IMDb 6.7 / 10
Official trailer
Ulysses is a 1954 Italian production of Homer’s Odyssey with Kirk Douglas in the lead, and it’s the kind of film that looks the part and gets the story wrong. The rating above is IMDb’s, not mine. I haven’t watched it, and I won’t, because what it does to the source is a perversion of one of the great stories.
Mario Camerini directed. Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti produced. The screenplay went through at least seven writers, including Ben Hecht and Irwin Shaw. That usually means the story was a problem long before the cameras rolled. Silvana Mangano plays both Penelope and Circe, Anthony Quinn plays the chief suitor Antinous, and Rossana Podestà plays Nausicaa.
What annoys me is how respectable it all looks. The cast is strong, the money shows, and Kirk Douglas has the build for a Greek hero, so the film had every chance to be good and still threw away the parts of Homer that make the poem worth reading. A cheap film that got the story right would get far more respect from me than this handsome one.
What the Film Covers
The film opens near the end of the story. Penelope is under siege in Ithaca by suitors who want her hand and her kingdom, and her son Telemachus is too young to stop them. Ulysses has been gone twenty years: ten at Troy and ten trying to get home.
He washes up on the shore of the Phaeacians with no memory of who he is, is taken in by Nausicaa, and slowly recovers his past in flashback. Those flashbacks carry the famous episodes: the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe and her island. Then he goes home, in disguise, and kills the suitors. The film runs a little over ninety minutes, and that’s the first clue about what it had to do to the poem.
What It Changes
Homer’s Odyssey is a story about a man the gods keep interfering with. Athena protects him. Poseidon hunts him. Zeus makes rulings. The 1954 film strips nearly all of that out and leaves a shipwrecked adventurer having exotic misfortunes.
It also doubles Penelope and Circe into one actress, so a story about fidelity becomes a love triangle with the same face on both sides. That’s a producer’s idea, and Homer would have had no use for it. This is the change that makes me angriest, because it turns the wife who outwits a houseful of suitors into a mirror of the witch, and the ending stops meaning what it meant.
The amnesia device does the rest of the damage. In the poem, Ulysses always knows who he is and where he’s going; his whole character is cunning aimed at home. A hero who’s forgotten his own name can’t be that man. Take away the gods, the guile and the purpose and you’re left with an adventure serial in sandals.
For Writers
Ulysses cuts the gods, merges two characters and gives its hero amnesia, and each change makes the story easier to film and weaker to watch. Adaptation means choosing what to lose, and the wrong cut can remove the reason the story existed. When you adapt anything, from a memoir to a myth, name the one element the story rests on and protect it, then cut freely around it. Write down, in a sentence, what your source is about. If a change you’re considering makes that sentence untrue, the change is wrong no matter how much production time it saves. Budget problems are real, but the audience only ever sees the result.
The Story Homer Told
The Odyssey is about a man who lies, schemes and endures his way home, and about a household holding out for twenty years without him. Penelope’s unweaving of the shroud is as clever as anything Ulysses does at sea, and Telemachus grows up across the poem.
The gods are the other half of it. Athena keeps choosing him.
Poseidon keeps punishing him. The poem is a long argument about what a mortal can do when powers far larger than he is have taken an interest in his life. Cutting the gods hurts almost as much as the doubled wife, since they’re where all the irony in the Odyssey lives.
That’s the story that gets flattened here. Remove the household, the gods and the guile, and the Odyssey becomes a travelogue with monsters in it. That’s roughly what this film is.
For Writers
The Odyssey works because two stories run at once: a man trying to get home and a household trying to survive without him. A second thread that pays off at the same moment as the first doubles the weight of an ending. When you plan a long story, give the people your hero left behind their own plot, with their own stakes and their own choices. Sketch what your secondary characters do while the hero is off stage. If the answer is nothing, your ending is going to land on one leg.
Kirk Douglas and the Cast
Douglas was a major star in 1954, a year after The Bad and the Beautiful, and he looks the part: compact, muscular and combative. The casting choice was itself unusual, since Italian epics of the era usually took their heroes from bodybuilding instead of Hollywood drama.
Silvana Mangano was one of the biggest Italian stars of the period, and playing both the faithful wife and the enchantress was meant as a showcase. Anthony Quinn, four years from his Oscar for Viva Zapata!, plays Antinous as the most dangerous of the suitors.
None of that is a defense of the film. A strong cast in a bad adaptation makes a handsome bad adaptation.
The Production
This was an Italian-American co-production at a time when American studios were shooting in Rome for cheap labor and good weather, a pattern that would produce Ben-Hur and Cleopatra in the years that followed. The money shows in the sets and the crowds. Harold Rosson, who shot The Wizard of Oz, handled the photography. Eugen Schüfftan, the German effects pioneer behind Metropolis, worked on the special effects. The Cyclops sequence is the one people still bring up, done with forced perspective and a large practical set. The dubbing is a problem, as it is with most co-productions of that era. Actors performed in different languages and everything was replaced in post, so the performances sit slightly outside the bodies delivering them.
The Odyssey on Screen
Homer’s poem has been filmed many times, and most versions have the same trouble. The 1968 Italian television serial had the room to cover the story properly and is generally considered the most faithful. The 1997 American miniseries with Armand Assante restored the gods and the scale. Even the loose adaptations tend to keep what this one dropped. O Brother, Where Art Thou? moves the Odyssey to Depression-era Mississippi and still keeps the trickster hero, the sirens, the long road home and a wife with suitors.
If you want the poem, read the poem. Emily Wilson’s translation is clear and fast, and Robert Fagles’s is the one most readers still recommend for the sound of it.
The Verdict on the Adaptation
The IMDb score of 6.7 puts this in the middle of the pack for 1950s epics, and that seems about right for what it is: a competent, good-looking costume adventure with a famous name attached.
What it isn’t is the Odyssey. The gods are gone, the wife and the witch share a face, and the hero spends much of the film not knowing who he is. The filmmakers rewrote the story into something else and kept the title, and I don’t care for that bit of salesmanship at all. Films that do that to a classic teach a generation the wrong version. A reader who comes to Homer expecting this movie will find a stranger, harder and far better poem.
For Writers
The 1954 Ulysses keeps the title, the names and the monsters, and still isn’t the Odyssey, because the parts it discarded were the ones carrying the meaning. Fidelity isn’t about details, it’s about intent. When you adapt or retell someone else’s work, ask what the original was arguing, then check that your version argues the same thing. Read your source’s ending and your own side by side. If they leave the audience believing different things about the world, you haven’t adapted the work, you’ve replaced it, and readers who know the original will say so in public.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Ulysses shows what happens when an adaptation solves production problems instead of story problems. Gods are expensive, so they go. Two actresses cost more than one, so Penelope and Circe merge. A hero with a clear plan is harder to string across flashbacks, so he loses his memory. Every one of those choices makes the film easier to shoot, and together they hollow it out. Solve your story first, then find out what you can afford.
Is Ulysses (1954) worth watching?
If you want a 1950s costume epic with Kirk Douglas and some impressive practical effects, it’s there, and IMDb users have it at 6.7. As a version of Homer, it isn’t worth your time, and that’s why there’s no rating from me on this page.
Read the Odyssey instead. If you want the story on screen, the 1968 Italian serial or the 1997 miniseries treat it with more respect, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? keeps more of its spirit than this film does. The 6.7 strikes me as generous for a Homer picture with Homer taken out, and all the money and all seven of those writers can’t talk me into spending ninety minutes on it.
