1960s, Action-Adventure, War

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

Director: J. Lee Thompson
Screenwriter: Carl Foreman

By Roderick Heath

The Guns of Navarone began life as a story penned by Scottish writer Alistair MacLean, a former Royal Navy officer and World War II veteran. MacLean debuted as a writer with H.M.S. Ulysses, a gritty and nightmarish portrait of a doomed warship attached to one of the infamous Allied convoys supplying the Soviet Union during the war, based on some personal experiences. The success of his debut inspired MacLean to write another war story, but this time in a more adventurous and commercial mode. His story this time was loosely inspired by the Battle of Leros in the Dodecanese campaign, but also perhaps drew on memories of movies made during the war like Secret Mission (1942), Desperate Journey (1942), and The Adventures of Tartu (1943), slightly matured Boy’s Own tales about stranded warriors, secret agents and commandos eluding evil Nazis and destroying secret bases. The Guns of Navarone proved another bestseller when it was published in 1957, cementing MacLean as a preeminent popular writer of gamy thrillers until his death in 1987, with many movies good and bad adapted from his works. Enter Carl Foreman, screenwriter and film entrepreneur who had found fame writing High Noon (1952) just before being blacklisted and co-wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) with Michael Wilson uncredited, only to see the Oscar they sould have received for it given to the author of the source novel, Pierre Boulle, despite him not speaking English.

Foreman began leveraging his epic Hollywood comeback by signing a production deal with Columbia Pictures as the blacklist was breaking down, and was given the book by an enthusiastic studio executive. Foreman was uneasy at first knowing it would be a hard movie to make, but he eventually pulled it off in grand fashion and made damn sure the movie was emblazoned as “Carl Foreman’s Production of The Guns of Navarone” in the credits and on posters. In adapting the novel, Foreman reshaped the material into something more ambitious and not so dissimilar to The Bridge on the River Kwai, introducing notes of ambivalence about war and greater depth to the characters as well as an emphasis on moral quandary that finally ends with a spectacular act of sabotage. Foreman also wanted to direct the movie, but Columbia refused, so he hired the great Alexander Mackendrick, of Ealing comedies and Sweet Smell of Success (1957) fame, who was on board with Foreman’s desire to make something more substantial out of MacLean’s material. But Mackendrick was fated to suffer repeated agonies in Hollywood, and a week before filming Mackendrick was fired with the evergreen “creative differences” excuse. On star Gregory Peck’s suggestion, Foreman then hurriedly hired J. Lee Thompson. Thompson was a rising star of British film with an array of recent, admired, superbly made films including the proto-feminist drama Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), the nuanced thriller Tiger Bay (1959) and blending war stories with adventure in North West Frontier (1958) and Ice Cold In Alex (1960).

The Guns of Navarone proved Thompson’s Hollywood debut and gained a Best Picture Oscar nomination, a highpoint of a long and violently uneven career. Foreman for his part bankrolled the success into his own, more overtly antiwar survey The Victors (1963), which fell afoul of studio interference. Viewed from today, The Guns of Navarone seems chiefly notable as a movie that mediated the evolution of the relatively straitlaced and realistic war movie popular through the 1950s towards the birth of the modern blockbuster action movie. The Guns of Navarone anticipated and perhaps helped leverage the following year’s debut of James Bond in Dr. No, and later presented an obvious template for Star Wars (1977), with its select band of specialist heroes setting out to assault a seemingly impregnable enemy base and destroy a deadly war machine, as well offering a specific blend of cliffhanger action sequences kneaded into a larger story building to a pyrotechnic climax. But what distinguishes The Guns of Navarone from the myriad films its influence is stamped on is that more elevated element Foreman wanted to explore. In that regard Thompson was an ideal collaborator for Foreman, as he was extremely good at balancing action with tight, tense interpersonal stories. The sort of thing more recent Hollywood event movies dismiss as a tedious chore Foreman and Thompson took very seriously and essential to such storytelling, and the result defies the idea that a potent adventure film can’t also be thoughtful.

