The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage, family and identity; and about travellers, hospitality and the changing meanings of home in a strange world.
Hollywood's obsession with the tale of American greed, justice, religion and sexual hypocrisy stretches across the history of cinema. This title studies this extraordinary sequence of adaptations. It reveals a history of Hollywood of American culture and the difficulty of telling an American tragedy in the land of the American dream.