The film follows one day in the lives of Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, a young teacher, in Dublin on 16 June 1904. Their stories intertwine with the epic wanderings of Odysseus, which serve as a loose mirror for their journey through the city.

How it was made

It was the first film adaptation of James Joyce's novel, published forty-five years earlier. Joseph Strick directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Fred Haines. Shot on location in Dublin on a modest budget, the film shows the city as it looked in the 1960s rather than in 1904. Stanley Myers composed the score and Wolfgang Suschitzky photographed it.

Reception and legacy

Critics were divided. Bosley Crowther put it on his 1967 list of the ten best films, and Roger Ebert ranked it second that year behind Bonnie and Clyde, while Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann saw it as homage or a thin reduction of the novel. Strick earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film was censored in several countries, Ireland among them, where it stayed banned until 2001.

Stills

Trailer

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Trivia

Censored subtitles at Cannes

During the Cannes screening, French subtitles were scrubbed out with grease pencil. Strick, who had not been told about the censorship, protested from the audience and withdrew the film from the festival.

Ban in Ireland

It was banned in Ireland in 1967 for being subversive to public morality. The ban was lifted in September 2000, and general release followed in February 2001.

Original Cinematopedia text based on Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.