Not the Best, Not the Worst

Ulysses. James Joyce was movie crazy. In the days before his eyes went bad, he saw every film he could, and in 1909 he established and managed the first movie theater in Dublin. In composing Ulysses, the enormous, erudite and scandalous masterpiece that is one of the few great novels of the century, he consciously employed the techniques of cinema: long shot, closeup, flashback, dissolve, montage. The cinematic character of the novel was excitedly recognized by moviemakers, and down the years some of the best--among them Sergei Eisenstein and John Huston--have unsuccessfully undertaken the prodigious labor of getting Ulysses off the page and onto the screen.

The man who finally did the job is a director of avant-garde movies (The Savage Eye, The Balcony) named Joseph Strick, and the film he has made is hardly the mighty epic Joyce imagined. In a show-business sense it is only a little old black-and-white movie, brought in for less than $1,000,000 and played by a group of actors no better known in the U.S. than any man jack in the Dublin telephone directory. It offers the spectator about as much of Joyce's "chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle" as a two-hour stopover at Shannon would offer him of Ireland. It is honest, mildly sensational, and for the most part intelligent: a pictorial precis of the novel that may not be the best but is certainly far from the worst movie version imaginable.

One of the main charges that will probably be made against the film is that it is more careful to preserve the glands of the book than it is to sustain its heart. But a bowdlerized Ulysses would be unimaginable. The book, which first came to prominence in the '20s as one of those shocking things published in Paris, grew into a legend, even for people who never read it, when its U.S. publication was sanctioned in 1933 by Judge John M. Woolsey's celebrated decision: "Whilst in many places the effect is emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac." The judgment has become the consensus. Though the script omits none of the common obscenities and few of the scabrous episodes that made the book notorious, it had no trouble getting through customs and ran into very little civic opposition. Only 65 theater owners agreed to exhibit it, however, and as a precaution against censorship the initial run was limited to three days at advanced prices ($4-$5.50).

Director Strick, who bought the screen rights four years ago for $75,000, originally wanted to make a Ulysses trilogy. "But the bankers," he says, "treated me like a nut case, so I decided to settle for one picture." Necessary though it was, Strick's decision can be blamed for much of what is wrong with the film. Joyce can be blamed for the rest; he presents a moviemaker with formidable problems. Ulysses is one of the most complex literary compositions of modern times: a short story that exploded into a veritable summa of 30 centuries of Western culture. Most of the leading European languages, ancient and modern, and 18 different literary modes are merged in the amazing Joycean jargon--all of them so repetitively punctuated with wordplays that the book resembles a giant pun cushion.

On the naturalistic plane, the story is relatively easy to adapt. It merely describes in numbingly minute detail a few ordinary things that happen on June 16, 1904, in the lives of three people in Dublin: a young poet-teacher named Stephen Dedalus (Maurice Roeves), a middle-aged Jewish ad salesman named Leopold Bloom (Milo O'Shea) and Bloom's erogenous wife Molly (Barbara Jefford). Joyce overlaid his simple story with symbolic parallels, some mythological and some psychological, that are more difficult to photograph. Stephen, for example, is Telemachus, Bloom is Ulysses, Molly is Penelope, and the events of the day correspond, in ways both witty and profound, with the episodes of Homer's Odyssey.

What can a director do with such supererogatory skimble-scamble? A great director--an Eisenstein or a Fellini--would no doubt have challenged comparison with Joyce by boldly transforming his words into images. Director Strick has preserved on his sound track as many of Joyce's words as he could, but most of the time he has used the images as a lecturer uses slides: simply to illustrate what is being said. Often the illustrations are inept. Joyce was half blind, and his Dublin is a city dimly seen but fantastically imagined. Strick's Dublin, however, is the ordinary place that shows up on postcards--even when Bloom sinks into parodic delusions of grandeur, the images in his fantasies remain invincibly normal and unexciting. The images, in effect, are afterthoughts; the film is essentially a book that several people are reading aloud.

Strick omits most of Joyce's well-worded obscurities ("met him pike hoses frillies for Raoul"), but makes telling use of the author's dry Irish drolleries ("weather as uncertain as a child's bottom"). He also gets some gross guffaws with Joyce's dirty jokes, among them Molly's assertion that oral sex practices can cause a woman to grow a mustache. As for the people who read the roles, most of them are recruited from the Abbey Theater, and they ring true as Irish shillings--particularly Actor O'Shea, whose Bloom is an ironic portrait of a man who doesn't quite know his place but continually gets put in it.

Many of the best parts of Joyce's book are missing. Since Strick has only 140 minutes at his disposal, he devotes most of it to the principal episodes: Stephen's soliloquy on the beach, Bloom's trip to Paddy Dignam's funeral, Bloom's brangle with the one-eyed Fenian in Kiernan's pub, Bloom's meeting with Stephen at Buck Mulligan's brawl, the nocturnal visit of Bloom and Stephen to Bella Cohen's brothel, Molly Bloom's magnificent end-spurt of soliloquacity.

Even the central scenes, sad to say, have been slashed for the sake of speech till nothing of the psychomythical significance remains and very little of the Joyce voice and its whilom Irish music. For those who have the patience and the intellectual equipment to read it, the novel is something very like a revelation; the film is not much more than a titillating tale intoned like the Gospel according to Joyce.

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