Forty years on from 1965, well parted are those who gathered to sit and watch the film Zorba the Greek through a haze of cigarette smoke in a venue known colloquially in Melbourne as the Carlton Bug-House. The film, based on the 1946 first novel by the great Nikos Kazantzakis, and directed by the almost equally great Michaelis Cacoyiannis, was made in 1964, seven years after Kazantzakis’s death. Cretan genius Mikis Theodorakis wrote the music, and a stellar cast made the whole work as nearly perfect as a film can be. The foreign leads—Alan Bates, Anthony Quinn and Lily Kedrova—are now all dead, although the Greek actors Irene Pappas and George Foundas are still alive.
In 1965, when Zorba reached Australia, I was 20, in my third year of university, and living in a college community where trends were inevitably quick to catch on. The young of today would not have a hope of understanding the impact of this film, but it quite simply bowled most of us over. The wonder is that we passed our exams, because we trekked wherever we had to in order to see the film yet again, and our record players worked overtime as we listened to the sound track for hours: the music of the santouri and the bouzouki, instruments none of us had ever heard before, made a strange contrast to the learning of lines of Donne and Shakespeare, and to whatever subject matter budding scientists and doctors had to revise.
Like most young people, we absorbed what we liked and left the rest. Very few of us had ever been out of Australia, and had certainly never been to Greece, let alone Crete. Our world was restricted enough, but it was still difficult to believe in one in which custom compelled most women to wear black and where men sported luxuriant moustaches and knee-boots, while spending their days in a monotonous herding of goats in order to make a precarious living. What really got us in, and what we clung to, was the request, made by a tortured but somehow liberated Alan Bates at the end of the film: Teach me to dance.
In a sense this request and Alan Bates himself, who bore a marked resemblance to my father, sealed my fate. One night in the Park Drive, Parkville, of 1966, a Greek who was also dark and handsome taught me and a few