Anthony Quinn

Alexis Zorbas [Zorba the Greek] (1964)

Alexis Zorbas [Zorba the Greek] (1964)

(On Cable TV, December 2019) You can say that Zorba the Greek gets a lot of mileage out of opposing a prim shy Englishman (Alan Bates) to an earthy, lusty, boisterous Greek (Anthony Quinn), but that’s only half-true. It gets as much mileage out of opposing a formidable character (Quinn as the titular Zorba) to a plot that goes in various directions, many of them so melodramatic that they lose their tragic edge. Much of the story takes place in a small Cretan village where our two protagonists are working on a mining project, a village where casual violence and savage behaviour seem to be the norm. The Englishman isn’t ready for such a place; Zorba does better but even he can be defeated by so much traditional madness. But Quinn overpowers the picture as Zorba—his career-defining performance is easily more compelling than the plot, to the point where you can ask if the plot is strong enough for the character. I’m not entirely convinced by the results: the most memorable scene of Zorba the Greek is an unbearably tragic death that would send most characters (and viewers) running away from that bloodthirsty village, but here it’s one more thing on the way of many more things just as bad. Quinn makes the most out of his character, but the film itself leaves disappointed, not quite making a point, not quite delivering a satisfying ending, not quite playing in a specific tonal registry. It remains a landmark of mid-1960s cinema, but it hasn’t aged all that well—the “rural savages” angle smacks of bigotry more than opposing modern values to traditional ones. Plus, well, Irene Papas is so cute that what happens to her leaves a bitter taste—not to mention the end of Lila Kedrova’s performance as well.

Union Pacific (1939)

Union Pacific (1939)

(On Cable TV, August 2019) I’m not sure how much we twenty-first century sophisticates truly understand the meaning and importance of the first coast-to-coast railway. To put in modern context, it was akin to building the first highway and the first Internet link throughout the country at the same time. The first transcontinental railway (1869 in the United States, 1886 in Canada) did as much to tie the country together as any law. It standardized time, facilitated the mobility of labour, ended the wild frontier, improved the flow of news and information—all things that we now take for granted. We may never be able to fully appreciate that it meant then, but at least there are movies like Union Pacific to make us appreciate the details of how it was done. Focusing on a troubleshooter for a railroad company, this is a film that takes a look at the nitty-gritty of building such a revolutionary endeavour, from shooing away undesirables that prey on railroad workers, to the logistics of keeping such a group of workers fed and productive, to negotiations with the native tribes. Joel McCrea plays the troubleshooter, bringing his usual charisma to the part and helping to humanize a complex subject. Barbara Stanwyck plays the love interest, while you can see (or rather hear) Robert Preston and Anthony Quinn in the supporting cast. But this is director Cecil B. de Mille’s film—an expansive, spectacular subject matter that never misses a chance to stage a large-scale action sequence. While the film does regrettably rely on native attacks as a pretext to action scenes, it does spend more time than was usual back in 1939 showing how those attacks were motivated by the white businessmen breaking their promises to the tribes. Union Pacific is my kind of western—not a celebration of the wild frontier using the usual macho tropes of the genre, but a study in how civilization spread throughout the land and closed the frontier. Some film historians point to this film and Stagecoach as when the Western grew up, but I can only testify as to the interest that it created and sustained over a two-hours-and-fifteen minutes running time: It’s a fascinating railway procedural, and it manages to have a nice human edge to it.

La Strada [The Road] (1954)

La Strada [The Road] (1954)

(On Cable TV, June 2019) Given that I don’t particularly like Italian neorealism and that Federico Fellini hadn’t yet fully evolved into his more personal expressionist style by the time he completed La Strada, you can probably guess how I feel about the movie. An episodic drama focused on two desperately poor entertainers eking a life of misery on the road with a circus, La Strada is not a film for the impatient. While there is a plot of sorts that eventually distinguishes itself from the individual scenes, it takes a long time between the scenes to get the narrative ball rolling … and you may not like where it’s heading. Anthony Quinn, unusually enough, stars as the strongman Zampanò. Alongside him, Giulietta Masina (familiar from her later role in The Nights of Cabiria) plays the dim-witted long-suffering young girl basically bought by the strongman. I tolerated much of La Strada, but the parts I liked more were those that strayed away from the neo-realist style (into expressionism, into genre suspense). Otherwise, it’s enough to be able to scratch off this film from the umpteenth lists of essential movies on which it figures. One annoyance (or cool find): The five notes of the film’s insistent leitmotif are near identical to the opening of the theme to the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun.