Anthony Quinn

Re “Passionate Star Anthony Quinn Dies,” June 4: Of all the energetic, riveting roles Anthony Quinn played, I think his best and most important one was in “Lion of the Desert,” in which he played a humble Libyan village sheik, Omar Mukhtar, whose people were facing the relentless, colonizing onslaught of Mussolini’s pre-World War II highly mechanized Italian army.

This film, based on true events, exhibits an all too rare counter-image of real, human Arabs and Muslims that punctures Hollywood’s predominant racist caricatures of these people that, one may well suspect, are meant also to legitimize other oppressive parallels in that region.

The Rev. Darrel Meyers

Burbank