Word: stricking
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ULYSSES. James Joyce's masterpiece is a short story that exploded into a summa of 30 centuries of Western culture. Joseph Strick's adaptation is merely a pictorial précis of some of the principal episodes-but a good...
...Much Grease. Director Joseph Strick had greater cause for distress when he discovered that 20 lines of Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy had been blacked out of the subtitles. Storming into the projection booth, he was confronted by six guards. "That's my film!" Strick cried. "You've mutilated it, and you've got to stop the projection!" There was a struggle, and Strick was thrown out of the booth. Limping back to his balcony seat on a twisted ankle, he screamed, "Stop the projection! My film has been mutilated!" The picture continued...
...Strick, or his scriptwriters, must also be commended for the judicious selection of dialogue fragments here. Often, in Bloom's imaginings, single faces fill the screen as they thunder a brief phrase, then vanish and aren't heard from again. We have seen a bit of this in Lester's The Knack, but how much more delightful to have such phrases be Joyce's, to have instead of "Mods and Rockers!" Theodore Purefoy's faithfully Catholic, "He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature!" or to have a solemn diagnostician pronounce. "He was born...
Compressing as he must, Strick inevitably creates certain emphases Joyce does not. He wisely emphasizes Bloom's relationship with Molly, which is certainly the essence of the novel. This, however, tends to exaggerate the relentlessness of Bloom's thoughts on his cuckoldry. More conspicuously exaggerated is Bloom's racial paranoia, his consciousness of anti-semitism around him; but perhaps the problem of anti-semitism took on a different aspect for this film's crew, shooting in 1966, than it had for Joyce in 1922; perhaps it is no longer a sorrow from which we are capable of drawing our thoughts...
...Joseph Strick has not made many films before Ulysses. One, The Savage Eye, an impressionistic documentary about a lonely divorcee, has been little distributed. Another, The Balcony, is evoked amusingly in the scene of Ulysses which represents the book's Circe episode. In The Balcony Strick was groping energetically, if not successfully, for new film conventions to express Genet's revolutionary theatrical form. In Ulysses he has recreated Joyce's form superbly, has proved himself a great translator. The mind delights in considering the unconventional literary masterpieces he might next adapt. My own first candidate is Tristram Shandy, the eighteenth...