---
title: "Zorba the Greek"
year: 1964
kind: "film"
canonical: "https://film.one/film/zorba-the-greek"
fi1m_score: 67
critics_reviews: 3
published: "2026-09-20T04:29:46.484578+00:00"
updated: "2026-09-20T04:30:29.546568+00:00"
region: "US"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Zorba the Greek (1964)

Directed by Michael Cacoyannis · 2h 22m · MPA NR · Drama

**Fi1m score: 67** · Critics: 3 of 6 reviews so far

*In a sentence:* Anthony Quinn plays the Life Force at a volume the Life Force never asked for

> Michael Cacoyannis’s film of the Kazantzakis novel is superbly shot and remembered for a dance, and Anthony Quinn’s Zorba is both its selling point and its biggest problem. The film worth seeing is the one behind him, with Irene Papas and Lila Kedrova.

## Synopsis

Basil (Alan Bates), a writer who has stopped writing, waits in a rain-soaked café in Piraeus for the boat to Crete, where his Greek father has left him land and a disused lignite mine. Alexis Zorba (Anthony Quinn), a loud labourer with an instrument wrapped in a bundle, talks his way onto the boat and into a job as foreman. On the island they lodge with Madame Hortense (Lila Kedrova), an ageing French courtesan who keeps a hotel and talks of the admirals she once entertained. Basil wants the mine working. The village men want the widow (Irene Papas), who walks past their café in black and speaks to nobody; Pavlo (Yorgo Voyagis), son of Mavrandoni (George Foundas), is worst afflicted. Zorba starts on the mine, and on Hortense.

## Review

*Zorba the Greek* is remembered for a dance and a tune. Michael Cacoyannis, working from Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, has made 142 minutes about a bookish young man taught how to live by a loud old one, and the loud old one is the trouble. There is a good film here, at times a fine one. It is not the film with Zorba in the middle of it.

Anthony Quinn plays Zorba as if the back row were hard of hearing. He roars, weeps, grabs, dances, and tells Basil at regular intervals that a man needs a little madness, in case we had not gathered it from the previous two hours. Some of it lands. Asked to play the instrument he carries about in a bundle, he refuses because he is not in the mood, and Quinn makes us believe the man would rather starve than play to order. But the film keeps stopping to admire him, and the admiring goes on long after the point has been made. Alan Bates underplays Basil, which is the part; a part written as a listening post gives an actor little to do except look faintly alarmed, and Bates does that well and often.

Walter Lassally shoots the island in hard black-and-white, and it is the best thing in the film. The whitewashed walls burn in the sun and the village women in black stand against them like cut paper. The hills are stone and scrub, the sea is a flat grey sheet behind everything, and the café where the men sit is lit so that every face reads. Mikis Theodorakis’s score is sparer than its reputation; the tune everybody knows is held back for a long while, and it is stronger for the wait.

Irene Papas, as the widow, barely speaks. She walks through the village and Cacoyannis cuts not to her but to the men watching her, one face after another, and then to the boy Pavlo (Yorgo Voyagis) following at a distance. Nobody has done anything yet, and we felt sick. Papas plays the whole part in her shoulders and her eyes, a woman who has decided that the only defence available to her is to give the village nothing, and every scene she is in is charged in a way the Zorba scenes never are. Her strand is the reason to sit through the rest, and the second half takes it somewhere we will not describe.

Lila Kedrova’s Madame Hortense moved us more than we expected. She is rouged, plumed and absurd, forever recalling the admirals she says she once kept company with, and for a while the film invites us to laugh at her. Then Zorba courts her, half in jest and half not, and Kedrova lets us see a woman who knows exactly how ridiculous she is and has chosen to be it on purpose. It is the one place where Quinn’s bigness meets something its own size, and the film briefly stops shouting.

Cacoyannis wrote, produced, directed and cut the film himself, and the cutting is where a second opinion would have helped. Scenes begin without warning and end when he has had enough of them. A saint’s day, a visit to a monastery, a mishap at the mine: each arrives, makes its noise and is gone, and the friendship the film is supposedly about is the thread developed least. Sotiris Moustakas’s Mimithos, the village simpleton, is used as a chorus and then forgotten. By the last half hour we were watching the clock, and the clock was watching us back.

