Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses

These two films by director Joseph Strick tackle the imposing task of translating the Irish genius James Joyce's works to the screen. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we meet Stephen Dedalus as a young boy. Both at school and home, Stephen gets a fair dose of Irish Catholicism, with a pinch of nationalist politics thrown in for good measure. Growing up with a proud, but improvident father, and a well-meaning, but overbearingly religious mother, Stephen (played as a young man by Bosco Hogan) enters the university, and gradually loses his ties to family, country, and religion--becoming, at last, an exile. Autobiographical in nature, the film has long stretches of Joyce's dialogue transferred virtually intact (and a great hellfire and brimstone speech by Sir John Gielgud). In Ulysses, we once again meet young Dedalus (this time played by Maurice Roeves) who shows up intermittently throughout--as his path is crossed by the main character, a Jewish cuckold named Leopold Bloom (Milo O'Shea). The record of a single day, Ulysses follows Bloom's wanderings (literally, through the streets of Dublin, and mentally over the course of his life and loves) until he meets Stephen in a brothel, following which, the pair share a drunken journey to Bloom's house, and the day ends with Leopold's wife Molly's (Barbara Jefford) long and earthy monologue on the nature of love. Made in 1967 and letterboxed to preserve the original wide screen image, Ulysses suffers somewhat from a '60s ambience which seems to pervade the second half of the film. Still, capturing the flavor of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness literary technique on film, is an achievement indeed. Ulysses is recommended for larger fiction collections; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which benefits from its more straightforward narrative (at least on film) is highly recommended. (R. Pitman)