For the Beautiful Lady. In terms of the number of military-patriotic films produced, Greece in the 60s - early 70s of the last century quite successfully competed with the Soviet Union, and if you divide these films by the number of population, then you won the fight "in one wicket." Not all of the films shot in those years (especially during the time of the “black colonels”) make sense to recall today, but there were bright tapes among them, worthy of remaining in history.
The film of the prolific director Dimis Dadiras “Thirteen” is difficult to attribute to the masterpieces of world cinema, but this is the case, in conversation about which the epithet “worthy” is best suited. Being able to work in any genre, however, is not always legible, this time the filmmaker managed to cope with the task and tell the story of the feat without bravura pathos, but with a precisely calculated share of drama at the climax of the action. His later films, just like those made during the dictatorship of No and Dawn of Victory, are too overloaded with jingoism, too openly strive to get into the stream of state policy to remain truly human with their heroes perched on the coturns. Here the characters remain alive, and no desire to “bronze” at the will of its author is not taken.
Quite the opposite. If we start from the plot, then there is a desire to remove the Hero (precisely with a capital letter) from the pedestal and bring him closer not to the viewer even to descendants, even if this will have to debunk the official myth, and the truth will not be so radiant and pure. And the feat itself was accomplished not by a knight in sparkling armor for the sake of the Beautiful Lady Motherland, but by an outcast and a renegade for the sake of ridiculous and hopeless love. Only from this he does not cease to be a feat, and tragedy does not rush to turn into comedy, although at first it seems that this metamorphosis should become inevitable. Because the rivalry of the young handsome rich Dimitris and the foolish shepherd Luke for the hand of the first beauty of the city a priori looks ridiculous. Who would not laugh at the ridiculous courtships of a dung-smelling idiot! So Dimitris can not pass by his “rival” without dipping his face into the mud. Literally and figuratively.
But the beginning of the war mercilessly laughed at Dimitris himself. Abandoned to his native island for sabotage, he breaks his spine when parachuting and is in the complete power of someone who was not considered a person before. He is the aristocrat and patriot who must fight for his country. He must do the feat - and now lies in a dirty hut and shits under himself. Dimitris does not even admit that the stupid (by his own standards) shepherd is capable of the same high feelings as himself. But the approaching death makes one believe in the impossible: that the fool's love for his (his!) woman is capable of inducing Luke to make a heroic and at the same time absurd act - the destruction of the German military warehouse.
Unfortunately, Dadiras confined himself to an outward description of the conflict between Dimitris and Luke, without trying to dig deeper, without getting to psychological and social roots. Still, he shot a mass, genre film, in which it was quite enough to put between the characters the beautiful Elena Nathanael, who felt herself in the role of the “head” of a love triangle like a fish in the water – and it seems that all the tasks themselves were removed. The rest was behind the action: for a tense duel of will between the main characters and for an absolutely "cinematic" battle of a peaceful shepherd with German soldiers.
And behind the denouement, which seems to be attached to the film from some other, much more pathetic patriotic project. When the very ones in the headline, thirteen hostages are to be shot unless a saboteur appears. And Luke, terrified by his countrymen, is ready to give his life to save his beloved father. And the proud looks of the unbroken townspeople. Probably, this is all right, it should excite and disturb the soul, nurture patriotism and so on. That’s just the story, which ended long before the formal end of the picture leaves behind much deeper traces than the official ending. However, to require a competent craftsman, like Dadiras, to rise to the heights of masters, would not be quite fair.