Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon (1975) is Kubrick's least loved and most admired film. It is adapted from Thackeray's 1844 novel. Redmond Barry is a poor Irishman. A chain of events beginning with a duel takes him into the British army, then the Prussian army, then to the gambling tables, and finally into marriage with a wealthy widow. He rises, and then he falls. Its best known feature is its lighting. Kubrick wanted to shoot candlelit interiors with no artificial light and tracked down Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 lenses built for NASA's Apollo programme. Very few existed and none were designed for cinema. The camera had to be modified to take them. The compositions were built from period painting; scenes resemble Hogarth and Gainsborough because they were deliberately made to. The narrator is the strangest thing in it. He tells you what is coming. You learn a character will die before the scene arrives, and Kubrick destroys the suspense on purpose: the question is not what happens but how. Casting Ryan O'Neal was criticised at the time. Kubrick did it deliberately. Barry is a mediocre man and had to stay one. It won four Oscars. It runs 188 minutes and is very slow. Good for: film history, period drama, and Kubrick. Less good for: the pace is extreme, the characters are cold, and the duels and battle scenes are harsh.