Cacoyannis had already made *Electra* (1962) with Papas, and that film knew what to do with her stillness. Here he has two actresses giving performances of real weight and a star who keeps walking in front of them. See it for Papas, for Kedrova and for Lassally’s Crete, and take a breath when Zorba starts to dance. It runs 142 minutes and carries a PG.

*Fi1m score 67, published 20 September 2026.*

## What the critics say

With only 3 reviews in so far, the lean is mildly favourable but hedged. Two critics call it mixed and one positive, and the praise gathers around Anthony Quinn’s Zorba, whom most see as the film’s engine, and around the black-and-white photography of Crete. Lila Kedrova’s aging courtesan and Irene Papas’s widow are singled out as the supporting work that carries the real drama. The reservations are about the screenplay, which the reviews find untidy, overstuffed with incident and implausible in places, with one climactic scene judged overplayed. Empire, the sole later voice, is the coolest, finding the parable clumsy and Quinn prone to overacting.

### Reviews we read (3)

- **Variety**, Variety Staff (70/100, inferred): The film is a paean to life embodied by the lusty Zorba, with Anthony Quinn delivering an excellent performance as the wise, free-spirited peasant. However, the screenplay packs in too many incidents without fully developing key ones, resulting in a loosely connected story. [Read](https://variety.com/1963/film/reviews/zorba-the-greek-1200420469/)
- **The New Yorker**, Brendan Gill (65/100, inferred): Anthony Quinn excels as the Life Force incarnate in this verve-filled black-and-white film set on Crete, supported by strong photography, while Lila Kedrova nearly steals the show as the aging courtesan. The direction has energy but the screenplay is untidy and implausible, with an overplayed climactic scene that feels preposterous. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/12/19/1964-12-19-151-tny-cards-000079943)
- **Empire**, David Parkinson (60/100, inferred): The critic views the film as a clumsy and occasionally leaden parable focused on the friendship between Quinn's Zorba and Bates's Basil, with the real drama in the supporting stories of the widow and Madame Hortense. Quinn tends to overact and Bates underplays, but Papas delivers a dignified performance approaching classical tragedy, and Lassally's photography stands out. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/zorba-greek-review/)

## Details

- **Director:** Michael Cacoyannis
- **Director:** Michael Cacoyannis
- **Screenplay:** Michael Cacoyannis
- **Novel:** Nikos Kazantzakis
- **Cinematography:** Walter Lassally
- **Editor:** Michael Cacoyannis
- **Music:** Mikis Theodorakis
- **Producer:** Michael Cacoyannis
- **Cast:** Anthony Quinn as Alexis Zorba; Alan Bates as Basil; Irene Papas as Widow; Lila Kedrova as Madame Hortense; Sotiris Moustakas as Mimithos; Anna Kyriakou as Soul; Takis Emmanuel as Manolakas; Eleni Anousaki as Lola
- **Runtime:** 2h 22m
- **Certificate (MPA):** NR
- **Release (the US):** 17 December 1964
- **Genres:** Drama
- **Budget:** $783,000
- **Box office:** $9 million

## Where to watch in the US

- Apple TV: rent $2.99, hd
- Amazon Prime Video: rent $2.99, hd
- Amazon Prime Video: buy $4.99, hd
- Apple TV: buy $14.99, hd

*Checked 2026-09-20.*

Also available in: AU, CA, NZ, UA, US, ZA. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country.

## Awards

- Academy Awards 1965: Best Actor (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Art Direction, Black and White (won); Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (won); Best Supporting Actress (won)

## If you liked this

- *Electra* (1962): Cacoyannis and Papas do Euripides on bare hillsides; the tragedy without the dancing.
- *La Strada* (1954): Quinn as a brute rather than a life force, and much the better for it.
- *Never on Sunday* (1960): The other Greek film everyone’s uncle saw; shorter, lighter, and Mercouri is a joy.
- *Il Postino* (1994), Fi1m 75: A shy young man taught to live by an older one, at a far gentler volume. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-postman.md)
- *The Wicker Man* (1973), Fi1m 90: An outsider on an island where the villagers smile; the same dread, no beach. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-wicker-man.md)

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/zorba-the-greek