Barry Lyndon

Part I: "By What Means Redmond Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon" In the Kingdom of Ireland, 1750, Redmond Barry's father is killed in a duel. Barry, of a genteel but impoverished Irish Protestant family, becomes infatuated with his cousin Nora Brady, and shoots her suitor, Army captain John Quin, in a duel. He flees but is robbed by highwaymen on his way to Dublin. Penniless, Barry enlists in the Army. Family friend Captain Grogan informs him that Quin is not dead: the duel was staged, Barry's bullet having been swapped for a plug of tow, so that Nora's family could get rid of Barry and improve their finances through her marriage to Quin. Barry serves with his regiment in Germany during the Seven Years' War, but deserts after Grogan dies in combat against the French. Absconding with a lieutenant's horse and uniform, Barry has a brief affair with Frau Lieschen, a married German peasant woman. On his way to Bremen, he encounters Captain Potzdorf, who sees through the ruse and impresses him into the Prussian Army. Barry later saves Potzdorf's life and receives a commendation from Frederick the Great. At the end of the war, Barry is recruited by Captain Potzdorf's uncle into the Prussian Ministry of Police. The Prussians suspect that the Chevalier de Balibari, an Austrian diplomat and professional gambler, is in fact an Irishman and a spy for Empress Maria Theresa, and assign Barry to become his manservant. An emotional Barry confides everything to the Chevalier and they become confederates. After they win an enormous sum from the Prince of Tübingen at cards, the Prince accuses the Chevalier of cheating (without proof) and refuses to pay his debt and demand satisfaction. To avoid a scandal, the Ministry of Police pays off the debt and quietly escorts the Chevalier outside Prussian borders, which allows Barry, disguised as the Chevalier, to leave the country as well, the Chevalier himself having uneventfully crossed the border the night before. Barry and the Chevalier travel across Europe, perpetrating similar gambling scams, with Barry forcing payment from debtors with sword duels. In Spa, he encounters the beautiful, wealthy, and visibly depressed Lady Lyndon. He seduces her, and goads her elderly husband Sir Charles Lyndon to death with verbal repartee. Part II: "Containing an Account of the Misfortunes and Disasters Which Befell Barry Lyndon" In 1773, Barry marries Lady Lyndon, takes her last name and settles in England. The Countess bears Barry a son, Bryan Patrick, whom Barry spoils. The marriage is unhappy: Barry is openly unfaithful and squanders his wife's wealth while keeping her in seclusion. Lord Bullingdon, Lady Lyndon's son by Sir Charles, still grieves for his father and accurately sees Barry as a gold digger who does not love his mother. Barry responds with years of escalating emotional and physical abuse. Barry's mother comes to live with him and warns him that if Lady Lyndon dies, Bullingdon will inherit everything. She advises her son to obtain a title. To this end, Barry cultivates the influential Lord Wendover and spends even larger sums of Lady Lyndon's money to ingratiate himself with high society. Bullingdon, now a young adult, interrupts a society party Barry throws. He publicly accuses his stepfather of infidelity, abuse, and financial mismanagement, and announces that he will leave the Lyndon estate for as long as Barry remains there. Barry responds by brutally assaulting Bullingdon until they are physically separated by the party attendees. In the aftermath, Barry is ostracised by high society and plunges further into financial ruin. Barry arranges to give Bryan a full-grown horse for his ninth birthday. An impatient Bryan rides the horse unaccompanied and dies in a riding accident. Barry sinks into alcoholism, while Lady Lyndon seeks religious counseling from clergyman Samuel Runt, who had been tutor to Bullingdon and Bryan and a longtime companion of Lady Lyndon. When Barry's mother dismisses Runt to keep her son from losing control, Lady Lyndon attempts suicide. Runt and Graham, the family's steward, write to Bullingdon, who returns to the estate and challenges his stepfather to a duel. When the duel takes place, Bullingdon accidentally misfires the first shot, but Barry then deliberately fires into the ground, refusing to exploit his stepson's mistake. Bullingdon refuses to accept this as satisfaction and fires again, shooting Barry in the leg. This wound forces Barry to have an amputation below the knee. While Barry is recovering, Bullingdon takes control of the Lyndon estate. Through Graham, he reminds Barry that his credit is exhausted and offers him 500 guineas a year to leave Lady Lyndon, her estates, and England forever. Barry grudgingly accepts and resumes his former gambling profession, but without any real success. In December 1789, Lady Lyndon signs Barry's annuity cheque as her son looks on. ==Cast==

Critic Tim Robey suggests that the film "makes you realise that the most undervalued aspect of Kubrick's genius could well be his way with actors." He adds that the supporting cast is a "glittering procession of cameos, not from star names but from vital character players." The cast featured Leon Vitali as the older Lord Bullingdon, who then became Kubrick's personal assistant, working as the casting director on his following films, and supervising film-to-video transfers for Kubrick. Their relationship lasted until Kubrick's death. The film's cinematographer, John Alcott, appears at the men's club in the non-speaking role of the man asleep in a chair near the title character when Lord Bullingdon challenges Barry to a duel. Kubrick's daughter Vivian also appears (in an uncredited role) as a guest at Bryan's birthday party. Other Kubrick featured regulars were Leonard Rossiter (2001: A Space Odyssey), Steven Berkoff, Patrick Magee, Godfrey Quigley, Anthony Sharp, and Philip Stone (A Clockwork Orange). Stone went on to feature in The Shining. ==Thematic analysis==

A 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 critic Roger Ebert says, "He is a man to whom things happen." ==Production==

Development 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's Waterloo was released, and failed at the box office. Reconsidering, Kubrick's financiers pulled funding, and he turned his attention towards a film 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." 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". 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 furor surrounding the controversially violent A Clockwork Orange (particularly in the UK) and partly due to his "long-standing paranoia about the tabloid press". In 1972 Kubrick finally set his sights on Thackeray's 1844 "satirical picaresque about the fortune-hunting of an Irish rogue", The Luck of Barry Lyndon, the setting of which allowed Kubrick to take advantage of the copious period research he had done for the now-aborted Napoleon. and be shot largely in Ireland. Kubrick made several changes to the plot, including the addition of the final duel. Principal photography Principal photography lasted 300 days, from spring 1973 through to early 1974, with a break for Christmas. Kubrick initially wished to film the entire production near his home in Borehamwood, but Ken Adam convinced him to relocate the shoot to Ireland. Many of the exteriors were shot in Ireland, playing "itself, England, and Prussia during the Seven Years' War". 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, County Kilkenny (the English Redcoat encampment); Huntington Castle, County Carlow (exterior) and Dublin Castle, County Dublin (the chevalier's home). Some exterior shots were also filmed at Waterford Castle, County Waterford (now a luxury hotel and golf course) and Little Island, Waterford. Moorstown Castle in County 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. Cinematography were used for Barry Lyndon to allow filming using only natural light. , Shortly After the Marriage'' (scene two of six). The film, as with "almost every Kubrick film", is a "showcase for [a] major innovation in technique". 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 Corporation for Kubrick to gain a wider angle of view, with input from optics expert Richard Vetter of Todd-AO. 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". 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". Music The film's period setting allowed Kubrick to indulge his penchant for using classical music, and the film score includes pieces by Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Paisiello, Mozart, and Schubert. 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. Charts Certifications ==Reception==

Contemporaneous The film "was not the commercial success Warner Bros. had been hoping for" within the United States, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "another fascinating challenge from one of our most remarkable, independent-minded directors." 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." He ranked the film fifth on his year-end list of the best films of 1975. 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." 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." 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." Steven Spielberg compared the experience of watching Barry Lyndon to “going through the Prado without lunch”. This "air of disappointment" On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 89 out of 100 based on reviews from 21 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". 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." 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. Director Martin Scorsese has named Barry Lyndon as his favourite Kubrick film, and it is also one of Lars von Trier's favourite films. Barry Lyndon was included on Times All-Time 100 best movies list. 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. The film ranked 27th in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films. 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. 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. The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited the movie as one of his 100 favorite films. Accolades == Home media ==

Barry Lyndon was released by Warner Home Video on DVD in 1999. The film was released on Blu-ray by Warner Bros. in 2011. It was released on Blu-ray and DVD by The Criterion Collection in October 2017, featuring a new remaster in the film's original 1.66:1 aspect ratio (compared to the Warner Blu-ray's 16:9 aspect ratio). The film was released on Ultra HD Blu-ray by Criterion in July 2025. ==See also==