Barry Lyndon

In 1750s Ireland, Redmond Barry's father is killed in a duel. Barry becomes infatuated with his cousin Nora Brady, and shoots her suitor British Army captain John Quin in a duel. He flees but is robbed by highwaymen on his way to Dublin. Penniless, Barry enlists in the British Army. Family friend Captain Grogan informs him that Quin is not dead: the duel was staged so that Nora's family can get rid of Barry and improve their finances through her marriage to Quin.

Barry serves with his regiment in Germany in the Seven Years' War, but deserts after Grogan is fatally wounded in a skirmish against the French Royal Army. Masquerading as a British lieutenant, he has a brief affair with Frau Lieschen, a peasant woman. On his way to Bremen, Barry encounters the Prussian Captain Potzdorf, who sees through his ruse and impresses him into the Prussian Army. Barry later saves Potzdorf's life and receives commendation from Frederick the Great.

At the end of the war, Barry is employed by Potzdorf's uncle in the Prussian Ministry of Police. The Prussians suspect the Chevalier de Balibari, a professional gambler, of spying for the Austrians, and have Barry become his servant. Barry confides everything to the Chevalier, a fellow Irishman, and they become confederates. After they cheat the Prince of Tübingen at cards, the Prince refuses to pay his debts, and the Chevalier in turn demands satisfaction. The Prussians, still suspecting the Chevalier, arrange to have both him and Barry expelled from the country.

Barry and the Chevalier travel across Europe, perpetrating gambling scams, with Barry forcing payment from debtors with sword duels. In Spa, he encounters the beautiful and wealthy Lady Lyndon. He seduces her, and her elderly husband Sir Charles Lyndon dies from apoplexy, induced by Barry's goading and verbal repartee.

In 1773, Barry marries Lady Lyndon, takes her last name and settles in England. Lord Bullingdon, Lady Lyndon's ten-year-old son by Sir Charles, despises Barry. Barry responds by physically abusing him. The Countess bears Barry a son, Bryan Patrick, but the marriage is unhappy: Barry is openly unfaithful and squanders his wife's wealth while keeping her in seclusion.

A few years later, Barry's mother comes to live with him. She warns him that if Lady Lyndon were to die, Bullingdon would inherit everything, and advises him to obtain a title to protect himself. To this end, he cultivates the influential Lord Wendover and spends large sums of money to ingratiate himself with high society. Bullingdon, now a young adult, disrupts a party Barry throws for Lady Lyndon; he declares his hatred for his stepfather and states that he will leave the family estate as long as Barry remains there. Barry assaults Bullingdon until physically restrained. He becomes ostracised by society and plunges further into financial ruin.

An overindulgent father, Barry gifts Bryan a full-grown horse for his ninth birthday, leading to his death in a riding accident. Barry turns to alcohol, while Lady Lyndon seeks solace in religion, assisted by the Rev. Samuel Runt, who had been tutor to Bullingdon and Bryan. Barry's mother dismisses Runt, for fear that his influence will worsen Lady Lyndon's condition. Lady Lyndon attempts suicide. Runt and Graham, the family's steward, then seek out Bullingdon, who returns and challenges Barry to a duel.

After Bullingdon nervously misfires the first shot, Barry magnanimously fires into the ground. Bullingdon refuses to end the duel and shoots Barry in the leg, forcing the leg to be amputated below the knee. While Barry is recovering, Bullingdon takes control of the Lyndon estate. He offers Barry 500 guineas a year on the condition that he leaves England forever. With his credit exhausted, Barry accepts. Barry resumes his gambling profession, though without his former success. In December 1789, a middle-aged Lady Lyndon signs Barry's annuity cheque as her son looks on.

After completing post production on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick resumed planning a film about Napoleon. During pre-production, Sergei Bondarchuk and Dino De Laurentiis' Waterloo was released, and failed at the box office. Reconsidering, Kubrick's financiers pulled funding, and he turned his attention towards an adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. Subsequently, Kubrick showed an interest in Thackeray's Vanity Fair but dropped the project when a serialised version for television was produced. He told an interviewer, "At one time, Vanity Fair interested me as a possible film but, in the end, I decided the story could not be successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a feature film ... as soon as I read Barry Lyndon I became very excited about it."[7]

