A Guide to Every Major Film Adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey Before Christopher Nolan’s Movie

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

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.

As Odysseus, the Yugoslav heart­throb Bekim Fehmiu (for a brief moment there­after, cin­e­ma’s next glob­al star) may or may not be to your taste. More acclaimed is Armand Assante, por­tray­er of fig­ures from John Got­ti to Mick­ey Spillane to Niet­zsche, in NBC’s Odyssey minis­eries from 1997, which also fea­tures the likes of Isabel­la Rosselli­ni, Bernadette Peters, Christo­pher Lee, and Vanes­sa Williams.

Though star-stud­ded, shot in the real Mediter­ranean, and direct­ed by one­time Tarkovsky col­lab­o­ra­tor Andrei Kon­chalovsky, the Odyssey of the nineties isn’t much ref­er­enced today, per­haps due to its dat­ed visu­al effects. View­ers will nev­er have any such objec­tion to Uber­to Pasolin­i’s The Return, not because it only came out the year before last, but because it has prac­ti­cal­ly no visu­al effects in the first place. Focus­ing only on the lat­ter half of the Odyssey, the film dra­ma­tizes the reunion of Odysseus and his wife: a very human sto­ry, espe­cial­ly in that it con­tains no mon­sters. Dif­fer­ent adap­ta­tions have cut out the sirens, say, or Scyl­la and Charyb­dis, though it’s a rare pro­duc­tion bold enough not to put every­thing it has into the cyclops scene. But you can get an actor like Ralph Fiennes to play Odysseus — and for that mat­ter, Juli­ette Binoche to play Pene­lope — there’s lit­tle need for a crea­ture fea­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the First Spec­tac­u­lar Film Adap­ta­tion of the Odyssey (1911)

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

A Walk Through Homer’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Epic Before See­ing Christo­pher Nolan’s Film

Christo­pher Hitchens Explains Why Homer’s Odyssey Still Mat­ters to Our World (2000)

The Ori­gins of the Mon­sters in Homer’s Odyssey: The Cyclops, Sirens, Scyl­la & More

Greek Myth Comix Presents Homer’s Ili­ad & Odyssey Using Stick-Man Draw­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.