Hailed at the Venice Film Festival in 1956, yet scandalously little known beyond that, this is a "buried treasure" from Nikos Koundouros. Theo Angelopoulos has called this the greatest Greek film ever made, and indeed, some fourteen years before Angelopoulos's landmark film Reconstruction, Dracos already posed an investigation into the nature of appearance and reality that implicitly challenged the status quo while skirting the censors. It is a dark satire of an obscure clerk who is mistaken for a notorious criminal and gradually comes to adopt the role: the underworld offers sudden respect, even love, for this little man caught up in the chaos of post-Civil War Greece. Whereas society can offer him only the illusion of a personal life, the Piraeus crime world and its rituals-shown in startling set pieces such as a spontaneous mass dance of gangsters-"has a vague memory of the ancient past and bourgeois aspirations"(CM). "Hugely impressive for its surrealistic syntax, the film hints at darker political meanings" (Georgia Brown, Village Voice). Music by Hadjidakis.