Having earned Oscar nominations for Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick's reputation in the early 1970s was that of "a perfectionist auteur who loomed larger over his movies than any concept or star".[6] His studio—Warner Bros.—was therefore "eager to bankroll" his next project, which Kubrick kept "shrouded in secrecy" from the press partly due to the furore surrounding the controversially violent A Clockwork Orange (particularly in the UK) and partly due to his "long-standing paranoia about the tabloid press."[6] Kubrick was initially rumored to be developing an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novell Dream Story, which would serve as the source material for his later film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).[8]

Having felt compelled to set aside his plans for a film about Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1972 Kubrick set his sights on Thackeray's 1844 "satirical picaresque about the fortune-hunting of an Irish rogue," Barry Lyndon, the setting of which allowed Kubrick to take advantage of the copious period research he had done for the now-aborted Napoleon.[6][8] At the time, Kubrick merely announced that his next film would star Ryan O'Neal (deemed "a seemingly un-Kubricky choice of leading man"[6]) and Marisa Berenson, a former Vogue and Time magazine cover model,[9] and be shot largely in Ireland.[6] So heightened was the secrecy surrounding the film that "Even Berenson, when Kubrick first approached her, was told only that it was to be an 18th-century costume piece [and] she was instructed to keep out of the sun in the months before production, to achieve the period-specific pallor he required."[6]

Kubrick based his adapted screenplay on William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon (republished as the novel Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.), a picaresque tale written and published in serial form in 1844.

The film departs from the novel in several ways. In Thackeray's writings, events are related in the first person by Barry himself. A comic tone pervades the work, as Barry proves both a raconteur and an unreliable narrator. Kubrick's film, by contrast, presents the story objectively. Though the film contains voice-over (by actor Michael Hordern), the comments expressed are not Barry's, but those of an omniscient narrator. Kubrick felt that using a first-person narrative would not be useful in a film adaptation:[10]

I believe Thackeray used Redmond Barry to tell his own story in a deliberately distorted way because it made it more interesting. Instead of the omniscient author, Thackeray used the imperfect observer, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the dishonest observer, thus allowing the reader to judge for himself, with little difficulty, the probable truth in Redmond Barry's view of his life. This technique worked extremely well in the novel but, of course, in a film you have objective reality in front of you all of the time, so the effect of Thackeray's first-person story-teller could not be repeated on the screen. It might have worked as comedy by the juxtaposition of Barry's version of the truth with the reality on the screen, but I don't think that Barry Lyndon should have been done as a comedy.

Kubrick made several changes to the plot, including the addition of the final duel.[11]

Principal photography lasted 300 days, from spring 1973 through to early 1974, with a break for Christmas.[12] Kubrick initially wished to film the entire production near his home in Borehamwood, but Ken Adam convinced him to relocate the shoot to Ireland.[8] The crew arrived in Dublin in May 1973. Jan Harlan recalls that Kubrick "loved his time in Ireland – he rented a lovely house west of Dublin, he loved the scenery and the culture and the people". [4]

Many of the exteriors were shot in Ireland, playing "itself, England, and Prussia during the Seven Years' War."[6] Kubrick and cinematographer Alcott drew inspiration from "the landscapes of Watteau and Gainsborough," and also relied on the art direction of Ken Adam and Roy Walker.[6] Alcott, Adam and Walker were among those who would win Oscars for their work on the film.[6][13]

Several of the interior scenes were filmed in Powerscourt House, an 18th-century mansion in County Wicklow. The house was destroyed in an accidental fire several months after filming (November 1974), so the film serves as a record of the lost interiors, particularly the "Saloon" which was used for more than one scene. The Wicklow Mountains are visible, for example, through the window of the saloon during a scene set in Berlin. Other locations included Kells Priory (the English Redcoat encampment)[14] Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard (exteriors of the Lyndon estate), Huntington Castle, Clonegal (exterior), Corsham Court (various interiors and the music room scene), Petworth House (chapel), Stourhead (lake and temple), Longleat, and Wilton House (interior and exterior) in England, Lavenham Guildhall at Lavenham in Suffolk (amputation scene), Dunrobin Castle (exterior and garden as Spa) in Scotland, Dublin Castle in Ireland (the chevalier's home), Ludwigsburg Palace near Stuttgart and Frederick II of Prussia's Neues Palais at Potsdam near Berlin (suggesting Berlin's main street Unter den Linden as construction in Potsdam had just begun in 1763). Some exterior shots were also filmed at Waterford Castle (now a luxury hotel and golf course) and Little Island, Waterford. Moorstown Castle in Tipperary also featured. Several scenes were filmed at Castletown House in Celbridge, County Kildare, outside Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, and at Youghal, County Cork.

