The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Stanley Kubrick · a film · 1975 · about three hours, in two parts with an intermission · from William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon
Mode
Costume picture turned into the portrait of a society; picaresque, chronicle of a marriage and tragedy of rank, told by a narrator outside the story
Mythos
The wheel of Fortune, rise and fall hinged at a marriage; the duel as ritual, three times; the fatherless son, the father who loses his son, and the displaced heir who returns to take back the house
Phase
Two parts with an intermission: a rise from an Irish village through two armies and the gaming rooms of the Continent to a marriage, and a fall from the marriage to a barn and an annuity; from the years of the Seven Years’ War to an epilogue card
Presentation
Feature film in colour, released December 1975, each part opened by a title card; John Alcott’s photography by daylight and candlelight, Ken Adam’s design, Michael Hordern’s narration; Handel, Schubert and others arranged by Leonard Rosenman
Register
From rustic comedy over a hidden ribbon to the death of a child; every scene held at one distance and one tempo, the reverse zoom ending on a composed tableau
Scale
One adventurer’s life, two armies, an English great house and the order of rank around it
Governing Proposition
An Irish adventurer without birth or fortune rises through two armies, a gaming table and a marriage to the style and title of an English gentleman, and falls by his stepson’s pistol to an annuity. The wager of the film is that the eighteenth century can be shown as it painted itself, lit by its own light, held in composed tableaux and told by a voice that already knows the end, so that a society’s forms are seen governing violence and money under the appearance of manners, and a man is seen as one figure placed in a picture that does not hurry for him.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a death seen from far off. Two men face each other on a field and fire, the camera holding them in long shot, and the narrator dismisses Barry’s father, killed in a duel, in a sentence. The son, Redmond Barry, played by Ryan O’Neal, grows up in Ireland with his mother, played by Marie Kean, a widow with ambitions for him. His first love is his cousin, Nora Brady, played by Gay Hamilton, and the courtship is rustic comedy, a hidden ribbon and a jealous young man. His rival is an officer, Captain Quin, played by Leonard Rossiter. The quarrel goes to pistols, and the duel is rigged; it sends Barry from home. Within its first minutes the film has twice shown the instrument that will make him and unmake him.
The voice that tells the story is not Barry’s. Michael Hordern speaks as a narrator outside it, dry, exact and ironic, and he tells outcomes before they come. Thackeray’s novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), was told by its rogue in the first person; the film takes the story from him and gives it to a voice that already knows the end. On the road to Dublin Barry is robbed by highwaymen. In the army he finds Captain Grogan, played by Godfrey Quigley, the first of a series of fathers he will find and lose. The picaresque has begun, and the film lets its episodes come one after another, as that form does, at a tempo that does not hurry for him.
Kubrick wrote the screenplay, produced and directed. John Alcott photographed the film, Ken Adam designed it, Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero made the costumes, Tony Lawson cut it, and Leonard Rosenman adapted and conducted the music. Beside O’Neal stand Marisa Berenson as Lady Lyndon, Patrick Magee as the Chevalier de Balibari, Hardy Krüger as Captain Potzdorf, Leon Vitali as Lord Bullingdon, Murray Melvin as the Reverend Runt and Frank Middlemass as Sir Charles Lyndon. It was released in December 1975, in English with passages in German and French, and it runs about three hours in two parts with an intermission, each part opened by a title card. The first reads: “By What Means Redmond Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon”. The card states the plot before the plot has begun.
Movement II
The Seven Years’ War is given in one action. A British line advances across open ground toward French volleys, in step, to “The British Grenadiers”, and the camera tracks beside it. Men drop out of the ranks and the rank does not break; it closes and goes on. There is no cutting for excitement and no hero in the shot, only the march, plainly staged, and it is the first great height of the film: the order of a state seen at work, spending men by the row with perfect manners. Barry comes through it, and loses Grogan, the first of his fathers to go.
From here the episodes rhyme. Each turns on a counterfeit identity, a stolen uniform or a borrowed name. Barry leaves one army in clothes not his own, passes an interlude with a German girl, Lischen, and finds himself in another army, the Prussian, a press-ganged soldier in the service of a monarchy with its own police. Captain Potzdorf, played by Hardy Krüger, becomes the second father, and him too Barry will lose. The continental passages are spoken partly in German and French. None of these episodes causes the next as the steps of a plot do; they come round instead in the same shapes, so that the adventurer’s fortunes repeat as a pattern rather than pile up as incidents.
