Zeus

Tropic Of Cancer (1970)

• Director
  • Joseph Strick
• Writers
  • Betty Botley(screenplay)
  • Henry Miller(novel)
  • Joseph Strick(screenplay)
• Stars
  • Rip Torn
  • James T. Callahan
  • Ellen Burstyn

  Three years after cinematizing James Joyce's long-censored Ulysses, Joseph Strick mounted an adaptation of another racy literary work -- Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Rip Torn plays Miller, an American expatriate author living -- and loving -- in 1920s Paris. The much-vaunted sex scenes were hot enough in 1970 to earn the film an X-rating, and an NC-17 when the film was re-rated in 1992. Ellen Burstyn (then billed as Ellen MacRae) has a few effective scenes as Miller's long-suffering wife, Mona; Phil Kaufman later elaborated on her character in the 1990 film Henry & June. Henry Miller himself appears in Tropic of Cancer, billed as a "spectator."