Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Perfect cast and a good story

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Anthony Quinn really makes Nikos Kazantzakis' character of Zorba come to life, turning in a fantastic performance, and conveying Zorba's philosophy of living life to the full, of dancing and laughing in not just moments of joy or success, but also those of tragedy or failure. The book is a masterpiece, and while the movie doesn't (or perhaps can't) get quite as deep, Michael Cacoyannis (producer/director/screenwriter) certainly does it justice, shooting on location in Crete, capturing beautiful images and an authenticity in his film, and letting Quinn shine. We're given a wonderful philosophy in this gruff character who eschews pretense, book learning, rational analysis, religion, and nationalism. He is at once both hedonistic and simple, and also profound and deep, having gone beyond all theories and frameworks while living his life with a kind of purity. Zorba grabs us from the beginning, asking an Englishman (Alan Bates) "Will no man ever do something without a 'why?' Just like that, for the hell of it?" as they await their ferry, and then quickly sizing him up by saying "You think too much, that is your trouble. Clever people and grocers, they weigh everything." There is a challenge to rationality and convention here, and while the Englishman hires Zorba, it's clear that Zorba will be the one doing the mentoring, on how to live. A part of this is in nudging him into pursuing women, which Zorba does with relish. Aside from his ribald moments, there are others which are pretty risqué, including an old widow (Lila Kedrova) recalling an evening she spent with four admirals, and making it clear they all had sex together after a champagne bath. There are two very disturbing scenes in the film, one of which is when a young woman (Irene Papas) a man has killed himself over is surrounded by the townsfolk, stoned, and then killed. It's truly horrifying, and even if we can 'accept' it as an honest portrayal of old-world culture (though she's not guilty of anything!), the fact that her death means nothing to the two principal characters, the Englishman especially, doesn't seem genuine. Regardless, it's very difficult to watch. Later, the instant an old woman dies, her home is ransacked and looted, in another ugly mob scene. It's as if Cacoyannis is emphasizing how primitive Crete is, and juxtaposing this with Zorba's primitive (though enlightened) philosophy. This is consistent with Kazantzakis' writing in the novel, as well as in 'Freedom or Death'. There is a ruggedness in the people, as rugged as Crete itself, and if you're sensitive to that or behavior which is far from politically correct, you may not like the film as much.A couple more quotes: On aging: "They say that age kills the fire inside of a man, that he hears death coming. He opens the door and says, 'Come in. Give me rest.' That is a pack of old damn lies! I've got enough fight in me to devour the world. So I fight."On being irrational: "A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free."On war: I have done things for my country that would make your hair stand. I have killed, burned villages, raped women. And why? Because they were Turks or Bulgarians. That's the rotten damn fool I was. Now I look at a man, any man, and I say, 'He is good. He is bad.' What do I care if he's Greek or Turk? As I get older, I swear by the bread I eat. I even stop asking that. Good or bad, what is the difference? They all end up the same way...food for worms."

It must have been the 60's . the plot makes no sense. the characters are ridiculous. the violence is inexplicable. there are some good lines, ex" are you married? wife, children, house, everything. the whole catastrophe," but many trite ones.Good local color. I thought there was a scene of Zorba dancing with a beautiful woman. I must have been high.

A built-in defect of this film adaption from the source novel ALEXIS ZORBAS by Nikos Kazantzakis is its utterly invidious treatment of its female characters, indisputably it was more acceptable in a male-chauvinistic backwater when it was released in the 60s (a 7 Oscar- nominations including BEST PICTURE, DIRECTOR, LEADING ACTOR for Quiin and SCREENPLAY with 3 wins), but it sheerly renders its modern-day audience a mouthful taste of misogyny and xenophobia, to which director Kakogiannis uncompromisingly adhere.What makes me more ill-at-ease is the egregious nonchalance projected afterward by their male counterparts, after the shocking demise of the widow (Papas, the author even doesn't bother to give her a name), our young half-Greek-half-British protagonist Basil (Bates) has no remorse of his inadvertent complicity in it and never even care to contest on her behalf; as for the forlorn Madame Hortense (Kedrova in her Oscar-crowning role), her beloved "husband" Zorba (Quinn) leaves her cold body on the deathbed after a fiendish loot conducted by the village people (initiated by a few local crones), he has no motivation to bury her and let her rest in peace for the sake of their liaison, even though we all know it is a miserable one-sided infatuation, it is outrageously despondent.Anyway, if one can abide all those random grouse, the film is a competently dazzling piece of work by Cyproit director Kakogiannis, a less glamorous rigmarole compared with David Lean's A PASSAGE TO India (1984, 7/10), it is in the 1930s, a young English writer Basil visits Crete for his inheritance on the island, he encounters a larger-than-life outgoing middle-age Greek, Zorba, who volunteers to work for him and assists him in starting a mining quarry on his inherited lot, the two form a close bond meanwhile their embroilment with two widows on the island sour the Cretan hospitality of the native inhabitants, things turn uglier than one can anticipate (on a premise one doesn't familiar with its novel). Zorba, a cimbalom player (called Santouri in Greece), a character exuberant with lust for life, the living-in-the-moment sort, an illiterate but knows to address "with your permission" when prying into his boss' private affairs, Quinn's English is somewhat too proficient in context, but his effervescence effectively galvanizes the bleak conditions, he plays boisterous pranks on the monks of monastery and materializes his creative idea of transporting limber from the mountain to their land, he is an emblem of complete freedom, but as a person, he is a deadbeat libertine, Quinn's performance is headstrong but persuasive. On the contrary, Bates' Basil is bookish, genteel and even effeminate when put opposite with Zorba, if he is more or less a proxy of the author himself, he barely motivates anything, he observes, takes the advantage of being a foreign on a primal island, one time he dares to follow his heart, tragedy ensues, both characters are not as likable as they appear to be. Kedrova brings out two sides of Madame Hortense's life track, balancing her "stop the boom- boom" French foxiness with her latter compassion-inducing despair, helplessly living in her wish fulfillment. Papas, with scarce lines, delivers her powerful resentment superbly albeit it is damaged good in its conception, like Madame Hortense, women are men's appendages, this undertone is as vicious and dangerous as the macabre barbarism, all stink of passé values spiked with unfulfilled loathsomeness accumulated through one's own personal path.

Anthony Quinn's title character is a force of nature, and the rest of the people in the movie are tossed and buffeted helplessly by his whims. The writer played by Alan Bates is stunned into almost catatonic inaction by the strange, harsh society he encounters on Crete. Why he comes, and why he stays despite unnerving and sometimes horrific experiences, are questions that the movie raises but cannot answer. The pervasive unpleasantness of the place dims even Zorba's spirit until his only option is to embrace his powerlessness over his surroundings. Irene Papas, who had shown great chemistry with Quinn in "The Guns of Navarone" (1961) is tragically underutilized here.