The opening moments of The Guns of Navarone promise a hell of a ride, whilst also presenting itself as a work of contemporary mythologising, “the legend of Navarone” that perhaps excuses some embellishing and larger-than-life details. Dimitri Tiomkin’s grand score, perhaps the best of his career, surges over a pre-credits prologue whilst the Scottish actor James Robertson Justice, who within the film proper plays the M-like spymaster Jensen, provides narration. Jensen explicitly describes the events as akin to the ancient myths of heroes and monsters born of the Greek islands, a modern echo of Achilles and Odysseus and Hercules, whilst the camera explores the ruins of classical temples overlooking Aegean-washed islands. The legend as he describes it begins when Hitler, trying to bully neutral Turkey into repeating history and joining the war on his side, orders a small garrison of 2000 British soldiers who have been holding out on the Aegean island of Kheros to be obliterated in a show of purposefully absurd force. The British decide to send in a flotilla to rescue them, but face one deadly roadblock: the Germans have installed two, colossal 15-inch naval guns in an old citadel on the neighbouring island of Navarone, controlling the only open strait to Kheros.

With the clock ticking down fast and all other efforts failing, including a disastrous bombing raid that costs many airmen their lives, Jensen pulls together an infiltration team to land on Navarone and find a way to sabotage the guns. Jensen selects Major Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle) to lead the team, assigning him demolitions expert Corporal Miller (David Niven) whose job it will be to destroy the guns, with partisan Spyros Pappadimos (James Darren), and Chief Petty Officer Brown (Stanley Baker) along for added deadly force. To get them to Navarone and help scale the seemingly impassable cliff face on the island’s southern coast, the only unpatrolled landing point, Jensen flies in Captain Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck), a former, renowned mountaineer who’s been leading partisan operations in Crete. Mallory arrives at Jensen’s HQ in North Africa just as one of the Lancaster bombers sent on the raid crash-lands. Mallory, surveying photos of the cliff, feels it’s a virtually impossible task, but still agrees to do his bit and asks for Andreas Stavro (Anthony Quinn), his uneasy ally on Crete and a ranking Colonel in the Greek army, to be brought out to help him, only for Jensen to assure him they’ve already done so. Jensen, Mallory, and Franklin listen to the crews of the failed air raid, including their truculent Australian squadron leader Barnsby (Richard Harris, in a memorable, even star-making cameo) who punctuates his tirade against the planners of the raid with saying “ruddy” every other word. Jensen admits to Mallory that he’s the one who put them up to the raid, knowing it was pointless but still had to be tried.

What war costs on both the most personal level and on the macrocosmic chart of human endeavour is a constant motif of The Guns of Navarone even as it sets up an officially heroic, thrill-a-minute story. Jensen muses with his adjutant Cohn (Bryan Forbes) on the grim necessity of someone in his job sending men off to die, fully expecting Franklin’s team to also be lost, the ships sent to rescue the men on Kheros to be sunk, and the garrison wiped out, whilst still being committed to try everything to prevent such ends. Jensen muses on the quality of the unexpected in such situations, the surprising, rarefied quality of the human that ironically requires such straits to emerge: “Slap in the middle of absolute insanity, people pull out the most extraordinary resources. Ingenuity. Courage. Self-sacrifice.” “With every one of us a genius, how can we fail?” Mallory frames it more ironically as he considers the team with all their particular talents, knowing well what a shit-show they’re heading into, in a war that generally seems inimical to individual identity and ability. Mallory finds Andreas waiting in his hotel room, a peculiar tension persisting between them despite being comrades who’ve been fighting alongside each-other for months. Later it emerges that Mallory gave a safe conduct to a German patrol to get their wounded taken care of after a skirmish on Crete, only for the Germans, desperate to kill Stavro as one of their most ferocious enemies, to shoot their wounded, go to Andreas’ house, and blow it up along with his wife and children. Andreas blames Mallory’s “stupid Anglo-Saxon decency” for his family’s death and has told Mallory he will kill him when the war is won.

Mallory also encounters Miller, who has a line in forced joviality and has long refused officer rank despite his many famous missions, through his deep scepticism for authority and the kind of moral calculus men like Jensen indulge. Spyros was born on Navarone and knows the island, but emigrated to America where he learned deadly arts as a petty hoodlum. Brown meanwhile specialises in killing at close quarters with a knife and has antifascist credentials going back to the Spanish Civil War, where he gained his colourful nickname “The Butcher of Barcelona”. “I’ve been killing Germans since 1937,” Brown tells Mallory, “There’s no end to them.” Trouble is Brown is suffering burnout from such Sisyphean labours, and can’t bring himself to kill anymore: “You shoot a man at two hundred yards he’s just a moving target. You kill him with a knife, you’re close enough to smell him.” Mallory also describes Franklin to Andreas as a man “who still needs to prove to himself he’s a hero.” Whatever attitude problems and neuroses are lurking under the surface of the omnicompetent team are nonetheless of little consequence at first as they’re gathered on the island of Castelrosso, halfway between Cyprus and Rhodes. On Castelrosso, the team are briefly billeted with the garrison commanded by Major Baker (Allan Cuthbertson), a snootily officious British officer.

When the team are installed in a grimy room in Baker’s army post, Andreas’ survival wits are illustrated as he insists on searching for microphones. Nor is he unjustly paranoid: whilst they discuss their plans, Andreas catches them being spied on by a young man (Tutte Lemkow). Baker is fetched and he tells them the eavesdropper is the HQ laundry boy Nicolai, who supposedly doesn’t speak English and only talks to Andrea in an obscure dialect, to which Miller casually but acutely queries, “Then why was he listening?” Franklin tells Baker he wants Nicolai held incommunicado until the mission is complete, but Baker insists Nicolai be released. In response Franklin tells Spyros to shoot Nicolai and Baker too “if he gets in your way.” When the aghast Baker realises they means it, he backs down and has Nicolai locked up. This tense scene sets in motion a theme that winnows through what follows, noting the different kinds of command displayed by Baker’s empty, privileged bluster, versus Franklin’s generally easy-going manner that masks that he knows exactly when to take ruthless action and apply pressure when it comes to fulfilling his mission, even if it’s likely just to make Baker pay heed. Mallory’s different brand of cool poise and sense of impact is also sketched out. When Baker makes appeal to Mallory, he replies that he agrees with Franklin, but also doesn’t need to have Baker shot, just speedily shipped home as a private with one call to Jensen, a threat that makes a more subtle but possibly deeper impact on Baker.

The next morning the team boards an appropriately banged-up fishing boat procured for them to voyage to Navarone, per Mallory’s request, a vessel that so alarms Miller that he keeps reminding Mallory he can’t swim. On the way they’re intercepted by a German patrol boat in an unexpected area, making Franklin suspect Baker let Nicolai go anyway. The team maintain their parts as poor fishermen until the right moment when they unleash with hidden weapons, slaying all the Germans and blowing up their boat. After the fight Mallory notices when Baker flinches from stabbing a German he didn’t quite finish up and gets up with his gun, only for Spyros to blow him away. Later Baker explains how tired he is of killing and tries to avoid it when he can, only to earn Mallory’s rebuke that none of them has the right to be making a private peace, not least because it makes him untrustworthy to the rest of the team. “I do my job sir,” Brown protests, to Mallory’s retort: “Your job is to kill enemy soldiers.” Mallory’s learned that the hard way, as he explains Andreas’ threat to him and the reason for it to Franklin, as they sail at night to Navarone. As they near the island coast, a vicious storm whips up, driving the boat onto rocks. The team laboriously rescue as much of their equipment as they can before a rogue wave rolls in, dislodges the boat, and sinks it.

