s forest and scares the hell out of some of the monks when they find him hiding, so filthy from his forays in the mine they think he’s a literal devil rather than his mere advocate. Zorba plays this to his advantage as all the monks come out to hunt the demon only to finish up getting drunk with him. Zorba pronounces, with dubious theology if certain feeling, that the only sin God won’t forgive is if “a woman calls a man to her bed and he does not come.” Zorba gets along like a house on fire with the lusty, romantic Hortense, who subsists in a bubble of melancholic recollection of her glory days as exalted concubine for warriors and statesmen, an embodiment of forgotten belle époque and spirit of sensual exaltation who remembers being bathed in champagne by her harem of naval officers who then proceeded to drink the liquor off her body. But Zorba has no intention of marrying again or settling down, taking up with a young tart when he goes to Chania to buy tools and parts for his project. Basil semi-accidentally commits Zorba to marrying Hortense when she insists on hearing the contents of a letter he writes his friend, substituting romantic feelings for Hortense for Zorba’s actual boasts of erotic adventuring.
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When Kazantzakis wrote his novel he was trying to bridge the ways Greeks had of looking at themselves, and to forge a new literary zone for himself and followers to inhabit. When Cacoyannis made his film, he faced the task of making a relatively esoteric piece of regional portraiture interesting to international viewers. Cacoyannis had been directing films since 1953’s Windfall in Athens, but with Zorba the Greek caught a similar wind to what had made Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960) big worldwide hits. Cacoyannis absorbed the new lexicon of New Wave cinema, as Zorba the Greek is replete with jump cuts, zoom shots, and interludes of hand-held shooting, and took to the latter technique in particular as a way of getting close to his characters and evoking their extreme emotions. Over and above that, Cacoyannis might as as well have been trying to reconcile principles of early ‘60s art cinema style with more traditional theatrical understandings of performance and character. Moreover, Zorba’s unpretentious and expansive sensibility repudiated the navel-gazing tenor of the Italian “alienation” mode and the hyperintellectualised aspects of the New Wave, and anticipated the oncoming age of the counterculture, when Kazantzakis’ writing would find many new fans.
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Cacoyannis’ interest in behaviour as an object of study in itself distinguished his work from much other filmmaking of the period however, and laid down a blueprint that countrymen like Angelopoulos and Lanthimos would explore in their own diverse ways. Cacoyannis stands off for long stretches to watch Quinn or Bates in character eddying in moments of private compulsion and eccentricity, as in a scene in which the bored and bothered Basil tries falteringly to recreate some of Zorba’s exultant dance moves, Zorba’s own seduction of Hortense. Scenes of rollicking comedy, reminiscent of the likes of Rossellini and Buñuel, retain the same method, in Zorba’s encounter with the monks, and engaging in teasing sensual overtures with the young prostitute. When Zorba returns from drinking with the monks, he starts dancing in Basil’s shack, confronting his friend with the near-deranged force of his passion and need to unfetter the forces straining within him, and some wandering musicians, seeing Zorba on the move, start playing to whip him up and drive him on. Quinn and Cacoyannis locate something disquieting, even menacing, in this scene, as the camera reels about the room with Quinn and captures something noir-like in the heavy shadows and increasingly haggard, frantic look of Zorba. Even after Basil chases off the musicians Zorba keeps dancing and the fugue only climaxes when Zorba collapses exhausted on the sand and narrates to Basil the story of how he danced just this way after his son died. Zorba alchemises both physical and mental passion into direct expression, moving into a state of being without past or future.
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Basil’s situation, trapped between languages and adrift in a place where little of meaning is actually spoken aloud anyway, except by Zorba, ironically gave Cacoyannis licence to play much of the film as a kind of silent movie or theatrical pantomime, with dashes of classical theatre and ballet incorporated as well. Such method is plain in the humorous sequences but also defines the most crucial dramatic moments. The sequence when the widow makes her first significant appearance unfolds almost entirely in silence, as she chases her escaped goat only to find several of the village men have herded it inside a tavern to hide it, vibrates with an evocation of repressed lust and hatred turning to a toxic stew, as the widow scans the men with haughty challenge, the camerawork turning madcap amidst the laughing and jostling as she tries to catch the animal. The foul tenor of the episode is only dispelled by the grace of Basil handing the widow his umbrella, a simple gesture of gentlemanly feeling that quickly defines both their lives. The widow has a sort of servant in the mute and stunted villager Mimithos (Sotiris Moustakas), who has a faintly Chaplinesque quality, or perhaps an extremely devolved version of the pantomime character Pierrot, slavishly enthralled to beauty.