The third father is a gambler. With the Chevalier de Balibari, played by Patrick Magee, Barry tours the gaming rooms of the Continent, and here the forms of the society he wants to enter appear to him whole: the card table, where money changes hands as courtesy; the duel, by which a debt of honour is collected; the bow, the borrowed title, the fine coat. He learns each of them quickly. He has the energy and the face for every form but one, and the one he lacks is birth, which no form can teach and every form exists to protect.
Movement III
At a gaming table lit only by candles Barry sees Lady Lyndon, played by Marisa Berenson, the wife of Sir Charles Lyndon. Nothing is said. Looks pass across the table, and on the soundtrack the Andante con moto of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat, D. 929, enters for the first time. The seduction is made without a word, in faces lit by flame and held for the length of a piece of chamber music cut to fit. It is the scene in which the film’s technique and its knowledge come closest: a courtship conducted as a composition, two people becoming figures in a picture before they become a couple. The trio was written in 1827, decades after the story’s action, and the film accepts the anachronism.
The light in that room was invented for it. For the candlelit interiors the film used Carl Zeiss 50mm lenses of f/0.7, made for NASA and adapted for a motion picture camera; by day the interiors are lit by their windows. The eighteenth century is seen by its own light. And the camera’s signature is the slow reverse zoom: it starts on a detail, a face, a hand, and withdraws until the person is one figure in a composed tableau, often a landscape after the manner of Gainsborough. The movement returns throughout the film, and each time it says the same thing: the man the story follows is placed inside a picture larger and older than himself.
Barry marries Lady Lyndon, and the first part ends at the top of the wheel; the first card has kept its word. After the intermission the second card announces the turn before it comes: “Containing an Account of the Misfortunes and Disasters Which Befell Barry Lyndon”. The film is built as rise and fall hinged at a marriage, and it tells the viewer so in writing. The marriage is a property transaction, the means by which an Irish adventurer without birth enters English rank. The music binds the halves: Handel’s Sarabande, from the keyboard suite in D minor, HWV 437, recurs across both parts in different scorings, and the Schubert of the gaming table is carried through the second, beside the Irish air “Women of Ireland” in the Chieftains’ arrangement and pieces by Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart and Paisiello.
Movement IV
The second part is a chain. Lady Lyndon’s son, Lord Bullingdon, played by Leon Vitali, is the heir Barry has displaced, rigid with misery in his own house. Barry courts Lord Wendover for a peerage, the one title a marriage cannot confer, and at a recital, before the company, he assaults Bullingdon. The Reverend Runt, played by Murray Melvin, keeps the household’s office of religion and watches. From here each step down is required by the step that follows it, to the barn and the annuity.
Barry and Lady Lyndon have a son, Bryan, and Barry promises him a horse for his birthday. The narrator has already told the viewer that the boy will die, before the film shows the death. The deathbed and the funeral follow, with the Sarabande slowed to a dirge. The camera keeps the distance it kept for the Irish courtship, and the tempo does not change, and still this is the one place where the film’s distance closes. The grief is made by the law that held the comedy, not muted by it. The fatherless boy of the first part has become a father who loses his son.
What the second part brings into the open the first prepared. The society Barry has entered is a set of forms: the duel, the card table, the marriage settlement, the purchased commission, the patent of nobility. Each is a ceremony that governs violence and money while appearing to be manners. Barry learned every one of them on the way up, and on the way down each turns on him. The patent he courts is the form that protects birth, and birth is the one thing he cannot acquire. The order absorbs the adventurer’s energy, takes what it needs of him, returns nothing, and does its cruelty politely.
Movement V
Bullingdon returns to take back the house. The third duel is fought in a barn, with birds in the rafters, and Bullingdon is sick with fear. His pistol discharges into the floor. Barry, given his shot, fires into the ground. Bullingdon insists on his second shot, and takes it. The son’s revenge and the father’s last act of grace are one exchange, and the ball costs Barry his leg, amputated, and with it his place. A duel killed the father in the first minutes of the film; a false duel made the son a wanderer; a true one unmakes him.
The last scene is an account settled. Lady Lyndon sits at a table with Bullingdon and the Reverend Runt and signs the annuity paid to the man who ruined her, and she pauses over his name while the Schubert returns, the music of the gaming table where the marriage began. The marriage ends as it was made, as a transaction. Then the epilogue card: “It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.” The levelling the order denied its people in life is granted by time, and the voice that knew the end from the first scene has the last word in writing.
