[5] It was reportedly jeered at its first screening, but during the second showing, French subtitles in which Molly Bloom described sexual intercourse were seen to have been scrubbed out by a grease pencil, pushing audience sympathies toward Strick who had not been informed of the censorship beforehand.

"[8] Roger Ebert ranked the film second on his own year-end list (behind only Bonnie and Clyde), writing that it "went into the minds of recognizable human beings and revealed their thoughts about those things most important to them – expressed in the only words they knew.

"[9] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "presuming no familiarity with the novel, the film remains an engrossing experience—very often superbly funny, frequently moving, a confrontation not with three but with more than a score of authentic and credible individuals."

... What one misses particularly is a sense of the author's presence, without which the book would be nothing—and without which the film is oddly and insistently impersonal.

"[12] Ulysses was originally rated "X" (adults-only) in the United Kingdom after extensive cuts were demanded by the British Board of Film Classification censor John Trevelyan.

However Strick replaced the offending dialogue with a series of screeches and sounds, thus rendering the scenes unintelligible.

It was screened in the late 1970s at the Irish Film Theatre, a members-only cinema in Dublin exempt from the laws on censorship.