Ulysses **** (1967, Milo O’Shea, Barbara Jefford, Maurice Roëves) – Classic Movie Review 6163

Co-writer/producer/ director Joseph Strick’s superb 1967 British drama is a bold and involving – and admirable – attempt to translate the seemingly unfilmable James Joyce stream-of-consciousness novel to the screen.

It is especially notable for its strong 1904 Dublin atmosphere, helped by the good location filming and Wolfgang Suschitzky’s superb black and white photography, and the outstanding acting from ideally cast Milo O’Shea (as Leopold Bloom), Maurice Roëves (as Stephen Dedalus), T P McKenna (as Buck Mulligan) and Barbara Jefford, who speaks the Molly Bloom part beautifully. Some of the crowd scenes are evidently filmed in the contemporary Dublin of 1966 but never mind, the atmosphere is right.

In the loose narrative, poet Stephen Dedalus, wanders around Dublin, finds a friend in Leopold Bloom, who passes his day with a funeral, an evening drinking and a night with his wife Molly.

Like the book, highly controversial in its day, the movie is packed full of four-letter words that apparently shocked at least some people in the allegedly liberated Sixties.  The BBFC originally requested 29 cuts to remove the strong language and crude sexual references from Molly’s final soliloquy but gave way and passed it for cinema release in March 1967. So it became the first film in the UK to feature the F word.

Also in the cast are Anna Manahan as Bella Cohen, Maureen Potter, Martin Dempsey as Simon Dedalus, Sheila O’Sullivan, Graham Lines, Peter Maycock, Fionnula Flanagan as Gerty MacDowell, Maureen Toal, Chris Curran as Myles Crawford, Maire Hastings, Eddie Golden as Martin Cunningham, David Kelly as Garrett Deasy, Graham Lines as Haines, Joe Lynch and O Z Whitehead.

It is written in an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Joseph Strick and Fred Haines, scored by Stanley Myers and designed by Graham Probst.

In New Zealand, it could only be screened before gender-segregated audiences. In Ireland it was finally passed by censors as late as 27 September 2000.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6163

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