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Zorba encourages Basil to make a play for the widow because “I saw how she looks at you,” the only true barometer, and Basil’s subsequent encounters with her unfold on a level of gesture, as when she sends back his umbrella along with food and rosewater, and then encounters him on a trail, charged with mutual awareness. The quality of the gaze obsesses Cacoyannis, sometimes furious, sometimes challenging, baleful, exalting, desirous. The sequence in The Trojan Women when he would stage a chorus recitation with the faces of many women staring into the camera is presaged by the sure sense here that eyes might be the windows of the soul but are also its cameras, demanding and excoriating in return. Another striking moment of mimed intensity comes when several of the villagers, infuriated by the knowledge Basil is spending the night with the widow, cruelly tell a young man of the village who’s obsessively infatuated with her, Pavlo (Yorgo Voyagis), holding him down in his tavern chair and whispering in his ear as she struggles and resists the knowledge as if he’s having evil spells cast down upon him. Meanwhile Basil’s time with the widow is a scene of pathetic displays, the widow experiencing a fit of inexplicable grief, followed by Basil suddenly and desperately grasping her naked form when she seems to feel embarrassed, revealing himself, and the depth of his feeling, for the first time.
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Gesture is just as important as gaze in Zorba the Greek, precisely where Cacoyannis identifies much of life actually happens, in silence, in cues and exchanges that have their own meanings. Acceptance of one thing is also rejection of another, however implicit or unintentional, and the widow’s affair with Basil drives the maddened and despairing Pavlo to drown himself, a tragedy which his father Mavrandoni (George Foundas) and other village men blame on the widow rather than Basil. They carry his body up to her door as if in accusation: Mimithos stands on her garden wall ready to defend her, only to fall off and be mocked by one of the old women of the village, “Is he her lover too?” Sometime later a gang lies in wait to ambush her as she goes to church. Mavrandoni bars her from entering, and villagers hurl stones at her, before one of the angry and offended men, Manolakas (Takis Emmanuel), moves to slay her in an honour killing; the circle of eyes that surrounded the widow in the tavern sequence has now grown and become malignant, a hydra now ready to devour. Basil, alerted from inside the church by the ruckus but unable to break through the cordon about the fateful scene, instead sends Mimithos to fetch Zorba, and he arrives just in time to save the widow from his knife in a trial of strength that sees Zorba victorious. But as Zorba stares down the other men and leads the widow out of the cordon, Mavrandoni springs upon her and cuts her throat.
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Cacoyannis’ love of tragedy and grand theatre certainly found its element in this movement of the film, and it’s a hard scene to take, in its portrayal of virulent communal misogyny and the cheerless confrontation with the truth that, however much moral and physical authority Zorba has and intellectual refinement and purity of spirit Basil retains, both are finally, easily outmatched when an entire community decides to consume its own. Basil confesses in a disorientated mumble his utter incapacity to help. Basil and Zorba are reduced to mere bystanders in someone else’s grim fate; indeed, the narrative implies, that is all anyone is, each in turn. One notable difference between source and film sometimes targeted by commentators is that Kazantzakis held Crete in greater affection, and balanced his portrait of the island’s inhabitants with more forgiving and indulgent aspects, whilst Cacoyannis seems much more prosecutorial of the Cretans he surveys in their brutal, hypocritical morality and vulture-like greed when they flock to raid the dying Hortense’s possessions. That said, Cacoyannis’ camera readily contextualises such behaviour, where scarcity engenders a form of madness that readily breaks out if the forms designed to keep life processes in play are disturbed. The widow’s commodity of beauty is retained chiefly because she doesn’t have to labour in the fields like the other women. Hortense’s pretences to keeping alive a little corner of romantic beauty are paltry by comparison with her dreams but might as well be royalty to her poorer neighbours.
