Film noir meets Greek tragedy. After a Bogart movie poster is pasted over in the opening sequence, Nikos Koundouros’ O Drakos (US: The Ogre of Athens) proceeds to package underground gangster noir, Italian neorealism, and Dostoyevskian delusion (think The Double) into Greece’s most fascinating contribution to the noir cycle. Thomas (Dinos Iliopoulos) is a lonely, unattractive nerd who wakes up one morning to learn he’s nearly identical in appearance to a gangster called “Dragon” whose picture is splashed all over the newspapers. Perhaps seeing this as his opportunity to attain personal prestige and a bit of excitement in an indifferent world, Thomas adopts the criminal’s image: he’s hunted by the police, shunned by his co-workers and neighbors, but embraced by dancer Carmen (Maria Lekaki), her co-worker Baby (Margarita Papageorgiou), and the gangster Fatman (Giannis Argyris) who runs the nightclub where they perform. The figures of the underworld assume he’s the real Dragon, desperate for him to lead their imminent Big Job, but Thomas’s good luck can’t last forever. With flourishes of magical realism and moments of borderline slapstick comedy, the film uses Greece’s postwar, post-occupation poverty as a backdrop in which desperate Athenians look to America as the great hope; in fact, it’s an American customer who comes looking to purchase a stolen column from a ruined temple, a symbol of American modernity pillaging the ancient ruins of Western civilization. Occurring almost entirely in a single night, the film’s streets, doorways, and alleyways are suffocated by low-key, B&W lighting, while the live music and dance numbers, one after another, are entirely mesmerizing. The Ogre of Athens is that rare film that feels odd while viewing (a blind marching band at night, a dancer sobbing beside her goldfish, homoerotic blood brother rituals to prepare for a heist, exaggerated acting by most involved) but leaves a lasting impact.