Zorba The Greek
This is one of those films I suspected I'd seen in a dozen sunday afternoon re-runs, but had no actual recollection of, so the wife and I hired it out to see if it was 'the classic film' the cover purports it to be. It wasn't. Daniel Karson sums it up for me over at IMDB (quick jist: anti-woman, no sympathy, no morality). And the plot is insane. Bates, the Englishman, takes a random liking to Zorba, then, after their initial foray into mining nearly leads to both Zorba, Bates, and a few of the locals deaths (this after burrowing all of 20 metres into the hillside), Bates entrusts the obvious nutter with all his cash so he can get supplies to create some farfetched pulley system for getting trees down off the top of the mountain. The madness.

The other weird thing is how this was something of a genre in the middle of last century: An English writer/teacher goes to Greece on some random pretence, meets an enigmatic local, gets enveloped in their plans, which invariably go horribly wrong. See also: The Magus, Who Pays the Ferryman?
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