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In Cacoyannis’s eye Zorba seems nonetheless less the archetypal common man than an exceptional one, one forged by a hard life of being used and absorbing such cruel lessons. An earlier scene in the film sees Basil facetiously accuse Zorba of being unpatriotic (in part to deflect Zorba from asking questions about the widow’s gifts) because he readily cited “a wise old Turk” as one source of his wisdom, stoking Zorba’s anger as he reports having “killed men, raped women” in the name of patriotism, led through paths of painful wisdom in a long life of being used to the conclusion that only his own sense of good and bad, right and wrong should guide his actions. The widow’s murder has no apparent consequence in the film (in the novel, Mavrandoni was hunted and eventually arrested), and of course there is nothing to be done: no rite or process breathes life back into a corpse. Basil and Zorba are left only to confront their own anguish, sparking one of the great dialogue exchanges in cinema, as Zorba demands Basil explain why the young die: “What’s the use of all your damn books if they don’t tell you that – what the hell do they tell you?” “They tell me,” Basil replies oh so poetically, “About the agony of men who can’t answer questions like yours.” To which Zorba retorts with all his peasant defiance, “I spit on their agony.”
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Quinn and Bates play off each-other beautifully throughout the film, and Bates, whilst cast in the far less eye-catching part, nonetheless gives the film its true centre. Carefully suggesting the lingering sorrow of loss and the wordless sense of need that drives him to Crete and makes him hire Zorba, Bates, with his inimitably lucid gaze and capacity for suggesting roiling emotions at war with cool intellect, balances Quinn’s evocation of bravura with a portrayal of a man for whom self-expression is like watching a golem trying to fashion its own clay. Papas, who had worked with Quinn on The Guns of Navarone and with Cacoyannis in the title role of Elektra, was always an astounding movie presence and she’s mesmerising here, her Widow a force of sensual imperative incarnate, glowing-eyed in the dark amidst the olive trees of her estate, until she’s revealed as all too human as Basil ventures close. Director of Photography Walter Lasally’s close-ups, particularly of Papas, are something close to shamanism in their enthralled study of intense and remarkable faces.
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Kedrova however emerged with the only Oscar for the film’s actors, with her marvellous blend of absurdity and pathos. Zorba’s decision to try and make Hortense happy, as he realises she’s dying, by actually agreeing to marry her, becomes another raw lesson in accepting loss. After she ventures out in rain to see Zorba, he goes through a mock wedding ceremony with her, and then looks after her as she becomes dreadfully ill. As it becomes clear she’s dying, the villagers flock to the Hotel Ritz as because Hortense isn’t officially married and has no relatives, the state will claim her belongings. The moment she expires, they begin stripping the valuables out of her house, leaving Zorba to only her corpse splayed upon her bed and her caged pet parrot in an otherwise completely bare room, a hyperbolic depiction of life and death as states of being and not being. Zorba’s simple reaction is take her parrot in hand and leave with Basil, after drinking a toast to her soul offered, with silent and conciliatory meaning, by Manolakis.
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Although Theodorakis’ theme is so well-known, it’s worth noting that his work throughout the film is excellent, snapping into lockstep with Cacoyannis’s images, investing hints of disquiet and abnormality as well as local flavour and comedy (Theodorakis became a significant voice of opposition to the military regime that took control of Greece in the late 1960s). An early scene, as Basil and Zorba travel on the ferry to Crete, becomes a kind of dance sequence as the passengers are tossed to and fro about as the ferry ploughs through heavy seas, reeling motions and editing choreographed with comic effect and Theodorakis scoring it like a madcap hoedown. Theodorakis’ scoring is also of course utterly vital to the film’s end. Zorba’s zipline proves to work a bit too well when they finally get around to testing in a moment of great ceremony and spectacle for the village, and the logs come flying down so fast they keep breaking, or ripping away and crashing, before shaking the whole array to pieces. Basil, aware he’s got no choice now but to go back to England, nonetheless asks Zorba to teach him to dance, and finally obtains the same talent Zorba has, laughing at disaster and determined to actually live life. Cacoyannis’ iconic final shot zooms back on the sight of the two men dancing on the beach, Theodorakis’ theme plucking away merrily on the soundtrack, two dancing idiots delivered from a sad world.

