Forget A Clockwork Orange, this is Kubrick's greatest film

Telegraph

7 days ago

In the early 1970s, Stanley Kubrick was enjoying one of the most extraordinary positions the film industry has ever given a director and producer. His last three films – Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) had been global sensations, securing his reputation as a perfectionist auteur who loomed larger over his movies than any concept or star.
'Kubrick' was by now an imprimatur of a certain style, and one that his current studio, Warner Bros, was eager to bankroll wherever it might lead them.
Production on his next project was shrouded in the utmost secrecy, stemming from Kubrick's long-standing paranoia about the tabloid press. All anyone was allowed to know was that his new film would star Love Story heartthrob Ryan O'Neal – a seemingly un-Kubricky choice of leading man – and the former Vogue and Time magazine cover model Marisa Berenson, a co-star in Cabaret (1972). It was to be shot largely in Ireland.
Never an originator of his own screenplays, Kubrick had in mind to adapt Thackeray's 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a satirical picaresque about the fortune-hunting of an Irish rogue and the position he secures for himself in the English aristocracy.
Robbed by highwaymen on the road to Dublin, O'Neal's Redmond Barry advances himself through cunning and impersonation, and eventually makes his way to England, where he seduces Lady Lyndon (Berenson), an unhappy trophy wife, nudges her husband into the grave – and proceeds to squander her wealth while becoming a dreadful rotter, openly flaunting his infidelities.
Almost every Kubrick film is a showcase for some major innovation in technique. In 2001, it was revolutionary visual effects; in The Shining, it was his mastery of the Steadicam. On Barry Lyndon, Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott set themselves the challenge of shooting as many sequences as possible without recourse to electrical light. For the many densely furnished interior scenes, this meant candlelight.
For months they tinkered with different combinations of lenses and film stock, before getting hold of a number of super-fast 50mm lenses developed by Zeiss for use by Nasa in the Apollo moon landings. With their huge aperture and fixed focal length, mounting these was a nightmare, but they managed it, and so Kubrick's vision of recreating the huddle and glow of a pre-electrical age was miraculously put on screen.
The painterly, determinedly static quality of Barry Lyndon was thereby dictated. The actors in the many dining and gambling scenes had to move as slowly as possible, to avoid underexposure. But it all fits perfectly with Kubrick's gilded-cage aesthetic: the film is consciously a museum piece, its characters pinned to the frame like butterflies.
For the stunningly beautiful exteriors, in which Ireland plays itself, as well as England, and Prussia during the Seven Years' War, Kubrick and Alcott looked to the landscapes of Watteau and Gainsborough; the interiors that were day-lit owe a lot to Hogarth, with whom Thackeray had always been fascinated.
Alcott would win an Oscar for his amazing work, as would three other departments: Ken Adam and Roy Walker for their scrupulously researched art direction, Milena Canonero for her often outlandish but totally persuasive costumes and Leonard Rosenman for his arrangements of Schubert and Handel, whose addictively funereal Sarabande in D Minor stomps ominously in the background of the various duels, like a march to the gallows.
The film was greeted, on its release, with dutiful admiration – but not love. Critics were itching to rail against the perceived coldness of Kubrick's style, the film's gorgeously remote artistry and sedate pace. Ever sharp-tongued, Pauline Kael dismissed it with a bored wave as a 'coffee-table movie'. Audiences, on the whole, agreed – it was not the hit Warner Bros had been hoping for, especially in the USA.
Though it got seven Oscar nominations in total, it was up against fierce competition that year and lost Best Picture and Best Director to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (The only personal Academy Award Kubrick would receive across his career was for the effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, rather suggesting that the Academy pegged him first and foremost as a technician.)
