Although filmed mostly in English and playing to international acclaim, Zorba is Greek to its melancholy bones. Anthony Quinn's "essential" Greek has a life force of greater mystery and intensity than Mercouri's in Never on Sunday (observed, here, by a British Alan Bates searching for the Greek in himself). But in this picture Zorba is the anomaly, the true outsider among a community of Cretans who live in the grip of ritual passions which undermine beautiful notions of life force and landscape. When Zorba loses his British friend he'll have no one to play to. Peter Pappas wrote in Jump Cut, "To deal with Kazantzakis, as Cacoyannis correctly understood, is (to come) to terms with the most influential myth-maker and legend-creator of modern Greece....Cacoyannis distilled the essence of Kazantzakis's novel without compromising either the texture of the book nor its latent darkness and pessimism." With a now-classic score by Mikis Theodorakis.