A Dream of Kings

This film is 2 hours but plays like it's 2 days. Steeped in so much melancholy, with wailing, sloppy lovemaking, dreary sets, droopy faced ethnics and a tidy deus ex machina ending that slaps you in the face for wasting time on this interminably long movie.

This theme was done infinitely better with Alan Arkin as Puerto Rican "Papi". Anthony Quinn tries hard to endear himself but it goes nowhere. So much was happening but the film still manages to bore and depress. Inger Steve's is misplaced as a Greek widow, (she came from the Swedish part of Greece I guess). She is transparently just there for her allure; Inger Stevens was just moribund, and a deathly aura is around her.

During this movie, I felt the compulsion to scream, pound the floor, kick the tv over. That's why I saw it in blocks of seemingly 8 hour segments. It drags like no other movie has. It's DMV waiting kind of torture. I think Telly Savalas or Vic Tayback would have been better in this role than Anthony Quinn.

In A DREAM OF KINGS, Anthony Quinn plays Leonidas Matsoukas, a ZORBA THE GREEK in late-1960's New York with smoggy industrial backdrops and absolutely no trace of the colorful counter-culture...

Despite being a hopeless gambler, roaming philanderer and with a dying son, he has the immense/intense zest for life Quinn was known for, making this a kind of Quinnspoitation and overall fairly entertaining...

The best scenes occur outside his grungy apartment where cheated-on yet assertive wife Irene Papas knows nothing of her husband's seductive infatuation with local widowed-baker Inger Stevens...

Quinn's noisy scenes with both dark and blonde-haired actresses are liken to a stage play, wielding the kind of "real man loved by initially reluctant/literally crying women because they just can't help it" that's quite dated nowadays...

Yet Quinn's not entirely overboard the rest of the time, with the titular futile dream to take his son to Greece for a miraculous cure... plus his equally futile attempts to afford such a trip...

But the famously epic actor... whether hanging at a local gambling joint or working from an office as a makeshift counselor giving random-client-advice from old men to young boys... seems, for better or worse, all-too-real at the crest of the American Renaissance where lower-budgeted films preferred people to plot-lines.

First, the film is set in Chicago, not New York. Fine acting from Quinn, the great Irene Pappas as his wife, and the enigmatic and quite lovely Inger Stevens in, sadly, her last film. Sam Levene is touching as Quinn's dear friend. Quinn as life force and failed dreamer is not to everyone's taste ... but it's Anthony Quinn--always the romantic, raging mensch with a code in those mean streets--a code that he eventually betrays, though with a compelling motive. This is curious film in many ways but a classic example of what happens when men and their dreams collude with what Pappas' character calls "dirty reality."

Anthony Quinn basically repeats his signature role from ZORBA THE Greek as a good-natured, large-living gambler and adviser in sexual matters -- invariably in the context of classical mythology.

This is not to say that Daniel Mann has directed a remake. This time, Quinn is married to Irene Pappas and their son is dying. The story's plot concerns Quinn's struggles to raise enough money to take his son to the mountains of Greece, where he imagines the boy will recover. The story is offered deliberately as a classical tragedy written small.

The cast is filled out with fine actors, including Inger Stevens in her last role, and Sam Levene -- best known for playing small-time Runyonesque crooks in the 1940s. However, the point of this movie is to see Quinn playing Zorba struggling against fate. and not an Englishman's civilized repression.

Quinn was an excellent actor but in this tragic story of a degenerate, booze, ego-bloated gambler who mentally tortures his wife Irene Pappas and the target of his extra-marital lust, hard working widow Inger Stevens, as well as me, with his "dreams," he's way over the top, spreading his annoying, obnoxious personality all over the screen. An exhausting experience to sit through, like a bad off-off Broadway play.