This tremendous piece of staging, accomplished with all the physical craft and energy required of moviemaking in those long-gone pre-CGI days, comes in a dizzy flurry of pounding white water and even in the relatively safe confines of a studio tank looks dangerous for the actors. And it’s only the start of the team’s true ordeal. The boat’s destruction forces Mallory, who had been promised a spell of leave after delivering the men, and Andreas to integrate with the team for the duration. Mallory succeeds in the agonising climb up the rock face, meticulously hammering in pitons and finding rock forms to make the ascent easier. Andreas ascends to help him, cueing a tense moment when Mallory slips and Andreas catches him holding dangling over a vast drop, awareness of a perfect opportunity for Andreas to carry out his threat, but instead helping Mallory get his grip again. Reaching the top, Mallory and Andreas are surprised by a German on patrol: they kill him, but when Mallory tries to bluff his way through a conversation on a field telephone with the German HQ, he doesn’t succeed, with soldiers dispatched. Whilst climbing the cliff, Franklin slips and breaks his leg. Whilst the others bring him aloft, Mallory, now ranking officer and so forced into command, considers the options of leaving Franklin for the Germans, carrying with them, or, as Andreas suggests, shooting him: “Better for him, better for us.” Mallory elects to bring Franklin along on an improvised stretcher, knowing they can rendezvous with local contacts at a nearby ruin and get them to look after him. As they trek into rugged, snow-clad mountains, they’re pursued by German patrols. Franklin tries to shoot himself, only to be stopped by Mallory, who tells him that Jensen has said on the radio that commandos are going to invade Navarone in two days’ time. Whilst the two men talk, Miller anxiously fingers his own pistol, ready to draw it if it appears Mallory is going to kill Franklin.

From the outset of The Guns of Navarone we’re assured every member of the team has something to contribute, some skillset that makes them invaluable, even if this assurance is picked apart as the story unfolds. As every plan is tested and found wanting by both enemy connivance, covert treachery, and bad luck, every character is bent in a direction they don’t want, improvisation is constantly required, and the real worth of all those skills is tested. In this regard the underpinnings of the story recall heist movies like The Asphalt Jungle (1949) and Rififi (1955), and indeed that’s exactly what the story is at heart. This aspect also distinguishes it from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and its Hollywood remake The Magnificent Seven (1960), films that by and large invented the basic modern blueprint for action movies about a team of warriors. The Guns of Navarone feels to me like the more immediate influence on most subsequent men-on-a-mission tales, a mode that would be taken to variously strange and hyperbolic places by the likes of Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966), Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), Jack Cardiff’s Dark of the Sun (1968), Andrew V. McLaglen’s The Wild Geese (1978), and both Enzo Castelleri’s Inglorious Bastards (1977) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), as well as the likes of the TV series Mission: Impossible and subsequent movie adaptations. The film’s success also encouraged MacLean himself to recycle many elements for the script of Brian G. Hutton’s more serial-like Where Eagles Dare (1968). The Guns of Navarone’s influence even echoes in the early scenes of John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) and in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films and pervasively in Saving Private Ryan (1998). Its impact on Star Wars was reiterated by Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One (2016). And, of course, Jim Abrahams and Jerry and David Zucker’s Top Secret! (1984) couldn’t exist without it.

