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Despite its somewhat undeserved modern reputation as a bit of lightweight tourist bait, Zorba the Greek turns out to be a surprisingly dark and anarchic film - not so surprising when you consider that it's based on a novel by Nikos Katzanzakis, who also wrote The Last Temptation of Christ. Indeed, the film originally began with Anthony Quinn playing Zeus (or at least Zeus as Zorba sees him) in a deliberately theatrically artificial heaven in a prologue that can be found in the extras on he US DVD and Blu-ray editions (but not the less fortunate Region 2 PAL editions).
It certainly paints a less than flattering portrait of Cretan village life. One Sunday the villagers leave the church to harry and then kill a woman they blame for a suicide, and when ex-prostitute Lila Kedrova lies dying they cannot even wait for her to stop breathing to loot her hotel. Functioning like some leaderless medieval fiefdom in thrall to machismo and misogyny, it is as far from a good commercial for the Cretan tourist Board as you can imagine.
Similarly, Anthony Quinn's performance in the title role is more layered than its many parodies over the years would lead you to expect. A loser with a gift for life who inveigles his sway into working for Alan Bates' excellently underplayed half-English observer of life who has come to make a go of his father's mine, there's a genuine sense of laughter in the face of death and despair in his performance. More low-key than you would expect, it is all perfectly underlined by Mikos Theodorakis' surprisingly varied and versatile score and Walter Lassally's Oscar-winning cinematography.
While, typically for Fox, the European PAL DVD releases of the film come up short on extras, their region-free US Blu-ray carries over all the extras from their two-sided US DVD release, and it's an impressive bunch: audio commentary by director Michael Cacoyannis and Nikos Katzanzakis expert Demetrios Liappas, the alternate opening sequence, documentary Anthony Quinn - A Lust for Life, 2 Movietone News extracts, stills gallery, TV spot; teaser trailer and full trailer (they're not all listed on the packaging but are all present and correct on the disc itself).