The filming took place in the backdrop of some of the most intense years of the Troubles in Ireland, during which the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provisional IRA) was waging an armed campaign in order to unite the island. On 30 January 1974, while filming in Dublin City's Phoenix Park, shooting had to be cancelled due to the chaos caused by 14 bomb threats.[12] One day a phone call was received and Kubrick was given 24 hours to leave the country; he left within 12 hours. The phone call alleged that the Provisional IRA had him on a hit list and Harlan recalls "Whether the threat was a hoax or it was real, almost doesn't matter ... Stanley was not willing to take the risk. He was threatened, and he packed his bag and went home"[5][4] Production of the film was one-third completed when this occurred, and it was rumored that the film would be abandoned. Nonetheless, Kubrick continued shooting the remaining two-thirds of the film at locations in southern England and Germany.[8]

Special ultra-fast lenses were used for Barry Lyndon to allow filming using only natural light.

Marriage à-la-mode, Shortly After the Marriage (scene two of six).

Hogarth's Country Dance (c.1745) illustrates the type of interior scene that Kubrick sought to emulate with Barry Lyndon.

The film, as with "almost every Kubrick film", is a "showcase for [a] major innovation in technique."[6] While 2001: A Space Odyssey had featured "revolutionary effects," and The Shining would later feature heavy use of the Steadicam, Barry Lyndon saw a considerable number of sequences shot "without recourse to electric light."[6] The film's cinematography was overseen by director of photography John Alcott (who won an Oscar for his work), and is particularly noted for the technical innovations that made some of its most spectacular images possible. To achieve photography without electric lighting "[f]or the many densely furnished interior scenes… meant shooting by candlelight," which is known to be difficult in still photography, "let alone with moving images."[6]

Kubrick was "determined not to reproduce the set-bound, artificially lit look of other costume dramas from that time."[6] After "tinker[ing] with different combinations of lenses and film stock," the production obtained three super-fast 50mm lenses (Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7) developed by Zeiss for use by NASA in the Apollo Moon landings, which Kubrick had discovered.[6][15] These super-fast lenses "with their huge aperture (the film actually features the lowest f-stop in film history) and fixed focal length" were problematic to mount, and were extensively modified into three versions by Cinema Products Corp. for Kubrick to gain a wider angle of view, with input from optics expert Richard Vetter of Todd-AO.[6][15] The rear element of the lens had to be 2.5 mm away from the film plane, requiring special modification to the rotating camera shutter.[16] This allowed Kubrick and Alcott to shoot scenes lit in candlelight to an average lighting volume of only three candela, "recreating the huddle and glow of a pre-electrical age."[6] In addition, Kubrick had the entire film push-developed by one stop.[15]

Although Kubrick and Alcott sought to avoid electric lighting where possible, most shots were achieved with conventional lenses and lighting, but were lit to deliberately mimic natural light rather than for compositional reasons. In addition to potentially seeming more realistic, these methods also gave a particular period look to the film which has often been likened to 18th-century paintings (which of course depict a world devoid of electric lighting), in particular owing "a lot to William Hogarth, with whom Thackeray had always been fascinated."[6]

The film is widely regarded as having a stately, static, painterly quality,[6] mostly due to its lengthy, wide-angle long shots. To illuminate the more notable interior scenes, artificial lights called "Mini-Brutes" were placed outside and aimed through the windows, which were covered in a diffuse material to scatter the light evenly through the room rather than being placed inside for maximum use as most conventional films do. In some instances, the natural daylight was allowed to come through, which when recorded on the film stock used by Kubrick showed up as blue-tinted compared to the incandescent electric light.[17]

Despite such slight tinting effects, this method of lighting not only gave the look of natural daylight coming in through the windows, but it also protected the historic locations from the damage caused by mounting the lights on walls or ceilings and the heat from the lights. This helped the film "fit… perfectly with Kubrick's gilded-cage aesthetic – the film is consciously a museum piece, its characters pinned to the frame like butterflies."[6][17]

The film's period setting allowed Kubrick to indulge his penchant for using classical music, and the film score includes pieces by Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Paisiello, Mozart, and Schubert.[lower-alpha 1] The piece most associated with the film, however, is the main title music, Handel's Sarabande from the Keyboard suite in D minor (HWV 437). Originally for solo harpsichord, the versions for the main and end titles are performed with strings, timpani, and continuo. The score also includes Irish folk music, including Seán Ó Riada's song "Women of Ireland", arranged by Paddy Moloney and performed by The Chieftains. "The British Grenadiers" also features in scenes with Redcoats marching.

