Come Here To Me!

Barbara Jefford as Molly Bloom and Milo O’Shea as Leopold Bloom in Joseph Strick’s 1967 Ulysses.

Fifty years have passed since one of the great Irish cinema controversies, when James Joyce’s Ulysses made it to the big screen, only to be banned here. The work of American director Joseph Strick, it would remain banned until 2000, giving it the rather dubious honour of being the longest banned film in the Irish state. In New Zealand, it was only shown to gender-segregated audiences.

Ulysses had long been a controversial work. When Sylvia Beach made the brave decision to publish the work in print in February 1922, the book was widely condemned, often by people with no intention of reading it. The Sporting Times, a weekly British newspaper, regarded the book to be the work of “a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine.” The Dublin Review went further still, wondering how “a great Jesuit-trained intellect has gone over malignantly and mockingly to the powers of evil.” To D.H Lawrence, himself a victim of censorship, the book was “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written.” It wasn’t only British and Irish sensibilities that were offended by the book; in the United States, some libraries refused to stock the book, denouncing it as pornography.

Yet whatever about the printed word (and it should be noted that Ulysses was never actually banned in Ireland, though condemned) it was the 1967 film version of the tale which shocked Irish sensibilities most. Denounced by the authorities as being “subversive to public morality”, it remained banned in Ireland for more than three decades. The film proved controversial globally, even inspiring a walkout protest at the Cannes Film Festival, with the audience of critics who booed the film denounced as “illiterates” by a festival official. The use of the word ‘fuck’, coupled with a nude man shown from behind, was too much for some.

Liberty Hall, a very new Dublin landmark.

Joseph Strick’s Ulysses is true to the text, but also very much of its own time. Though Joyce set the story on 16 June 1904 (now eternally known as Bloomsday), Strick made no attempt to hide 1960s Dublin from the cameras, and the city itself emerges as one of the stars of the film. I like to think that Joyce, a true modernist, would welcome Strick’s playfulness with the contemporary city. We see Liberty Hall, Desmond Ri O’Kelly’s sixteen storey building by the Liffey. Then the tallest building in the state, such a building was a distant dream in the Dublin of 1904. We also get a great look at the much-missed Irish House pub on the corner on Winetavern Street, sadly lost a decade later to the regeneration of Wood Quay for the Civic Offices.

Strick originally intended to make the film more than eighteen hours in length, though financial constraints thankfully prevented this. The film divided critics; to the Sunday Independent, it was “a sincere if rather tedious homage to Joyce – very much a filmed book. It is totally innocuous visually.” It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the cast was something of a who’s who of Irish stage and screen acting. Leopold Bloom, the central protagonist, was portrayed by Irish stage actor Milo O’Shea, while Barbara Jefford was one of the few non-native talents, taking on the role of Molly Bloom. To her fell some the most controversial lines in Ulysses, and her characters bluntness about sexual matters like masturbation stood little chance against the Irish censor. Her performance is masterful, at its best in her closing soliloquy.

It wasn’t just the Irish who took issue with the film, and we should always be wary of presenting censorship as something uniquely Irish. Internationally, the film was banned in a number of countries, sometimes allowed only with comical stipulations. In New Zealand, the film was shown only to gender-segregated audiences, lest Molly Bloom’s soliloquy led to fondling in the aisles. The British Board of Film Censors allowed Ulysses to be shown, but insisted on significant amendments. Newspapers reported that “during the cut version the characters will move their lips but the banned lines will not be heard.”

For those who had opposed censorship in Ireland for decades, the film was useful for opening up a discussion around the merits of state imposed censorship. In the Seanad, Senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington lambasted those who banned Ulysses, on the basis that “all state censorship was doomed to failure and, therefore, is a bad thing. One can not legislate to make a people virtuous.” And yet, despite the best efforts of the film censor, thousands of people in Ireland did see Ulysses. Under the Censorship of Films Act, only films shown to the general public needed to be submitted to the censor, creating a loophole that allowed private film clubs to thrive. Though the League of Decency hissed and moaned about the film being “spicy and suggestive” (it is), they could do nothing about the showing of it in private clubs.

Finally, after 33 years, Ulysses made it past the film censor. Strick remarked at the time that “it was humiliating for me to have this film banned in Ireland. I shot the film with absolute fidelity to the book. There isn’t a word in the film that isn’t taken from the book.”Having made his first visit to Ireland in more than two decades, he felt times and sentiment had changed enough to try once more to get Ulysses approved. He died in 2010, proud of and willing to defend Ulysses until his dying day.

Ireland owes much to those who stood firmly against censorship in the decades that followed independence. It is telling of where Ireland is today that Ulysses has just completed a sold-out run in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and that the city is preparing to open a new interpretative centre dedicated to Joyce’s masterpiece. Much has changed since 1967.