1970s, Auteurs, British cinema, Horror/Eerie, Scifi, Thriller

The Shout (1978)

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Director/Coscreenwriter: Jerzy Skolimowski

By Roderick Heath

Jerzy Skolimowski was born in Łódź, Poland just before the outbreak of World War II, and like many film talents of his time and nation, his life was doomed to be a strange tale of exile and wandering. After enduring a terrifying childhood in the midst of war, Skolimowski found repute early in his early twenties as a writer with a sideline passion for boxing. Skolimowski encountered Andrzej Wajda, then at the forefront of his generation’s film talents in Poland, and Wajda challenged him to rewrite the script of Innocent Sorcerers (1960), in which Skolimowski also acted, playing a pugilist. A spark of passion for a new art form lit in Skolimowski, who started attending film school and studied under Andrzej Munk, and graduated with a near-complete feature film to be assembled from all the fragments he had shot in that time. Skolimowski wrote the dialogue for Roman Polanski’s debut film, Knife in the Water (1962), before he began to make a name for himself with his autobiographical tales of growing up in post-war Poland, particularly Walkover (1966), about a boxer who defeats an opponent in the ring but is felled by him in a street fight. The political commentary of Hands Up! (1967) got him in trouble with authorities, and he found himself unable to return home. He drifted around western Europe for a time, and washed up in London, where his experiences would eventually be transmuted much later into his acclaimed 1982 film Moonlighting. Skolimowski debuted in English-language cinema with Deep End (1970), a story about a teenager’s sexual obsession with a slightly older woman that unfolds in tragicomic fashion. Sinking instantly from sight at the box office upon release, Deep End soon gained a dogged cult following.
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Skolimowski’s follow-ups, adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle — The Adventures of Gerard (1970) — and Vladimir Nabokov — King, Queen, Knave (1972) — were also flops and critically derided to boot, so Skolimowski did not get to make another film until 1978’s The Shout, an adaptation of a short story written by Robert Graves. Graves, best-known for his poetry and his diptych of erudite and blackly witty historical fiction I, Claudius and Claudius the God, is not a name usually associated with fantastical literature, but The Shout was an eerie and bizarre tale about magic and madness, one that was to prove a perfect springboard for Skolimowski’s talents. The resulting film captured him the Grand Prix at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Marco Ferreri’s Bye Bye Monkey). The Shout stands today as a lonely island in cinema, one of a handful of entries in the history of the cinefantastique that evokes vast possibilities with a spare, even abstract, method. Then again, to call The Shout a fantasy film might be to misclassify it. Actually, most any description of it runs the same risk. It also isn’t quite a horror film, not quite a domestic drama, not quite a sex farce, not quite a shaggy dog story that both describes and enacts abuse of credulity as to how convincing a well-told story can be even when it seems utterly lunatic.
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Skolimowski starts the film with images of a woman, Rachel Fielding (Susannah York), driving quickly through the countryside, springing out of the vehicle in a nurse’s uniform, and dashing inside an institutional building to behold three corpses laid out on tables under sheets. Checking the faces of each body, she comes to the last, and just as she draws the sheet back, Skolimowski teasingly dissolves into an eerie and tantalising shot of a man advancing slowly over a region of sandy dunes that could be deep desert, a sandy beach, or the cold and lonely stretch of the mind Dali constantly tried to paint. The figure advances on the camera until it can be seen properly as a black man wearing an old military jacket and clutching a pointed bone, a being of strange shamanic power and menace. From there Skolimowski leaps again in time to focus to a man riding a motorcycle, Charles Crossley (Alan Bates), passing the same Citroen mini Rachel drove earlier. This time Rachel is in the company of her husband, Anthony (John Hurt). Rachel drops a glum-looking Anthony at the same institution his wife was speeding to at the start. Both Anthony and another young man – Tim Curry, playing the role nominally that of Graves himself as ears to the story – advance into the institutional grounds wearing cricket gear. All this splintered time has more than mere arty intent, as it sets up a zone where identity, time, cause, and effect are all in flux. Graves has been asked to keep score of a cricket match between a team from a nearby town and a team partly comprised of people from the institution, which is a hospital for the mentally ill.
