It’s 1964 Month at the Film Experience, and Nathaniel R has accordingly selected one of that year’s big Zeitgeist pictures, Zorba the Greek, for this week’s edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot. It’s one of the great “…I don’t really know what to think about that” movies of all time, in my estimation: it stars Anthony Quinn (an actor whom I greatly admire, though it’s my impression that his massive presence and bombast aren’t terribly easy for most folks to warm to) in the highly dubious role of a Greek who teaches a stuffy Brit to loosen up and Live Life, and those capital Ls are burned into the scenario, make no mistake about it. It’s corny, it has a remarkable inability to remember characters after they’ve done their bit for the plot (Irene Pappas’s nameless widow, in particular), and it’s bogged down by an exhausting 142-minute running time; but Quinn is absolutely flawless in the role (setting aside the flaws that the role had associated with it already), Walter Lassally’s cinematography beautifully runs the gamut from hyper-modern realism (by ’64 standards) to stark Expressionist shadows, and Mikis Theodorakis’s score includes some of the best music written for a movie in the whole decade. And it’s intensely, achingly sincere; sincerity goes a long way with me. At any rate, while the whole Learn to Love Life genre is one of which I am instantly suspicious, there aren’t many films that do it better.
So the question of choosing a favorite shot arises: there is the absurdly obvious pick, and the obvious but not terribly so pick. And I have elected to go with the only moderately obvious pick.
We are, at this point in the film, near the end of the first dance scene. For dance is an important narrative motif here; it is the metaphor for how much vivacity and vitality one possesses, and how much one is willing to pull the utterly English stick out of one’s utterly English ass. At this point, Basil (Alan Bates) – Basil! Even the name is stuck up its own ass! – is still pretty stuffy, and has been watching Zorba’s energetic gyrations with something approaching horror; Lassally and director Michael Cacoyannis feed this impression by initially staging Quinn in shadowy, exaggerated medium shots and close-ups that make him look like a lunging beast, but as the dance progresses, it looks increasingly passionate and emotional. This is too much for Basil – Basil! – to take, so he runs out to the beach where Zorba is dancing with a group of musicians on their way home for the night, and demands that they stop. But even deprived of his music, Zorba still has rhythm in his soul, and so he keeps dancing in the silence, despite Basil’s anguished desire that he should not do so.
And then comes the shot: Basil, lit from just one side so that he fades away into black, has his back to us as he’s crushed intoone corner of the frame by Zorba, standing out brightly against the night, springing into chaotic motion that contrasts with Basil’s stiff, straight pose. This is the whole conflict of the film in one primal moment: the Life Force refusing to give up and give in to the dark, challenging the conservative, wet noodle personality of the little man who wants to have nothing to do with all of that dangerous passion. Eventually, of course, Basil caves: he will have his own moment of dancing before the film’s iconic final scene (the absurdly obvious choice I didn’t go with), in which the two men have their dance out in the bright light on a beach. But where we are now, this the lowest point of their conflict, where they are furthest apart; it is thus the moment from which the rest of the drama naturally derives, it is from here that life and light begin to steadily triumph over darkness and crabby Britishness.