Word: cretan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Zorba the Greek resembles the Cretan landscape which it portrays so magnificently. Its themes are as ancient and clean-cut and harsh as the rocks. For this is a film about the struggle to live--to survive physically, to force nature to yield a living, and to continue to be glad you are alive. And it is about a community, its harsh and timeless rites, its reaction to outsiders...
...cliches (witness the sadistic, perverted-looking SS officer), but most are acceptable. Gregory Peck, as usual, is better at looking rugged than anything else, but David Niven turns out an excellent performance as a college professor with a talent for blowing things up. And Anthony Quinn, as a Cretan guerilla, is in consistently top form. His bit in the interrogation scene should win over anyone not already convinced that he is among the finest actors in this country...
...natural anchorage for ancient mariners. Caskey was right. This summer, on Kea's St. Irene peninsula, he found a Mycenean settlement dating back 3,500 years, complete with temple, palace, private homes with inside plumbing, and a municipal sewer system. Scattered through the town were fragments of delicate Cretan pottery. The settlement was probably destroyed by an earthquake in 1400 B.C., but not before the imported arts and crafts of Cretan voyagers had influenced the more primitive local population. "What we call the miracle of Greek civilization," said Caskey, "did not come out of nothing...
Before long the moonlight is glinting off Peck's jaw as he leads a crew of ruffians up an unclimbable rock face in a pelting rain. Suddenly he slips. In best White Tower tradition, the man who grabs Peck's wrist is his blood enemy, a dour Cretan guerrilla (Anthony Quinn) who has sworn to kill him when the war is over. Quinn's eyes flash. Will he let Peck fall? Not, the viewer may be sure, while there are still old war movies left to anthologize...
...Palmer delved into the daybook, soon found an item that raised his academic hackles. According to Sir Arthur, the great palace at Knossos was destroyed about 1400 B.C. After that date it was occupied and partially rebuilt by "squatters" from the mainland, whose culture was far below the true Cretan level. The theory depended on Sir Arthur's claim that he found jars of squatter type in a room whose clay floor covered tablets written in Cretan script. This proved, he said, that early, literate Cretans had been superseded by comparatively crude invaders from mainland Greece. But according...