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Graves speaks to the chief psychiatrist (Robert Stephens), who seems to be encouraging the match for therapeutic reasons, and anticipates Graves’ encounter with the other man who’ll be scoring with him. When Graves asks if this man is mad, the psychiatrist illustrates the lack of a clear dichotomy by pointing to a tree that has a sane appearance and another one with less leaves and twisting limbs that is not quite so commonplace. Graves soon finds his companion is Crossley. The game of wits that persists between Crossley and the psychiatrist is suggested as each describes the other as the most intelligent person in the place and Crossley guesses that the doctor has used the line about the trees on Graves: “Very repetitive fellow.” Crossley spies Anthony walking out to the cricket pitch and becomes excited, and proposes to Graves to tell him the story of how Anthony lost his wife. Crossley’s story quickly proves to be his own as well, and the reason behind his agitated eagerness in seeing Anthony again proves to be contained within it. The earlier shot of the shaman marching across the dunes is deployed again, joined with Crossley on a subliminal level, a spirit-shape sneaking up upon Anthony and Rachel where they lay sunbathing on sand dunes near their Dorset home. They both snap into wakefulness in quivering alarm, as they think they’ve shared a dream of the same advancing figure. Rachel soon finds she’s missing a buckle from her sandal.
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On one level, under its atavistic hints and air of inscrutable numinous threat, The Shout is a portrait of a very English nightmare: the guest who invites himself in and won’t take the hint to leave, and swiftly proves so much more charismatic and interesting that he claims everything about him by right of psychic conquest as domestic courtesy is extended and abused. This facet is reminiscent of the sorts of stories of middle-class infidelity and marital tension often sarcastically referred to as the “infidelity in Hampstead” genre, as Anthony squirms regardless of his double standards at the spectacle of his wife being seduced by another man. But there’s also a crucial likeness with Knife in the Water as a tale of a troubled marriage given new and competitive zest by the inclusion of a third party, as well as sharing with Polanski a fascination for the fringes of the settled, civilised world, a place where all sorts of transformations, both lovely and repugnant, can occur. As a transplanted artist in a foreign culture, Skolimowski foregrounds the very Englishness of the story he tells here even as carefully portrays the feeling of being alienated from the landscape, and conveys that sense of hazy horizons through Crossley as a man who smudges the barriers between places and people. The rituals and uniforms of cricket are given totemic importance for a reason, for the psychiatrist tries to use them as a way of securing his patients in the game’s bucolic unfolding. But as anyone who knows the game well, it is actually defined by tension and the constant provocation of frustration by its jittery, trying rhythms. So Skolimowski drolly observes an underlying edginess under the equable surfaces of the match, and The Shout constantly rubs raw nerves in the same way. The asylum’s star player is a former test cricket bowler who loses his temper easily, and has it quickly stoked to boiling point by bad umpiring. One patient-turned-player (Jim Broadbent) has to retrieve a ball from a cowpat, getting shit all over his hands, and he becomes increasingly jittery and hysterical as the match proceeds. As Crossley recounts his narrative, the atmosphere constantly darkens and becomes more pregnant, as a thunder storm approaches, its dull rumbling thunder echoing through the leafy hospital grounds.
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Anthony is an experimental musician who spends his days creating new and unusual sounds in a makeshift studio in his house, whilst occasionally filling in playing organ in the church in the nearby town. Skolimowski depicts Anthony at work with a mesmeric fascination for the techniques he uses to make his effects, each creation an act transmuting a commonplace object into something extraordinary, like a haggard sardine tine scraped with a violin bow, or a fly trapped in a bulb taped to his microphone. When Anthony dashes to town on his bicycle after getting so wrapped up in his work he nearly forgets he’s due at the church, he pounds on the keys whilst making eyes at his lover in the town (Carol Drinkwater). When he returns to his bike, he finds the tyre flattened, an act performed by Crossley to contrive their meeting. Anthony tries to dodge Crossley’s angular, unwelcome conversation, but after gallivanting around the countryside with his lover finds him waiting for him again outside his house. Crossley claims to be on a walking holiday, and having only recently returned to England after spending eighteen years in the Australian outback. He invites himself to tea and entertains the bewildered Fieldings with his accounts of life with a remote Aboriginal tribe, and gives his testimony to having taken advantage of the tribe’s law and killed the four babies he had with his tribal wife, so that he would leave nothing of himself with them when he departed their society. This report drives a distraught Rachel from the room, in part, she admits later, because the Fieldings’ own marital unease is sourced in part in their own failure to have a child.
