Word: strickly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...