Word: agha
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...Edouard Roditi, the book tells the story of young Memed who grows up in a mud-walled village hut in a remote province of Anatolia. Recklessly brave and a deadly marksman, Memed battles his environment and a succession of superb villains. Chief among them: sly, goat-bearded Abdi Agha, who owns five villages and combines the brutality of Simon Legree with the buffoonery of Captain Hook. Readers will have to remind themselves from time to time that all this is happening in the 20th century...
...child, Memed runs away from Abdi Agha but is dragged back to serfdom. As a young man, he elopes with the village belle on the eve of her marriage to Abdi's nephew. Tracked down in the forest, Memed loses his girl but kills the nephew and escapes to the crags and hidden valleys of the Taurus mountains, where he joins a band of outlaws and finally becomes a Turkish Robin Hood. After a dozen gunfights, in which bursts of Homeric rhetoric alternate with bursts of grenades and guns, Memed at last avenges himself by murdering his goat-bearded...
...Must Die begins innocently, even happily. It is a day of triumph for a small Greek community. Their local oppressor, the Turkish Agha, has benevolently granted his Christian subjects permission to engage in their religion; he has allowed them to stage their passion play. But he, in his infidelity, and the town, in its belief, do not realize that more than a church festival is at stake. Able to cope with the reality of Turkish conquest, they are not really able to cope with belief...
Director Jules Dassin relentlessly pursues this point. He has artfully brought to the screen Nikos Kazantzakis's novel of the triple meeting of the Church, the Turks and belief. Each of these elements is made to complement the others. The Agha is not portrayed as a shallow reproduction of Pilate, but as a ruler involved in protecting his 1921 interests. The disciples' reluctance to follow is more than biblical, it is equally motivated by their fear of leaving their wives and their pubs...
Most scenes with the Agha are shot in the neutral gray of shadowy interiors. Only once--on horseback--does he come fully into the sunlight, where he briefly loses stature. In contrast, the world of Manolios and his "apostles" appears as the quietly violent whiteness of the Greek countryside, a brightness broken by the cold black of one night scene--during which Manolios goes through the agony of mockery, rejection, and self-doubt...