E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wronged women Greeks bearing gifts on DVD BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Antigone (1961) From the tragedy by Sophocles. Directed by George Tzavellas. In Greek with English subtitles. Kino Vido; $29.95; available September 7. The Trojan Women (1971) From the tragedy by Euripides. Directed by Michael Cacoyannis. Kino Video; $29.95; available September 7.

Back before beach volleyball, weightier things were afoot on Attic sands than Misty May and Kerri Walsh. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the great Greek tragedians from the fifth century BCE, left a trove of immortal works telling tales of humbled kings, murderous clans, ravaged lands, and mighty fate. Despite their considerable power, the plays, with their long arias of speech and reliance on the ritual singing and dancing of the chorus, aren’t easily translated to the more naturalistic medium of film.

It can be done, of course, and two better efforts are being released this week on DVD: George Tzavellas’s dark, formal 1961 rendering of Sophocles’ Antigone, spoken in modern Greek (with eloquent, succinct subtitles and the choruses reduced to minimal voice-over narration) and featuring 500 actors, along with soldiers and horsemen of the Greek Royal Guard; and Michael Cacoyannis’s heartbreaking 1971 production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, with its horde of parched and ragged women, its desert vistas of destruction, and Katharine Hepburn’s quivering chin. Though both films, with their hairy-legged Greek soldiers in short skirts, make a compelling argument for pants, they also share an effective weapon in the great Greek actress Irene Papas. With her smoldering stare under black arches, she takes the irony right out of Shakespeare’s "ballad made to his mistress’s eyebrow."

Papas plays the title role in Antigone, which, though filmed on a circa-Spartacus studio set that’s not an entirely convincing stand-in for Thebes, captures the fear and chaos of its primal time. This is not, however, an Antigone that balances the debate between the heroine, who insists on burying her fallen rebel brother, and the new king, Creon, whose edict forbids it. Like Hebrew National, Antigone answers to a higher authority, and so does the film, painting the inflexible Creon as a stubborn tyrant rather than a state-steadying rationalist. Still, Manos Katrakis gives a remarkable performance, his face almost mask-like as it moves from contained, unappeasable anger to pitilessness at Antigone’s internment to dignified anguish at his own losses and self-exile. At the end, his form disappears through thick city gates into a swirling mist that gradually obliterates him — though not the lesson learned.

The film, like its view of the issues, is black and white and seems to take its cue from the line, "Silence can hold more pain than the loudest cries." Somber and shadowy throughout, its Theban court as formal as the streets are teeming, the film offers little of the "light of day" whose imminent loss the doomed Antigone mourns. (The only sunlight is a glare directed at the blind prophet Teiresias as he reads Creon the riot act.) Papas, her voice alternately velvety and guttural, delivers a dignified performance that conveys the defiant strength as well as the helpless of her character. Adding a human touch, particularly in his close-ups, is Nikos Kaziz’s youthful Haemon, who touchingly plays Romeo to Antigone’s entombed Juliet.

Cacoyannis’s The Trojan Women adds color and an element of hellish pageantry. But being based on perhaps the most anguished anti-war play ever written, it’s less bearable than Antigone — which is at least a tragedy of individuals, not the entire distaff spoils of a long, hate-fueled war. The director built the film on his acclaimed 1963 staging of the play for New York’s Circle in the Square, and it follows Euripides closely, using the Edith Hamilton translation. Of course, Cacoyannis fields a cast that Circle in the Square could not have shaken its checkbook at: Hepburn as the flinty Trojan queen, Hecuba; Geneviève Bujold (a gamine with an aquiline nasal prosthesis) as the mad prophetess/princess Cassandra; Vanessa Redgrave as Andromache, fallen Trojan hero Hector’s exquisite wife, soon to have their son torn from her; and Papas, her outlined animal eyes darting back and forth behind the wooden bars of a protective stockade, as Helen.

Cacoyannis’s wisest stroke is in casting the golden Redgrave not, obviously, as Helen but as Andromache, in which role she gives a studied but wrenching performance that pulls itself from a stately daze to deliver, at the news her son must die, a swelling scream that tears the heart. I prefer Hepburn tough rather than tremulous, but she has an opportunity to exercise both muscles as Hecuba, railing against the conquering Greeks and tenderly preparing her grandson for burial. Bujold brings a childlike seer-savant quality to the wild Cassandra. And Papas, bathing naked in her cage while the women of Troy despair for a drop of water, is a Helen calculating and feral. Cacoyannis comes up short in his few attempts to split the chorus’s words among the film’s sorrowing women of the East. But The Trojan Women focuses its tragic tale on the upper-crusters, and their cruel comeuppance burns like the city from which they are driven.