cult film freak: ANTHONY QUINN IN 'A DREAM OF KINGS' WITH INGER STEVENS

Title: A DREAM OF KINGS Stars: Anthony Quinn Year: 1969 Rating: ***1/2

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...

Anthony Quinn in A DREAM OF KINGS

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...

Anthony Quinn in A DREAM OF KINGS with Radames Pera

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.