in Film, Literature, Television | July 30th, 2026 Leave a Comment

If you plan on shoot­ing your own adap­ta­tion of Home­r’s Odyssey, bear in mind how much rests on your choice of lead­ing man. In order to play Odysseus, an actor must sum­mon a real grav­i­tas, but also a still-smol­der­ing vital­i­ty: here is a man who led the Greek army to defeat Troy, but still has the dogged­ness to make the decade-long jour­ney back home to his wife. In the mid-nine­teen-fifties, Hol­ly­wood had just the chin for the job: Kirk Dou­glas, who plays Odysseus under his Latin name in the epony­mous Ulysses. Though mer­ci­less in its exci­sions to Home­r’s text, as explained in the Under­rat­ed Cin­e­ma video above, it still has more or less every­thing you’d want in a fan­tas­ti­cal Tech­ni­col­or spec­ta­cle — and one shot by The Wiz­ard of Oz vet­er­an Harold Rosson at that.

Those in search of a view­ing expe­ri­ence more adher­ent to the orig­i­nal sto­ry should con­sid­er L’Odis­sea: not the Ital­ian silent film from 1911 recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, but the 1968 Ital­ian minis­eries direct­ed by Fran­co Rossi, who would go on to be bet­ter known for Quo Vadis? Though no Odyssey adap­ta­tion fits every­thing in, this one gets just about as com­plete as a clas­sics fan could hope for in its 446-minute run­time.