Word: dassin
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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...
...Dassin has capitalized on the Motion Picture's potential for reality in making a potentially abstract story tragically concrete. Action, not dialogue, implements the drama. His players square off against each other visually, not verbally. In place of articulating their beliefs, the prostitute Mary Magdalen stops strutting and the betrothed disciple, John, lets loose his fiancee's hand...
...hero is defined as someone who comes to fill the needs of others. Filling the small needs of many, Manolios approaches the stature of Christ. To put someone on the screen, posing him as Christ to the point of naming him, is blatantly presumptuous. But the fact that Dassin does it successfully absolves him of presumption...
Ultimately, the story revolves around Manolios' effect on other people. With such a subject, the best description is indirect. Beside the dramatic use of crowds, Dassin traces individual characters. Although the entire cast performs laudably, the roles of Mary Magdelan and that of the Turkish Agha deserve special note, both for themselves and for the skill with which they are filled. The former experiences fully and convincingly the joys of virtue and of vice; the latter commits himself to detachment. Were his portrait drawn with less sympathy, a criticism of the Turk's detachment might be the biggest single answer...
...movie was made in a Greek village called Kritza with its populace participating. Dassin's evocation of this atmosphere is the final triumph of the film. He has isolated a place which seems to belong at once to antiquity and to the modern world, and found it inhabited with people of all shades of passion and knowledge, from the clearest white to the darkest black. A tremendously serious movie, it is also full of wise and ridiculous humor. Surely there is no better sign than this of Dassin's success...