Ulysses
Joseph Strick
1967 | 132 min | B/W | 35mm

Dublin June 16th, 1904. Stephen Dedalus, a poet, embarks on a day of wandering about the city during which he finds friendship and a father figure in Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jew. Meanwhile, Bloom's day, illuminated by a funeral and an evening of drinking and revelry that stirs paternal feelings towards Stephen, ends with a rapprochement with Molly, his cuckolding wife.

It's hardly surprising that it took 45 years for someone to attempt an adaptation of James Joyce's dazzling modernist masterpiece that parallels a day in the life of unassuming Jewish advertising man Leopold Bloom with the events of Homer's Odyssey.

Wolfgang Suschitzky's black and white photography of authentic Dublin locations brings Joyce's famously detailed descriptions vividly to life, and Barbara Jefford's impassioned delivery of Molly Bloom's notoriously erotic monologue caused such a furore that the film was banned from general release in Ireland until 2000, something that would doubtless have amused Joyce himself.

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Part of our British New Wave season