Zorba the Greek — The Film
Based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis
Having written about Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of the novel Zorba the Greek, quite a bit recently I thought I’d watch the 1964 film again to see if it still has the same effect on me when I first saw it back in 1965. It does.
Of course Nikos Kazantzakis never saw the film, dying in 1957, but he did meet the film’s Greek-Cypriot director, Michael Cacoyannis, in London in 1946 when Michael was studying to become a theatre and film director at the same time working for the BBC as director of their Cypriot radio broadcasts. As a great fan of the Cretan novelist, Cacoyannis commissioned Kazantzakis to write and broadcast ten radio talks. The fee for the talks enabled Nikos and his wife Helen to remain living in Paris, which was then at the heart of a literary and philosophical revolution. It was probably Helen — after Nikos’s death, and the publication of Zorba the Greek in 1961 — that suggested Cacoyannis film Zorba? It was a nice payback.
It was also the chance the forty-two-year-old Cacoyannis needed to make a film that might give him the international profile his talent deserved.
Cacoyannis had already directed seven films before Zorba (he would make another eight after), with the majority set in Greece, but it was the Kazantzakis project that made his name as a director with a…