An air of disappointment clouded the film's reputation for many years – as O'Neal (who died in 2023) would tend to agree. He was madly fond of Kubrick and spent the long, arduous shoot doing everything he could to please him. But like a reality TV contestant griping about a distorted edit, he was dismayed by the end result. Kubrick's year-long cutting process, in O'Neal's view, had ruined his performance, making him look like a 'clueless and opportunistic Shallow Hal of the 18th century'.
Newly restored in 4K, Barry Lyndon turns 50 this year – and has only grown more mesmerising with each passing decade. O'Neal's take actually gets to the heart of it: the film's compulsive power depends entirely on the weak moral fibre of its antihero, a soldier of fortune who becomes ever more corrupt the richer he gets. We can celebrate the lucky breaks of a penniless scamp, but it all comes to nothing once he claws his way to the topmost rungs of society.
Only there does he meet his nemesis: pouting stepson Lord Bullingdon (played with teary resentfulness by Kubrick's right-hand man, Leon Vitali), who implacably punishes Barry for ruining Lady Lyndon's life and orchestrates his downfall. The ending may not be quite as windingly savage as in Kubrick's next two films (The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), but the sense of waste, irony and unfulfilment are cosmic lessons learnt.
It's telling that Kubrick made this and A Clockwork Orange back-to-back in the 1970s – the heyday of the misogynist antihero, including pretty much every character Jack Nicholson ever played, from Five Easy Pieces to Chinatown and beyond. Kubrick's male rebels belong to that lineage: they aim to defy whatever cage society tries to put them in, but never truly manage to escape.
What made A Clockwork Orange a huge global hit (it grossed $114 million, versus Barry Lyndon's paltry $20 million) was that it gave audiences their kicks: sex, ultraviolence and musings on free will, all set to beefed-up Beethoven, which electrified the counterculture. Candlelit strolls to the terrace, to the slow strum of a Schubert trio, were self-evidently a far harder sell.
The period piece may have spoken to its own time more obliquely than the twisted science-fiction morality play, but A Clockwork Orange has not dated at all well. It's Barry Lyndon that now looks timeless. Indeed, bizarrely current. In 2021, it spawned a viral sensation on TikTok, when the British rapper 21 Savage found his track 'a lot' wedded, unexpectedly, to a fan edit of Lyndon moments that perfectly matched the chorus: 'How much money you got? A lot. How many problems you got? A lot.'
Revisiting Lyndon in full today is a spellbinding experience on many levels, but it makes you realise that the most undervalued aspect of Kubrick's genius could well be his way with actors. O'Neal's slippery, unformed quality is more perfect for the lead role than he ever clearly knew, and the doll-like presence of Berenson, her face a sad mask, is similarly ideal. Meanwhile, the supporting cast is a long, glittering procession of cameos – not from star names, but from vital character players. Leonard Rossiter makes the first unforgettable impression as Captain Quin, the pompous and prickly suitor of Barry's cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton), raising snobbish indignation to an art form. The Irish stage actor Arthur O'Sullivan has just two scenes as the notorious highwayman Captain Feeney, but manages to be both disarmingly polite and quietly terrifying.
Patrick Magee, who played the crippled writer in A Clockwork Orange, gets a lovely, quizzical turn as the avuncular Chevalier de Balibari, an inveterate cheat at cards who takes Barry under his wing. And the list goes on, taking in the extraordinary Murray Melvin as a pursed-lipped reverend, Marie Kean as Barry's mother, Frank Middlemass as the splenetic Sir Charles Lyndon, Hardy Krüger as a Prussian captain, Steven Berkoff as a priapic gambler, Vitali's blubbing Lord Bullingdon and Kubrick favourite Philip Stone – Alex's father in A Clockwork Orange and the dead caretaker Grady in The Shining – as the Lyndon family lawyer.
Subjected to the director's infamous regime of many, many exacting takes, their faces light up the film and the era like a series of fine, carefully hung oil portraits. Kubrick's cast may have been required to sit for these for days and weeks on end, but we're forever in their debt. This slow-burn masterpiece is a gallery worth walking through again and again.