The vignette of Mallory trying to fake his way through the phone conversation with a German was the obvious inspiration for the famous scene of Han Solo doing the same in Star Wars, although the model plays it in a cagier manner, the German on the other end of the line slightly puzzled by not hearing the right code words, but not giving anything away until after the call is ended and then hitting the alarm. Whilst the climactic scenes surge with swashbuckling vigour, Thompson also does his best to keep the film grounded in realistic physicality and problem-solving wit from its heroes: nobody ever gets too clever, and when the characters take damage it’s hurt they feel. The characters are also treated with rare seriousness, in a careful set-up of dramatic stakes that don’t combust until the last third. The triangulation of Andreas’ sternly pragmatic, even ruthless sensibility, Miller’s humane and antiauthoritarian streak, and Mallory’s attempts to walk a centre path however crooked, provides a backbone of drama, amplified by less consequential but still substantial elements as Brown’s moral exhaustion and Spyros’ wild, almost berserker aspect when let loose in war, contrasting his rather boyish façade. His sister Maria (Irene Papas) proves to be their partisan contact on Navarone, catching the men unaware when they’re distracted by another female partisan, Anna (Gia Scala), who Spyros knocks out when they catch her flitting around their camp in a ruined monastery. Upon recognising her brother, Maria walks up to him with a smile of surprised delight, and then, remembering she’s angry at him for being away so long, slaps him in the face – a moment Spielberg conspicuously lifted for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

Papas enters the film with her usual, leonine presence, a promissory note for a future generation of action heroines, holding the team at bay for a few moments with a machine gun before admitting they’re obviously not Germans. She cares for her friend Anna, who, as she explains to the team, was recently captured and brutalised by the Nazis – “They whipped her until the white of her bones showed” – but survived the ordeal without breaking and is now one of the partisans’ assets, although she hasn’t spoken a word since her captivity and has never shown anyone her scars. The two women join the team as they hike towards the town of Mandrakos, in the hope they can get medical aid for Franklin there. During a rest pause in an olive grove, Miller tells Mallory that Franklin’s leg has become gangrenous and needs amputation. Brown also asks Mallory to give him another chance as a fighter, as Mallory’s been relegating him to menial tasks. German soldiers roll up and start firing mortars at them, and Stukas bomb them as they flee up a canyon and find refuge in a cave. At last they manage to enter Mandrakos, Andreas, Maria, and Brown taking Franklin to a doctor, whilst the others sit quietly in a café where a wedding party is being held. But both groups are quickly captured by Germans, who zero in on them with suspicious exactitude.

Thompson’s career arc wasn’t a pretty one on the face of things, moving from being considered one of 1950s British cinema’s most exciting and truly cinematic talents to one often dismissed as downright bad by the time in the 1980s when he finished up making potboilers for the beloved/infamous Cannon Films in the 1980s. Thompson’s aura of professionalism was both a problem and a virtue when it comes to summing up his career, but his rock-solid visual force never degraded even when making Charles Bronson shoot-‘em-ups. Thompson was known for his peculiar, loose, almost improvisatory approach to filming, all leveraged on set through such force of personality that Peck called him “Mighty Mouse.” Thompson certainly made a lot of unremarkable movies during his career, as well as many that were terrific and more than a few that became worthy cult films. Thompson was particularly confident and innovative in using the widescreen frame, apparent throughout The Guns of Navarone in his constant attempts to keep the relations between the members of the team enclosed within his frames on the churn, and use of looming actions against deep focus shots. One great example of this comes when Spyros starts enthusiastically fixing a silencer to his pistol when Franklin orders him to kill Nikolai, Spyros in the foreground, Baker standing in between him and his prey with puckered anxiety, with Mallory gazing on impassively to one side: there’s painterly precision to Thompson’s images and yet they contain energy and barely stifled movement as well.

