Ulysses

Banned in Ireland until this decade – as if in honour of James Joyce’s similarly treated source novel – blacklisted director Joseph Strick’s 1967 adaptation presents a pretty picture of garrulous and gabby 1960s Dublin. That said, the sacred poetry of the 1904-set novel is much muted. As a director, Strick, this month the subject of a Barbican retrospective, veered from the sober to the fanciful, and in this film his care and fidelity tend to shroud the action in a cloak of sepulchral reverence as he charts the wanderings of Jewish ad man Leopold Bloom. Nevertheless, there’s much to appeal in this miniature odyssey, notably the superb black-and-white location work of ‘Get Carter’ lensman Wolfgang Suschitzky and the seductive turns of a range of Irish, American and British players, headed by Milo O’Shea’s innocent drifter and Barbara Jefford’s adulterous ‘armful’, Molly.