Homer in Technicolor: How the 1954 Film ‘Ulysses’ Turned the ‘Odyssey’ into a Ripping Adventure Tale

Given its foundational place in the literary canon, it seems likely that Homer’s Odyssey would have inspired dozens of feature film adaptations prior to the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. In fact, the number is much lower: one. That’s not to say that the Odyssey hasn’t inspired many other films, from Georges Méliès' 1905 short “The Mysterious Island,” in which Méliès' Odysseus fends off a seductive Calypso after giving the business to a cyclops, to the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? to 2024’s The Return. The Odyssey has also been adapted into several TV miniseries, but for full, big-screen Troy-to-Ithaca adaptations of the epic poem, the 1954 film Ulysses has stood alone until now.

The film suggests why so few have tried: it’s hard to squeeze all (or even most) of the source material into a feature-length running time. It’s even harder to make that material sing. Ulysses mostly succeeds at the first task and struggles with the second.

Produced by the Italian team of Dino de Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti and directed by Mario Camerini, a comedy veteran with roots in the silent era who joined the production late in the game after the departure of G.W. Pabst, Ulysses was born of the “Hollywood on the Tiber” post-war Italian film production boom. Its credits list seven screenwriters, including Ben Hecht and Irwin Shaw, and the cast includes a mix of American and Italian actors who delivered the film’s later-to-be-overdubbed dialogue in their own language. It’s a film designed to play around the world to audiences attracted by the prospect of seeing an ancient world spectacle in glorious Technicolor. All other concerns feel secondary at best. In that sense, Ulysses succeeds. Running a tight 104 minutes in the cut now most widely available (Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray includes the same cut in both Italian and English), Ulysses breezes through the events of the Odyssey and looks good doing it. It plays like the cinematic equivalent of a Classics Illustrated adaptation, albeit one with an intense interest in showing barechested men and women in clingy gowns.