Ulysses 1954: The Day Homer Hit the Big Screen

The Oldest Adventure Story, On Film

On October 6, 1954, the Italian-American film Ulysses premiered. It reached American theaters the next year. The movie put Kirk Douglas on screen as Ulysses, the Roman name for Odysseus, and it was one of the first big-budget attempts to bring Homer’s Odyssey to a mass audience. That release date is worth marking, because it’s the day one of the oldest stories humans have ever told got handed to the movies.

I’ve read the Odyssey many times, in several different translations and styles. I always went looking for the prose versions, the narrative tellings, instead of the long verse. I’m not a fan of poems that run on for hundreds of pages. Give me the story in plain sentences and I’m happy. And the story is great. The Cyclops. Circe. The journey home that takes ten years. The wife who waits and the husband who claws his way back to her. It’s everything.

Watch: Ulysses 1954 Trailer with Kirk Douglas, junkiefix

What is the Odyssey?

An epic poem in twenty-four books, The Odyssey is traditionally credited to the ancient Greek poet Homer. It was meant to be performed out loud, and oral poets passed it down for generations before anyone wrote it down. That matters, because it was built to be heard. That’s part of why it moves the way it does.

The plot is simple and bulletproof. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, has been gone for ten years fighting the Trojan War. Now he spends another ten trying to get home. Along the way he faces the Cyclops Polyphemus, the sorceress Circe who turns his men into pigs, the Sirens, and a parade of gods who help or hinder him on a whim. Back home, his wife Penelope holds off a crowd of suitors who have moved into her house and want her to declare Odysseus dead and remarry.

Their son Telemachus grows up in the middle of it. The story drives toward one reunion.

If you want to read it, the translations people return to most are Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and Robert Fagles. They each handle the poem differently. Find the one whose voice you can live inside, because you’ll be there a while.

What is the 1954 Ulysses film?

Mario Camerini directed Ulysses, and Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, two of the biggest names in Italian cinema, produced it.

Kirk Douglas played the lead, and he was a perfect Odysseus, all arrogance and mischievous intelligence and physical energy. Silvana Mangano pulled double duty in two roles, the faithful Penelope and the witch Circe, a clever bit of casting when you think about what the story is doing. Anthony Quinn played Antinous, the most aggressive of the suitors back in Ithaca.

The film hits the big set pieces. The Cyclops sequence and the Circe sequence are the standouts, heavy on effects that were impressive for the mid-1950s. It was shot partly on real Mediterranean locations, along something close to the route the poem describes. American critics gave it mixed reviews. They praised Douglas and the spectacle and knocked the pacing and the dubbing. In Italy it landed as a milestone. Looking back, it’s often credited as one of the films that kicked off the sword-and-sandal genre, the wave of muscular ancient-world epics that followed.

It’s not a perfect film. But it’s a real attempt to film a story most people thought couldn’t be filmed, and Douglas holds it together.

Troy and the Same Old Story

Think of The Odyssey as the second half of a pair. The first is the Iliad, the story of the Trojan War itself, and Hollywood went back to that well in 2004 with Troy. Brad Pitt played Achilles. The critics weren’t kind to it. I liked it anyway, and I liked Pitt in it. What do the critics know. The story is three thousand years old and still pulls you straight in, the rage of Achilles, the doomed city, the heroes who know they’re going to die and fight anyway.

That’s the point. These stories survive every retelling. Bad films, good films, prose translations, verse translations, the bones hold. You can hang almost anything on them and the structure holds it up.

Why has the Odyssey survived three thousand years?

Stop and think about what it took for the Odyssey to reach you. There was no printing press. There were no books in the sense we mean. The poem lived in the memories of performers who recited it aloud, night after night, passing it from one generation to the next before anyone wrote a word of it down.

That’s an astonishing thing to survive. Most stories from that era are gone, lost the moment the last person who knew them died. The Odyssey made it because it was good enough that people refused to let it go. They memorized thousands of lines to keep it alive. The repeated phrases you notice when you read it, the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn, were memory hooks, tools that helped oral poets hold the whole epic in their heads.

There’s a lesson in that for anyone who writes. A story that people will work to preserve has to earn it. Its writer has to build it well enough, and make it mean enough, that someone three thousand years from now might still want to pass it on.

Most of what people write won’t last a decade. The Odyssey is the high bar, the proof of how durable a story can be when the structure is sound and the human truth underneath it never goes out of date.

What can writers learn from Homer?

A poem this old still matters to anyone writing now because the Odyssey is the original story arc everything else copies. A man leaves home, faces a series of trials that test something different in him each time, and fights his way back changed. Almost every adventure story since runs on that frame, whether the writer knows it or not.

The structure is the lesson. Each obstacle in the Odyssey has its own job. The Cyclops tests Odysseus’ cunning. The Sirens test his discipline. Circe tests his loyalty. None of them is filler. They each reveal the hero under a different kind of pressure. That’s how you build a plot that means something, not a string of random events but a sequence where every trial pays off a piece of character.

The other lesson is the homecoming. The Odyssey is about getting home, and the cost of getting there, and whether the home you fought to reach is even the one you left. That ache, the pull toward home and the fear that it’s changed, is older than writing and still works on every reader who has ever been away too long. I’ve used that pull in my own fiction more than once.

Homer got there first, three thousand years ago, and nobody has improved on it much since.

So on October 6, watch the 1954 Ulysses, or read a few books of the Odyssey, or just think about the fact that a story this old still holds. Then go build something on those same bones. They’ve held up for three thousand years. They’ll hold up for yours.

Ulysses 1954 and the Odyssey FAQ