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Crossley also speaks about various magical feats he has witnessed or mastered himself when he submitted to the schooling of the indigenous sorcerers, referring to his soul as split in four pieces, and describing the shaman of the Fieldings’ nightmare, who was his principal teacher and a man even Crossley describes as “a genuinely terrifying figure.” Crossley recounts that man’s greatest feat of magic, in which he sliced the skin of his torso right around his navel and pulled the skin up like a shirt, an act that brought on torrential rain to end a long drought. Anthony sees that Crossley himself has a scar just like this around his belly. Crossley turns himself into a house guest with a fainting spell. He later offends Anthony by telling him he’s listened to his music and found it empty, but Anthony, though he throws a private tantrum, can’t quite work up the proper pith to toss his guest out. Distracted as he keeps dashing off to see his mistress, Anthony returns home to find Crossley developing a connection with Rachel that soon shades into outright erotic domination, a grip that might be facilitated by his possession of her sandal buckle, a personal trinket that he claims allows him to bend another to his desire. Another of Crossley’s claimed skills is his mastery of the Shout, which allows him to kill by releasing an ear-splitting cry. Anthony declares his disbelief, so Crossley agrees to demonstrate it for him. After leading him out on a long march to the centre of the coastal dunes and advising him to plug his ears with wax, Crossley draws a deep breath, and performs the Shout.
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The very 1970s quality of The Shout is a part of its appeal, the sense of eccentricity and experimental attitude inherent in both the storyline and Skolimowski’s expostulation of it, and its exemplary status as perhaps the greatest entry in a peculiarly British brand of fantastic filmmaking that’s mostly been buried in the intervening decades. As near-forgotten a quantity as The Shout has become, some filmmakers clearly remember it however. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) referenced it several times, whilst The Duke of Burgundy (2014) took on a similar proposition of melting realities amidst a self-sequestered couple. Recent works of arthouse note like Carol Morley’s The Falling (2015) and Hope Dickson Leach’s The Levelling betray its remnant spirit in trying to evoke the primal, hostile, protean aspect of the countryside and the spaces between people. David Yates nodded to it in a very unexpected context, in the sequence of alienated wanderings of a British landscape turned alien and desolate in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One (2011). Skolimowski uses seemingly very casual scenes to begin knitting the unique mood that defines The Shout, as one game gives way to the equally calm yet increasingly overwrought process of Crossley entering and influencing the lives of the Fieldings. Graves’ story was written in the late 1920s, but updating it to the present day of the 1970s allowed Skolimowski, whose contexts are usually sharply observed even when his dramas are usually more interior, like the swinging London backdrop to the portrait of painful adolescent neediness in Deep End, to encompass a host of pertinent likenesses. Although apart from the cars and Anthony’s technical gear there’s little to nail down the period, nonetheless The Shout incidentally records the shaggy, shambling, depleted spirit of the post-counterculture era: the refugees from city life permeating the countryside, their former lustre of revolutionary adventures transmuting into fiddly obsession and petty rather than exploratory sexual dalliances, confronted by a figure who both threatens and appeals in wielding mystic power, a guru figure teasing constantly with the suggestion of wisdom hard-won and rigorously applied.
