Never in Crete

Usually Greeks don't gripe in movie theaters. But last week in Athens packed houses were howling, hissing, booing and whistling in disgust. Zorba the Greek was having its first showings. What the audiences took most unkindly to were scenes that portrayed the people of a small village in Crete uniting to support the knife slaying of a young widow outside church and the robbing of a harlot on her deathbed. "Cretans should do something. This is disgraceful," declared Athens' daily Estia. The Pan-Cretan Union in Athens declared the film monstrous and insulting.

The whole thing was just a bit much for Eleni Kazantzakis, however. Widow of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of the book on which the movie is based, she angrily responded: "Greeks resent being told that 60 years ago in a Cretan village simple peasants behaved inelegantly toward a dead woman. They forget my dead husband, whose tombstone in Crete was covered with excrement every day for years."

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