Thompson also displayed a consistent fascination with interactions with sharply diverging worldviews, whose collisions ultimately drive his best films. Tiger Bay revolved around the disparity between its child heroine’s perspective on a fugitive she falls in with and the reality of his situation. North West Frontier, nominally a straightforward imperial-era chase yarn, spared a deal of time and depth exploring its microcosmic characters and evoking the motives of its villain, a biracial Muslim desperate to prove his identity, clashing with the more officially humane but also smug personalities around him. Cape Fear (1962) was a film that anticipated both later slasher films and concerns with violence and vigilante reprisal in 1970s and ‘80s thrillers, as it portrayed a sleazy psychopath intimidating a prosperous lawyer and family man, trying to provoke him into abandoning his civilised ideals. Thompson would go on with his unexpectedly strong foray into Horror cinema proper, Eye of the Devil (1966), to a similar theme of a man sacrificing himself in a dark religious rite for the sake of fulfilling his role as lord of the manor. His perverse thriller Return From The Ashes (1965) hinged on the incomprehension of a holocaust survivor trying to resume ordinary life with the more petty brand of murderous zeal she encounters. Even oddities like his two entries in the Planet of the Apes series and the unique horror-western The White Buffalo (1977) would spend time allowing iconic representatives of warring factions in the American West to argue through their different perspectives on history and society. In The Guns of Navarone this proclivity found exactly the right material, as Thompson weaves the more serious concerns of Foreman’s script throughout, finally combusting when Mallory reveals to the team, after they’ve been forced to finally leave Franklin with the Germans, that the story he told him about the upcoming invasion was false, and he hopes the Germans will give him a dose of scopolamine to extract it from him, on the theory that it will spare Franklin torture but also to make the Germans commit their forces in distraction. Miller is appalled nonetheless when Mallory tells him this, questioning what would happen if they skipped the scopolamine and just went with torture: “Oh, I misjudged you – you’re really rather a ruthless character aren’t you, Captain Mallory?”

The obvious riposte is that all those things would happen to Franklin anyway and indeed the only way to save his life, but Mallory doesn’t take that out, instead stating it was the only way to get the job done, his way of living up Jensen and Franklin’s credo as a leader. “I just hope that before this job is over I get the chance to use you the way you used him,” Miller declares, and you just know he’ll get his wish. Thompson and Foreman also allow some hue of moral complexity to enter from the German side of things too. After the team is captured in Mandrakos, they’re interrogated by a cool, clinical officer, Muesel (Walter Gotell), who nonetheless disdains brutality. He is quickly supplanted by SS man Sessler (George Mikell), a more familiar kind of evil Nazi, who slaps Andreas when he claims to be a poor Cypriot fisherman forced into the team’s company, and provokes not just the heroes when he threatens to hit Franklin’s injured leg with his sidearm but also sparks Muesel’s angry outburst. “We’re not all like Hauptman Sessler,” Muesel comments to Mallory later, and also deftly stands up to Mallory’s threat to have him shot if he doesn’t give up information, “You would not hesitate to shoot me for any number of reasons – in any event I will not tell you.” Andreas proves the key to the team escape this seemingly impossible situation, with his fisherman act. He pretends to be violently ill and rolling around the floor when Sessler starts tormenting Franklin, angering Sessler and distracting the Germans sufficiently for the team to attack suddenly and overpower their captors. A terrific little part for Quinn that deftly conflates different kinds of improvisation: “What a performance,” Miller comments, to Andreas only waving his hand in a so-so gesture.

The team’s visit to Mandrakos also allows a slightly corny but tone-varying vignette of the men, all ill-shaven, hunched-over mystery, suddenly enjoying an idyllic moment with the townsfolk during the wedding celebrations, the island’s native culture and love of life still sustained amidst occupation. Spyros reveals a decent voice as he sings a verse of a folk song for village musicians (actually written by Tiomkin), and a small girl comes over to the team to hand them some flowers, unfortunately at the same moment Muesel leads in a detachment of Germans and levels guns at them, a moment of vaguely surreal contrast that crystallises the imminence of indiscriminate bloodshed. The team surrender, but Mandrakos suffers an ugly fate anyway, as the Germans destroy the town in reprisal for the team’s escape, an act of vandalism and contempt that eventually drives Spyros to wildly self-destructive acts. The narrative encompasses such constant knock-on effects of choices and aims even as the urgency of the mission and the moral imperative behind it aren’t forgotten, but different people have different ways of feeling their way through the murk, as Miller summarises when he angrily upbraids Mallory, “I don’t know the men in Kheros, I do know the man on Navarone.”