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Crossley’s air of command and acumen burn beneath his veneer of shambling, unkempt, almost tramp-like look. The Shout came out in the same year as the infamous Jonestown cult’s mass suicides and murders, and Crossley has the air of a cult leader who needs only to find apt soil to plant himself in, wielding dangerous magnetism and the ability to fixate and unnerve others until they put faith in his strength, needing to be cut down quite before he can work up the right wild verve to enthral more than just the Fieldings. In making The Shout, Skolimowski took advantage of the relatively new Dolby sound recording technology, which had been before that only been a tool for large-budget blockbusters. This allowed him to toy with his film’s sonic dimensions in a rich and layered way. The audio is pitched throughout with a restrained hush occasionally punctuated by a violent or peculiar sound in the same way that a random shout of “Out!” during the cricket match breaks the spell of Crossley’s narration, and the cry is taken up like a chain bark, the illusion of sense and placidity turned into an echo chamber of lunatics. Part of the challenge of making The Shout clearly lay in conveying the awful power of the eponymous concept, the idea of a Shout that can set the world’s spirit in chaos. And Skolimowski pulls it off. The quelled soundtrack persists until the fateful moment when Crossley shouts, a noise that explodes with shattering force, as if raw sound might punch its way out of the screen, Bates’ yawing mouth filmed like a great cavern as he releases the mighty cry. Sheep fall dead at the impact, and even with his ears blocked Anthony contorts and faints. When he awakens, he clutches a totemic stone in his hand, and is momentarily convinced he’s a cobbler — which happens to be the profession of his lover’s husband. Skolimowski casually reveals a shepherd lying dead near the sheep, his death unnoticed by the two men, incidental victim of the conspiracy between heedless will and equally heedless curiosity.
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Skolimowski’s touch of making Anthony a musician compelled by process and fascinated with what wonders simple tools can produce is preffectly apt on the thematic level, but also allows Skolimowski to make a spectacle of his own intents and effects evinced throughout. Much as Anthony labours to create his noises, Skolimowski here stretches cinematic sinews, conjuring a sense of potent mystery and the advancing pressure of the irrational, and terrifying eruptions of preternatural power, purely through means naturally available to his camera and his editing desk, with scarcely any special effects. The Shout anticipates the Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker from the following year in attempting to create credulity of a destabilised reality on screen purely through carefully parsed use of basic film craft. Aiding Skolimowski immeasurably in creating his mood is the droning, otherworldly electronic music soundtrack provided by Michael Rutherford and Tony Banks, aka the other guys from the band Genesis. The scoring suggests Anthony’s head-space in the course of his labours, whilst touching the landscape the Fieldings inhabit in the same way Crossley does, turning it from homey pastoral stretch into a zone where the coding of nature seems to be pixelating – rocky shores reaching fingers into the ocean, the grass-thatched sand dunes, the old house tucked into the folds of the land, at once a perfect English landscape and an outpost on the moon, a land hovering on the edge of nothingness.
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Anthony’s studio sports clipped-out art work like Munch’s painting “The Vampyre,” and an artwork depicting a perverse imp on all fours, suggesting the zones of surreal and sublime perversity Anthony retreats into in his mind, whilst his exterior life remains timid and largely conventional, even in his tawdry affair. Crossley turns up like a demon to torment him precisely for his transgressions, whilst in the course of turning into a rampant, even mindless sensual being under Crossley’s influence, Rachel mimics the crawling imp figure. Although Crossley is nominally telling the story here, Anthony’s own psychic mindscape seems to be blurring into the drama we see, perhaps harvested by Crossley as he ventures into Anthony’s studio. The framing sequences are true to Graves’ story whilst also situating the film in a cinematic tradition kicked off by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), as a tale whose inferences cannot entirely be trusted because of who is telling the story, even as evidence accumulates that Crossley is not merely entertaining his fascinated companion with sick and stirring fancies. Storytelling itself is an act of conjuring in The Shout, and an untrustworthy weapon.
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The question as to whether or not Crossley is merely a madman and manipulator or actually possesses the sorts of power he claims is a narrative mystery to be solved by the end, but it’s also connected with Skolimowski’s deeper objective, as the way The Shout is pieced together makes the way reality is represented on screen, as a usually seamless flow of images linked by codified grammar, becomes a nebulous zone through straightforward touches – a simple cut from one action to another can completely unmoor a viewer from a sense of cause and effect. The synergy Skolimowski finds between the various layers of his story and his method of telling it means that even at only a very trim 82 minutes, The Shout is near-endlessly rich. Crossley’s preamble to telling his story could be Skolimowski’s own: “It’s always the same story but — I change the sequence of events and — I vary the climaxes a little because I like to keep it alive.” In the same way, although films are static things, Skolimowski’s games with the unfolding his story, his flash cuts forward and back in timeframe, sometimes for good reason and other times just to stir bewilderment.
