Greece in the Movies - continued
Even the spectacular Greek scenery had to fight to compete with the image of Sophia Loren rising Aphrodite-like from the Aegean in 1957's Boy on a Dolphin, a tale of an ancient statue and its effect on the humans who find it and want to profit from it.James Bond enjoyed a Greek vacation in For Your Eyes Only, which opens with a scene of scuba diving in Greece, (although it is standing in for Albania at the time). The present Corfu Holiday Palace casino served as the backdrop for -guess what- the casino scene. And finally, the sky-high monasteries of Meteora appear as arch-villain Kristato's hideout.
James Bond may not have finished with Greece - here's Panos Sambrakos' interesting and behind-the-scenes tale of helping to research Greek locations for Raymond Benson's James Bond novel, The Facts of Death. While it's probably decades away from becoming the next "Bond Movie", it's a fun airplane read with lots of Greek and Cypriot locations.
Regrettably, many films on Greece are long out of the theaters and have, in many cases, gone out of print on video. Some can be purchased on the next page - check your friendly video rental shop for others, or, for the brave, call up and see if your local art movie house can be persuaded to bring back one or two of them.
Happy Hellenic viewing!