Spyros’ eventual death in combat in the climactic scenes provides self-satire aimed at the kind of shootout scene Foreman so memorably formulated on High Noon. Amidst the chaos unleashed by the team and their local allies as the climax unfolds, Spyros and a German officer confront each-other with glazed, fanatical facades after Spyros has killed the German’s men with a grenade and Spyros is looking for revenge for Mandrakos. The two enemies march at one another, letting spray with their machine guns until they kill each-other. “He forgot why we came here,” Andreas tells Maria when she asks him how her brother died. The scene reads as a moment of self-critique from Foreman, as if dismayed by some of the more straightforwardly reactionary readings of High Noon. Meanwhile the sort of love interest often jammed into such a story is presented only to eventually be given a ruthless twist. Andreas faces the slightly blindsiding confession by Maria that “I like you,” a marvellously oblique moment of courtship befitting two hard and worldly survivors nonetheless finding a connection. Mallory on the other hand has a passionate tryst with Anna when she sneaks out of the monastery chamber they spend the night in whilst he’s on guard duty, and she approaches him, growing teary-eyed as he communicates his angst to her after Miller’s tirade over Franklin, before they kiss. But when the presence of a traitor in the team’s midst becomes undeniable after Miller finds all his explosive detonators sabotaged just before they’re going to take their all-or-nothing assault on the citadel, Miller quickly winnows the likely culprit down to just one person – Anna.

The scene that follows is quite epic in its depiction of moral responsibility and brutally clashing viewpoints that close off all options but the worst. Miller is proven right when Andreas strips Anna to show she has no scars and she weepily confesses to having turned to collaborating because “I cannot stand pain,” and seduced Mallory because she needed to cover up her foiled attempt to sneak away. Miller argues forcibly that Anna can’t be left alive because she knows all their plans, and with relentless relish argues to Mallory that he should be the one to execute her, as the officer and gentleman who gets to make the hard decisions but leaves it to the little men to actually perform: “Why don’t you let us off for once? Come down off that cross of your, close your eyes, and pull the trigger.” Mallory, facing up to the challenge despite its ugliness, stands over Anna and pulls out his pistol: Miller moves to make a last-second intervention, but both men are forestalled when Anna is shot dead by her comrade Maria, whose execution is at once more truly fitting and even more painful. Quinn and Papas make a brilliant little moment of Andreas reaching out to comfort Maria as she’s hit by a squall of feeling after her stone-faced execution, only for him to not quite be able to meet her eyes. Of course Quinn and Papas would be reunited a couple of years later in Zorba The Greek (1964).

Niven and Peck are also at their best here, with Niven’s Miller given the crucial scene of theatrical bravura, first pacing through a pastiche of a detective’s drawing room exposure of a criminal, before being called upon to articulate Foreman’s scepticism with his signature spindly, hangdog charm turned to angry purpose. Mallory finally works up to a fine pitch of anger as the smoke clears, informing Miller that his free ride in terms of responsibility are at an end, waving his pistol at him and telling him to find some way of setting off his explosives: “You’re in it now up to your neck…You get me in the mood to use this thing, or by god if you don’t think of something I’ll use it on you!” A notable moment if not least for seeing Peck, who would win an Oscar a year later for playing the most equable of personalities, playing one here driven to a pitch of ferocity that is also focused enough to literally level a mountain rather than expend itself fruitlessly. At other points in the film Peck is more awkward: Mallory, who was a New Zealander in the novel, is also supposed to be fluent in Greek and German, but Peck obviously couldn’t quite manage that, but nonetheless he has just the right gravitas to play a thoughtful but grimly committed hero.