The film won four Academy Awards, for cinematography, art direction, costume design and adapted score, and was nominated also for best picture, direction and adapted screenplay. It came after the success of A Clockwork Orange, on a large studio budget, was received coolly and disappointed commercially, and for a time after its release stood outside general attention. Its standing has risen since, through critics and filmmakers, in five decades of attention to its light, its compositions, its narrator’s irony and its music. Its look has not dated, because it was never the look of 1975. What a first viewing takes for coldness is found on return to be grief held under pressure. What has lasted is a shape: a rise and a fall told by a voice that knew both, a man drawn back by the lens until he is one figure in the picture, and a sentence at the end that makes everyone in it equal.
Act III · The Twelve
The second part resists subtraction. Each step of the fall is required by the step after it: the assault on Bullingdon at the recital, the courting of Lord Wendover for a peerage, Bryan’s birthday horse, the barn. The annuity of the last scene closes the account the opening duel opened. The first part is a picaresque, and the picaresque is an additive form: the highwaymen on the Dublin road, the interlude with Lischen and the Chevalier’s gaming tour could each be shortened without the film losing a thought. Kubrick binds them by repetition, each turning on a counterfeit identity, a stolen uniform or a borrowed name, so they rhyme rather than pile up. The slowness is compelled; the order of Part I’s fortunes is not.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: an order of rank is a set of forms, the duel, the card table, the marriage settlement, the purchased commission and the patent of nobility, each a ceremony that governs violence and money while appearing to be manners. Barry learns every form and is undone because he cannot learn the one thing the forms protect, which is birth. The order absorbs the adventurer’s energy, returns nothing, and does its cruelty politely, and the epilogue card seals the case with a levelling granted only by time. It is a meaning, articulated scene by scene. The limits stand: part of it was the novel’s first, and the film’s distance shows a society’s condition more exactly than life inside it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation here is cold, and its frequency carries the axis. The British line marches in step to “The British Grenadiers” into French volleys, the camera tracking beside it as men drop from the ranks and the rank does not break. At the gaming table by candlelight the Schubert trio enters as Barry and Lady Lyndon exchange looks without a word, a beauty the medium had not shown in this kind before. The reverse zooms that end on a landscape after the manner of Gainsborough recur throughout, each a small grandeur. Bryan’s deathbed and funeral, the Sarabande slowed to a dirge, rise to grief; the barn, birds in the rafters and Bullingdon sick with fear, rises to dread. The controlled distance damps transport where a warmer work would carry the viewer further.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The wheel of Fortune is built, not evoked: two parts of rise and fall, hinged at the marriage, with title cards that announce the turn before it comes. The duel is the film’s ritual and it bears load: a duel kills the father, a false duel makes the son a wanderer, a true duel unmakes him. Beneath it runs a pattern of fathers and sons in two directions. The fatherless boy finds and loses a series of fathers, Grogan, Potzdorf and the Chevalier, then becomes a father who loses his son and is unseated by a stepson, a displaced heir come back for the house. What holds the axis below the gate is the figures: Barry is opaque by design, and the people do not acquire the weight of the patterns they move through.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inherited form is the costume picture and the historical epic, which dressed modern stars in period clothes, lit them as stars and drove them through incident. The film turned against all three habits at once. It lit the eighteenth century by its own light, daylight and candles, with lenses adapted for the purpose; it composed scenes as the painting of the period composed them, and held them; and it gave the story to a narrator who tells the outcome in advance, removing suspense from three hours of narrative. The stake was real: a large studio budget, a slow film in two parts, a star cast against type, after the success of A Clockwork Orange. Held at the gate because the departure is from a genre’s manners, not from the grammar of cinema.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The reverse zoom starts on a face or a hand and withdraws until the person is a figure in a composition, placed each time inside a picture larger and older than himself. The narration announces Barry’s ruin and his son’s death before they are seen, so fate becomes a property of the telling and the viewer watches, like the period’s order, already knowing. The tableau’s stillness makes rank visible as arrangement. Substitute close coverage, cutting for tension and the novel’s first-person voice, and the film becomes the story of a rogue, not the portrait of a world in which a rogue is weightless. Each instrument does the knowing. What holds the figure from the top is Part I’s episodic chain, the novel’s form carried over rather than remade.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise. A film received coolly at release has sustained five decades of re-examination: of its pictorial sources; of its lighting; of its narrator’s irony, which reads differently on each viewing as the viewer learns to hear what the voice withholds; and of its music, whose recurrences gather meaning on return, the Sarabande at a duel, then at a funeral, then at a duel again. Its temperature, taken for coldness on first encounter, is commonly found on return to be grief held under pressure, and that change in how the film is read is itself evidence of depth. What holds the axis is the breadth of its field: once the design is seen, return deepens the same insight more than it opens new ones.