Hello!

Since everybody’s caught up in Odyssey fever … at least that’s the news says … we looked into the past to remember some older, good versions of the same story.

The Odyssey is of course the sequel to a larger epic about War, The Iliad. We might be re-reviewing the  Wolfgang Peterson version of that tale, as there’s a new  Arrow disc due in mid August. It starred Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger, etc. Sean Bean plays Ulysses/Odysseus … all I really remember is the camera fussing over Brad Pitt’s hair and costume.

We still favor the old, somewhat stiff 1955  Robert Wise version of The Iliad, with Rossana Podestà, Jacques Sernas, Stanley Baker, Niall MacGinnis and Brigitte Bardot. Good old Torin Thatcher, ‘Sokurah’ himself, plays Ulysses / Odysseus as a crafty, ruthless strategist.

We reviewed one good version of The Odyssey. In one of the first instances of a big Hollywood star working in Italy, Kirk Douglas gave a good accounting of himself in a star-studded Italo epic, in color. From 1954,  Ulysses gets good mileage from Sylvana Mangano as both Circe and Penelope. The Cyclops sequence is excellent. Seeing how Ulysses gets involved with more than one woman on his ten-year effort to get home, we can’t help but think that the whole story is an excuse for a straying husband. “She looked just like you, honest!”

We also really enjoyed a version of The Odyssey that hasn’t a big profile, a Hallmark/Zooetrope  TV miniseries from 1997, directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. It’s a couple of minutes longer than Christopher Nolan’s version. It was shot flat for TV, and has its share of shaky CGI effects, but the story plays extremely well. Armand Assante is Odysseus, and he’s magnificent … his big problem is his ego, and the Gods punish him by continually delaying his return to his home in Ithaca. Greta Scacchi is Penelope, Bernadette Peters is Circe, plus we’ve got Isabella Rossellini, Irene Papas, Vanessa Williams and Geraldine Chaplin in tow. Jeroen Krabbé, Eric Roberts, Nicholas Clay and Christopher Lee carry the name male roles.

I remember my kids being very taken with the Armand Assante version … he was the best actor/hero ‘fit’ since Liam Neeson played Rob Roy.

The old DVD of the ’97 Konchalovsky The Odyssey seems to still be around. It looks like it might be on Prime Video … the flag when I bring it up says ‘included with Prime.’

We don’t often look in the past to re-think this story, but correspondents Jeff Allee and Alan Dezzani tipped us off to an 8 minute discussion (happy rant) on a YouTube page called James Whale Bake Sale: none other than Quentin Tarantino weighs in on Steven Spielberg’s ‘problem picture’  “1941”, the one with the poor reputation.

Did you hear that Mr. Tarantino expresses his opinions with enthusiasm?  We’re not surprised that he’d choose 1941 as a title to praise, as he loves nothing better than to give out with interesting, wildly inconsistent reviews. He’s great when he likes a picture we like, as he finds unique ways to give a thumbs up. When we disagree with him, we usually grumble that he thinks movies like  Switchblade Sisters are a pinnacle of film art. Well, I liked that one too.

Everything Quentin says about 1941 make perfect sense, but even he seems to be straining for the right words … “it has great things in it,” etc. He judges the movie on the fact that he read Bob Gale’s novelization first. He’s absolutely right in that the big star characters push the show out of shape, letting us lose track of the small-scale story with the original non-stars from  I Wanna Hold Your Hand. I still have one of the first scripts, The Night the Japs Attacked, which ‘grew like Topsy.’ John Milius added his guns ‘n’ explosions bits, and then Gale and Zemeckis did constant rewrites and additions as more big stars and more Saturday Night Live and Second City personnel were added. The more the merrier.

We like most everything IN 1941, but by the last act we’ve gone past our tolerance limit for screaming people and explosions. The film might become a terrific editorial experiment: turn the 150 minutes into Ten Serial Chapters, with titles, re-caps and last-gag cliffhangers. Any ten minutes of the movie are exhilarating.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson