Dances with Greeks

Viewing the vintage 1961 war film The Guns of Navarone and struck by the care taken in the introduction titles to acknowledge the help of the people in Greece in making the film on Rhodes.
The film was based on Alistair MacLean's novel about a fictitious action on the fictitious Greek Island of Navarone but rooted in the reality of the Battle of Leros during the hopeless WW2 Dodecanese Campaign. The allied forces lost badly but it delayed the Axis forces enough that the Russian attack was forced into the Autumn and then Winter. The rest is history.
But, returning to the shooting of the movie, and how well the makers were treated.  One of the cast, Anthony Quinn ( a native of Chihuahua, Mexico) loved the area so much that he kept returning and eventually bought property around a bay that he particularly warmed to.

Three years later he starred in the famous Zorba the Greek. The film was shot on location on Crete. Specific locations featured include the town of Chania, the Apokoronas region and the Akrotiri peninsula. The famed scene in which Quinn's character dances the Sirtaki was filmed on the beach of the village of Stavros.
The film was incredibly successful. In the 1980's he revived the 1968 Broadway musical that had adapted Zorba to the stage and at age 67 took it on a four-year US tour.
Today his memory is kept alive with a bay and beach named after him on Rhodes. But in a typically Greek way, there is a messy ownership issue
The story goes that he was so angry about the broken promises made by local politicians that he stopped only in Crete and never once mentioned Rhodes.
Quinn died in 2001 at 86 and was buried on his family estate...on Rhode Island, NY