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 1975, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: the film reorganised what a period film could look like, establishing that the past could be lit as it was lit and composed as it saw itself, and it made its tempo a statement in an industry built on pace. The reach is real and narrower than the force. The film did not redirect the main current of Anglo-American studio cinema, as 2001 did science fiction, and much of its standing arrived late, through critics and filmmakers rather than the films that immediately followed; delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its candlelight and daylight became a reference point for cinematographers, and its look runs through a strand of painterly period drama since.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across fifty years, and the standing has risen across them. The form survives whole: the film as released is the film now seen, and its restorations are repair, a small credit to survival. A commercial disappointment in 1975, it has gained in presence since rather than lost. Its surface is less fixed to its production era than most films of its year, because its look is the eighteenth century’s and not the 1970s’: the light, the clothes and the compositions carry no date of their making. The chief period mark is Ryan O’Neal’s casting, which divides viewers and will go on dividing them. Held below the top by that element, and by a presence interrupted after release, a rise rather than a continuous standing.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears load throughout. John Alcott’s photography, Ken Adam’s design and the costumes of Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero hold every frame to one standard: rooms lit by candles alone are composed as exactly as the daylit exteriors. What the lenses invented is credited under The Swerve; here the credit is for what was made with them. The music is chosen and edited rather than scored, the Sarabande re-orchestrated for each return, the Schubert cut to the length of a silent seduction. Restraint is directed: O’Neal’s blankness, Vitali’s rigid misery and Berenson’s near silence are used, not suffered. The cost runs through the film: restraint sometimes leaves a scene inert where the design is fuller than the drama, as Tristan und Isolde, at the same figure, carries a poem stiffer than its music.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements. The Irish courtship with Nora is rustic comedy, a hidden ribbon and a jealous cousin; Bryan’s death is grief past bearing. Both are shot at the same distance and the same tempo under the same narrator’s irony, and the grief is the stronger for being held under the law that held the comedy. That law is the indifference of the picture to the figure in it, told by a voice that already knows the end, and the battlefield, the Prussian barracks, the gaming rooms of Spa and the Lyndon drawing room obey it alike. The range, war, comedy, courtship, crime and grief, makes the coherence an achievement. The seam is the opening of Part I, lighter in texture than anything after it and visible on return.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One structure holds the family, in two marriages, two sons and a mother’s ambition; class and the patent of nobility; money and property; war and the state, in the British and Prussian armies and the police of a monarchy; the relation of Ireland to England, in an Irish adventurer trying to enter English rank; and the art of a period as the frame through which the period is seen. They are integrated, not listed: the marriage is a property transaction and the duel a class instrument. What holds the axis lowest is consciousness, kept at a distance by design, and the sacred, present only as the Reverend Runt’s household office and the formal church. Beside the novels that hold a society and its inner lives together, three hours of one life hold less.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5, then The Inner Law at 9.2, then The Sublime at 9.1. A making that holds every frame to one standard, from rooms lit by candles alone to a borrowed score re-cut for each return; one law, the indifference of the picture to the figure in it, told by a voice that knows the end, holding the Irish courtship and the death of a child alike; and elevation, cold and frequent, from the march into the volleys to the barn.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9: the family, class, money, war, the state and the relation of Ireland to England are held in one structure, but consciousness is kept at a distance by design, and the sacred is a household office and a formal church. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.2, where the episodes of the first part rhyme but could each be shortened, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, where the wheel of Fortune and the three duels are built but the figures do not acquire the weight of the patterns they move through.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Imperishable at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last at the threshold, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, on The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition, and by its aggregate, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Barry Lyndon as released in December 1975, in two parts with an intermission, from the father’s duel in long shot to the epilogue card: written for the screen, produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, photographed by John Alcott, designed by Ken Adam, edited by Tony Lawson, with music adapted and conducted by Leonard Rosenman and narration by Michael Hordern. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844) is a source, not part of the work, and is named only where the film departs from it. Later restorations and home releases are weighed on survival alone. The passages in German and French are not quoted. Words are quoted only where they are certain: the two title cards and the epilogue card. Figures that could not be verified, among them the exact running time and the lengths of the two parts, the shot and scene counts, the budget and the returns, the date on the annuity and the full roll of the film’s pictorial sources, are not given.