Despite all the quarrels Mallory’s gamble pays off: the commandant of the citadel garrison orders Franklin injected with scopolamine after Sessler’s had some fun torturing him, and with Franklin giving up the details in his subsequent daze, the Germans scramble the bulk of their forces out of the citadel and down to the shore, whilst Mallory and Miller drive in in a captured ambulance, almost getting crushed by tanks in the frantic activity. Meanwhile Maria and Brown head off to steal a boat to ferry them off the island whilst Andreas and Spyro set out to create havoc amongst the remaining garrison troops, gaining some help from locals who shuffle out of a tavern and start pulling tricks like using fishing nets to dismount motorcyclists. Mallory coolly kills a couple of guards overlooking the doors to the cavern where the guns are mounted, and he and Miller manage to get inside, locking the doors at the cost of setting off an alarm. Whilst the Germans outside try everything from sledgehammers to jackhammers and finally a welding torch to penetrate the doors, Miller plants several explosive devices, including one hidden under an elevator designed to be set off by the descending lift’s runner, as well as one disguised as a rat and hidden under one of the guns: when a soldier plucks it out, the device proves only to be a fizzing firecracker, burning out harmless to the soldier’s heavy breath of relief.

Of course, all discursion and complication in the film are only part of a long arc building relentlessly to a climax, which unfolds on multiple stages and finds punctuating tragic ironies in Spyros and Brown’s deaths. Brown meets his end as he again holds back from killing a German guard on the motorboat he and Maria set about stealing. When the guard begins shouting for help, Brown finally stabs him and muffles his cries, but the German retains enough life to pull the knife out of his gut and stick it in Brown, who expires on a note of desperate pathos. Miller and Mallory flee the gun cavern by sliding down ropes into the ocean and are picked up by Anna, whilst Mallory helps pluck the wounded and exhausted Andreas out of the ocean with a boathook, Andreas hesitating as he sees the deadly implement wielded at him by the man he threatened to kill, but finally grabs it and is rescued. Meanwhile a flotilla of British destroyers come sailing up the strait. Thompson saves special relish for building tension as the guns are finally glimpsed up close by the heroes, with Tiomkin’s music underlining the awe and fear of these weapons of mass destruction, Mallory and Miller dwarfed by them. After they escape, the Germans reclaim the guns and dig out all of Miller’s devices save the one in the elevator shaft, and tension mounts mischievously as Thompson keeps noting the lifts descending but stopping short of the trigger wires, whilst the guns let loose with all their hellfire and start straddling the British warships, forcing them to start manoeuvring.

George Lucas would directly pinch the moment of special relish here for Star Wars as the German commander speak the command to fire, this time certainly to hit and sink one of the destroyers, just before the lift makes contact and sets off the blast. The resulting explosion of the magazine rips the top off the mountain and the two mighty guns plunge into the ocean, whereupon the warships release whooping siren sounds and the sailors cheer the heroes riding to join them. Franklin in his hospital bed, roused by the sound of the explosion shattering the ward window glass, is gripped by tears of joy. Success breeds peace for the surviving heroes: Andreas and Miller both make their peace with Mallory, and Andreas offering his hand to Mallory to shake as he announces he’s heading back to Navarone with Maria to fight with the partisans. Even here the film doesn’t forget its diastolic quality, shifting to a mood of weary and stunned reflection, finding strange, post-apocalyptic beauty in the sight of the burning citadel of Navarone, a Pharos for the sailors seeking out their comrades. Miller and Mallory exhaustedly confess they didn’t think it could be done, viewing their titanic handiwork with the glaze of tired men, earth-shakers worthy of myth and just two more shit-kickers in the grand and impersonal business of war. Thompson interpolates ghostly images of the dead and absent members of the team over the ships passing by the burning mountain, with Tiomkin offering a gentle choral requiem on the soundtrack, and the film fades out with evocation of loss as well as triumph. A last flourish to remind that The Guns of Navarone is the quintessential wartime adventure film, and also more than that.

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.