Kubrick's Greatest Film

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2012)

With ornate imagery reminiscent of paintings from the story's 18th century period, Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel depicts the rise and fall of a sensitive rogue in the British aristocracy. Barry Lyndon is a period film starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee and Hardy Krüger. It was written, produced, and directed by Kubrick. It is based on the novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray which recounts the exploits of a fictional 18th century Irish adventurer.
Young Irishman Redmond Barry leaves home to seek his fortune after apparently killing an English officer in a duel. Through a series of mishaps and accidents, Barry winds up fighting with the Prussian army in the Seven Years' War under the command of Capt. Potzdorf; at war's end, Potzdorf enlists Barry to spy on a shady Chevalier. Instead, Barry joins up with the Irish Chevalier to flee Prussia and live as gamblers among Europe's elite. Wishing to climb even higher, Barry soon meets the beautiful Lady Lyndon, marrying her for her fortune after her older titled husband dies. Her son Lord Bullingdon, however, despises the upstart Barry, and, regardless of how his mother may feel, sees to it that the re-named Barry Lyndon will never be able to stake his claim to the entrenched aristocracy.
In 1975 the world was at Stanley Kubrick's feet. His films Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, released in the previous dozen years, had provoked rapture and consternation--not merely in the film community, but in the culture at large. On the basis of that smashing hat trick, Kubrick was almost certainly the most famous film director of his generation, and absolutely the one most likely to rewire the collective mind of the movie audience. And what did this radical, at-least-20-years-ahead-of-his-time filmmaker give the world in 1975? A stately, three-hour costume drama that now stands as one of his greatest and most savagely ironic films, not to mention one of the few period pieces on celluloid so transporting that it seems to predate the invention of cameras.In addition to that,Ryan O'Neal's excellent performance captures the shallow opportunism endemic to the title character who is brought down as much by his own flaws as by the mores of the ordered social structure of 18th-century England.All of Kubrick's features look better now than when they were first released, but Barry Lyndon, which fared poorly at the box office in 1975, remains his most underrated. It may also be his greatest.