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Casting Bates as Crossley was a particularly inspired move on Skolimowski’s part, for he had the right kind of verbal dexterity for the role of a man who must compel the viewer as well as the characters about him with his conviction and ability to intrigue, in addition to the necessary cobra-and-rabbit mystique of sexual threat. Bates’ pale-hued eyes, so strikingly expressive and romantic in films like Zorba the Greek (1964) and Women in Love (1969) still glow out from behind his grizzled four-day-growth, whilst his tongue is able to twist the metre of his speech from intimate confidant, as he plays for Rachel, to maniacal prophet out of the wilderness, as he otherwise readily postures. The Shout plays upon a quality in Bates Ken Russell had exploited well in Women in Love whilst also incidentally depicting the decay of the messianic figure from that film’s prophet of a new age to a shifty bum whose great ambition for his tremendous gifts consists of cuckolding a hapless musician. Hurt, with his pale, rubbery physique and York with her stark blue eyes and tensile, honed body, round out a major cast notable for their physically palpable qualities, counterpointing the hovering mood of mystic peril with one of immediate corporeal anxiety.
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That anxiety is sometimes played for laughs, as when Graves is met upon arrival at the asylum by a woman who’s paranoid he’s going to peek up her dress. Anthony tries to negotiate a conversation with a naked Crossley, and later he is plucked out of the bath where was getting amorous with Rachel, obliged to converse with the village priest (Julian Hough) about performing at the shepherd’s funeral whilst struggling to hide his erection. But the undertones of sensual strangeness build to electric and unnerving moments too, as when Anthony catches a glimpse of a tell-tale scar ringing Crossley’s belly, and when Crossley appears to Rachel in his room as she tries to pull on a shirt, staring down through the folds of linen at her blankly adoring face, and her moments of ecstatic undressing and seeming transformation into an animal, York offering visions of carnal identity suddenly freed and given reign. Skolimowski also makes memorable use of animals as barometers of human activity. The staring, disinterested cattle who watch the cricket players mimic the ideal of bovine calm that game is supposed to engender. The sheep who pitch limp and very dead after being pulverised by the Shout. A bird that slips into the Fieldings’ kitchen and flits about madly over the head of Rachel, who weeps as she senses her marriage and sense of self dissolving in the face of infidelity and Crossley’s compulsion of her affections, her distress embodied by the animal overhead.
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Crossley’s very arrogance, his desire to prove his power as well as possess it, proves to be his undoing, however. When his lover’s husband reveals to him that he experienced a similar dissociation as Anthony knew when Crossley performed the Shout, Anthony intuits the stone he awoke with in his hand after the event might have become invested with some of Crossley’s power, so he goes back to the dunes to dig it up. When Crossley makes it clear he intends to stay on in his house and subjugate Rachel to his will, Anthony calls the police, who try to arrest and charge him with murdering his children, and when Crossley tries to kill his harassers with his Shout, he only manages to fell one before Anthony shatters the stone, robbing Crossley of his power and allowing him to be captured. By now the import of what we’ve seen at the outset has become clearer: Rachel works at the hospital to be close to Crossley, who still holds some power over her, and Crossley is excited to see Anthony because he hopes to get a chance to enact revenge upon him. But the arrival of the thunderstorm sets the cricket match in chaos, whipping up Broadbent’s hysteric until he strips naked and begins pushing the score box back and forth around the pitch, whilst the psychiatrist and Crossley struggle, and Gaves wisely darts off. Crossley tries to peform the Shout, and a bolt of lightning strikes the box, killing both him and his medical nemesis as well as the hapless patient. Has Crossley’s Shout called down the lightning and felled them all, or was it just a coincidence? Either way, Rachel’s dash to the scene as glimpsed at the opening gains proper ending, as she removes her shoe buckle from Crossley’s neck, his influence finally ended. It’s typical of Skolimowski’s ingenious touch that he’s able to retain a note of ambiguity underneath what we’ve seen even as it seems all has played out to its literal end, and equally indicative of his refusal to indulge any familiar triteness that he fades out upon the sight of Rachel restored, yet still lingering over Crossley’s body – did he really control her, or did he simply claim her affections in all his mad stature? The Shout can still tantalise, madden and perplex. It’s certainly a film of great craft and art that badly needs rediscovery.