The film "was not the commercial success Warner Bros. had been hoping for" within the United States,[6] although it fared better in Europe. In the US it earned $9.1 million.[20] Ultimately, the film grossed a worldwide total of $31.5 million on an $11 million budget.[2]

This mixed reaction saw the film (in the words of one retrospective review) "greeted, on its release, with dutiful admiration – but not love. Critics… rail[ed] against the perceived coldness of Kubrick's style, the film's self-conscious artistry and slow pace. Audiences, on the whole, rather agreed…"[6]

Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four and wrote that it "is almost aggressive in its cool detachment. It defies us to care, it forces us to remain detached about its stately elegance." He added, "This must be one of the most beautiful films ever made."[21] Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "another fascinating challenge from one of our most remarkable, independent-minded directors."[22] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three and a half stars out of four and wrote "I found 'Barry Lyndon' to be quite obvious about its intentions and thoroughly successful in achieving them. Kubrick has taken a novel about a social class and has turned it into an utterly comfortable story that conveys the stunning emptiness of upper-class life only 200 years past."[23] He ranked the film fifth on his year-end list of the best films of 1975.[24] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "the motion picture equivalent of one of those very large, very heavy, very expensive, very elegant and very dull books that exist solely to be seen on coffee tables. It is ravishingly beautiful and incredibly tedious in about equal doses, a succession of salon quality still photographs—as often as not very still indeed."[25] The Washington Post wrote, "It's not inaccurate to describe 'Barry Lyndon' as a masterpiece, but it's a deadend masterpiece, an objet d'art rather than a movie. It would be more at home, and perhaps easier to like, on the bookshelf, next to something like 'The Age of the Grand Tour,' than on the silver screen."[26] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that "Kubrick has taken a quick-witted story" and "controlled it so meticulously that he's drained the blood out of it," adding, "It's a coffee-table movie; we might as well be at a three-hour slide show for art-history majors."[27]

This "air of disappointment"[6] factored into Kubrick's decision for his next film, an adaption of Stephen King's The Shining, a project that would not only please him artistically, but was more likely to succeed financially.

Over time, the film has gained a more positive reaction.[28] On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 88% based on 81 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Cynical, ironic, and suffused with seductive natural lighting, Barry Lyndon is a complex character piece of a hapless man doomed by Georgian society."[29] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 89 out of 100 based on reviews from 21 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[30] Roger Ebert added the film to his 'Great Movies' list on 9 September 2009 and increased his original rating from three and a half stars to four, writing, "Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, received indifferently in 1975, has grown in stature in the years since and is now widely regarded as one of the master's best. It is certainly in every frame a Kubrick film: technically awesome, emotionally distant, remorseless in its doubt of human goodness."[28]

The Village Voice ranked the film at number 46 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.[31] Director Martin Scorsese has named Barry Lyndon as his favourite Kubrick film,[32] and it is also one of Lars von Trier's favourite films.[33] Barry Lyndon was included on Time's All-Time 100 best movies list.[34] In the 2012 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, Barry Lyndon placed 19th in the directors' poll and 59th in the critics' poll.[35] The film ranked 27th in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films.[36] In the 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, Barry Lyndon placed 12th in the directors' poll and 45th in the critics' poll.[37]

In a list compiled by The Irish Times critics Tara Brady and Donald Clarke in 2020, Barry Lyndon was named the greatest Irish film of all time.[38]

The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited the movie as one of his 100 favorite films.[39]

The main theme explored in Barry Lyndon is one of fate and destiny. Barry is pushed through life by a series of key events, some of which seem unavoidable. As Roger Ebert says, "He is a man to whom things happen."[28] He declines to eat with the highwayman Captain Feeney, where he would most likely have been robbed, but is robbed anyway farther down the road. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes the role of fate as he announces events before they unfold on screen, like Bryan's death and Bullingdon seeking satisfaction. This theme of fate is also developed in the recurring motif of the painting. Just like the events featured in the paintings, Barry is participating in events which always were.

Another major theme is between father and son. Barry lost his father at a young age and throughout the film he seeks and attaches himself to father-figures. Examples include his uncle, Grogan, and the Chevalier. When given the chance to be a father, Barry loves his son to the point of spoiling him. This contrasts with his role as a father to Lord Bullingdon, whom he disregards and punishes.[28][44][45]