| Joseph Strick obituary Maverick director best known for his film of Ulysses – widely seen as a noble failureThere must be something quixotic about a director who sets out to make a film of James Joyce's Ulysses. A passionate Joycean, Joseph Strick, who has died aged 86, was undeterred by the challenge and the obstacles: "Even before I made it, people were saying it was unfilmable. I think the truth is, some people just find the book unreadable."The iconoclastic Strick first envisaged an 18-hour version, faithful to every word, but unsurprisingly he could not get anyone to finance it. When the final two-hour version, shot in Dublin, was completed in 1967, it fell foul of censorship – just like the novel. The British Board of Film Censors requested 29 cuts to remove sexual references from Molly Bloom's final, expletive-laden soliloquy. Strick obliged by replacing all of the offending footage with a blank screen and a high-pitched shrieking sound. Astonishingly, the board relented on the cuts and passed the film with an X certificate. It was one of the first films released in the UK and the US to feature the word "fuck"."I knew what kind of material I was choosing," Strick declared, "but I was still surprised at the intensity of the reactions to the film. In Ireland the book had never been banned, but the film wasn't passed there until 2000."In 1967, when Ulysses was shown at the Cannes film festival – an event described by the outspoken Strick as "corrupt and fake, and just a mechanism for keeping the hotels open" – some of the French subtitles were cut. During the screening, Strick stood up and yelled out that the film had been censored. He then went upstairs to the projection booth and turned off the switches. A scuffle ensued, and Strick was thrown down the stairs by security guards and broke his ankle. He withdrew the film immediately from the festival.One of six children, Strick was born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, and first read Ulysses at the age of 16. His Polish-Jewish immigrant father had brought a copy of the book – banned for several years in the US – over from Europe. He studied physics at the University of California before enlisting in the military during the second world war, serving as an aerial photographer for the air force.With a war-surplus 35mm camera, and the help of his co-director Irving Lerner, he filmed the lightly satirical and poetic Muscle Beach (1948), about the growing California subculture of bodybuilding. The nine-minute short, which now seems like a eulogy to carefree, postwar American youth, influenced the British free cinema movement of the late 1950s and was a forerunner of the American direct cinema genre of the 1960s.After shooting another short, American Homes (1949) – on how architects' designs are influenced by their customers' needs and the materials available – and working on what Strick called "real trash", he left the movies to become a successful businessman, selling scientific equipment.After several years, Strick linked up with the blacklisted screenwriter Ben Maddow and the editor Sidney Meyers to make a semi-documentary, The Savage Eye (1959). The film, made by three leftwing intellectuals in Hollywood who felt "transplanted, in alien territory", looks at the more bizarre aspects of life in Los Angeles including faith-healers, strip joints, beauty parlours and the grotesqueries of all-in wrestling, seen through the eyes, more jaundiced than savage, of a divorcee.The Savage Eye is in fact closer to the Joycean stream-of-consciousness style than the more literal film of Ulysses, which must be considered a noble faiIure. The Savage Eye was seen as part of the American new wave, and opened around the same time as Shirley Clarke's The Connection, John Cassavetes's Shadows and Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy, a paean to the Beat generation.Strick added another dimension to The Balcony (1963), Jean Genet's allegorical play about political power and sexual sadomasochism, set in a brothel, by having it designed as a film studio, making the point that "film studios are whorehouses". For Strick, there were three types of cinema: "subsistence film-making", done independently on a shoestring like The Savage Eye; "scale level", using small crews and casts like Ulysses and The Balcony, whose actors, including Shelley Winters as the madam and Peter Falk as a police chief, were prepared to defer payments; and "industrial", with all the loss of control that implied.Strick's few experiences with "industrial" Hollywood were less than happy. He was fired by Warner Bros from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968) because he refused to accept script changes that would have distanced the film further from Carson McCullers's novel. A year later, hired by 20th Century-Fox for Justine, based on Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet, he was fired after insisting that Glenda Jackson be cast in the title role. "They said she's ugly! But I said she's a great actress! And she'll make this movie work! But, no, they wanted a bimbo," Strick recalled. Anouk Aimée was no bimbo, but the film, eventually directed by George Cukor, was an unmitigated disaster.Meanwhile, Strick had moved to Britain, where he made a riveting TV documentary called The Hecklers about the 1966 general election. Still keen to explore the classics of 20th-century erotic literature, he then directed Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1970), which was X-rated in the US and banned in the UK and elsewhere. "If you're going to do Miller, you have to do Miller," Strick said unrepentantly, adding, "What good's a movie if you can't corrupt a 16-year-old?" Unfortunately, the film updated Miller's 1934 account of sexual adventures to contemporary Paris, where Strick settled for the rest of his life.He returned to documentary with the 22-minute Interviews With My Lai Veterans (1971), for which he won an Oscar. Although no footage of the massacre of Vietnamese villagers by GIs is shown, it is vividly (and horrifyingly) evoked by the five soldiers interviewed by an offscreen interviewer. The subjects candidly reveal how they learned not to question orders, even commands such as "shoot everybody".Strick often expressed the view that he was ashamed to be an American. In the 1960s he got in touch with the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, a communist, who was not allowed into the US to supervise the construction of the UN building. "It's disgusting. I can't bear to be an American. Would you like to design a house for me?" he asked. The resulting building, on the edge of Santa Monica Canyon, was the only house designed by Niemeyer in north America and was built "by correspondence". However, because Strick and his first wife Anne divorced, he never occupied the house.In 1977 Strick returned to Joyce, directing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a reasonably faithful adaptation featuring John Gielgud's powerful rendition of the famous hell-fire sermon. Strick's last film was the disturbing documentary Criminals (1996), which, through interviews, presents the thesis that crime is a product of nurture, not nature.Strick is survived by his second wife, Martine, their two children, and three children from his marriage to Anne.• Joseph Ezekiel Strick, film producer and director, born 6 July 1923; died 2 June 2010James JoyceUnited StatesCannes film festivalCensorshipRonald Berganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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