History & Film | Problem Solved: Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon
WRITTEN BY BEN BERGONZI
I am assuming that readers of this article have seen Barry Lyndon and know its plot. On release in 1975, it was a commercial failure in the USA but better received in the rest of the world; its popularity and critical reputation have climbed immensely since then. Hundreds of internet pages have been written about it, and two books.1, 2
The origins of Barry Lyndon lie in Stanley Kubrick’s planned film of the life of Napoleon. However, by the early ´70s, the director, always conscious of commercial realities despite his unremitting focus on making the films he wanted to make, was prevailed upon to shelve the project. A series of biographical epics were failing epically at the box office – not just Waterloo, in which Rod Steiger played Napoleon, but also Cromwell and Nicholas and Alexandra.3 But Warner Brothers did back Kubrick to make a less expensive historical film which would use some of the research for the Napoleon project. He selected as his raw material Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray, a little-known novel first published in 1844.4 Thackeray’s inspiration was the history of the Irish soldier Andrew Robinson Stoney (1747-1810), who gained great wealth by marriage to Mary Eleanor Bowes, widow of the Earl of Strathmore. Stoney tricked Bowes into marrying him via a conspiracy involving a faked duel. On marriage he incorporated his wife’s name into his own. He starved and beat his wife for years in the attempt to acquire her fortune, but was ultimately unsuccessful and died in prison.
The resemblances between this historical biography and the novel/film are obvious – Redmond Barry changes his name to Barry Lyndon on marriage to the widowed Honoria, Lady Lyndon, and flies very high in wealthy society, but then loses everything. The book’s writing style has a knowing dryness wherein we can easily spot how the author makes fun of the vanity of his leading man, through whose egotistical eyes the story is told. Thackeray was married to an Irish woman and was obviously fascinated by the melancholic fluctuations, as he saw it, of the Irish psyche. Much of the book concerns itself with class-conscious humour, which has dated. The name of Barry’s nemesis, his stepson Lord Bullingdon, may have been inspired by the Bullingdon Club, a clique of wealthy Oxford University students.
In adapting the book, Kubrick removed some characters and enlarged others and – as any Hollywood adaptor of a Victorian novel would do – improved the organization of the story, whilst also adding far more emotional heft. The climactic duel between Barry and his stepson was purely Kubrick’s conception and greatly improves on the original, in which Bullingdon only manages to give his stepfather a thrashing.
Another story about a selfish protagonist who negotiates war and poverty, marries for money, but then sees the marriage collapse after the death of a child in a riding accident, is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The film of the book was, in visual terms alone, outstandingly successful. These visuals are not enough for many people, Kubrick himself among them. As he commented (quoted by Strelow): ‘It’s a really terrible movie.’ Thirty-five years on, did the director approach Barry Lyndon in a competitive spirit? A fascinating speculation.
Warner Bros. insisted that a bankable leading man played the main character. The rather blandly handsome Ryan O’Neal may not have been Kubrick’s first choice, but he turns in a fine performance, conveying more grief and self-doubt than is ever suggested by the bumptious voice of Thackeray’s narration. The script was originally closer to the book, with narration in the first person, and with scenes in Dublin which were never filmed. These changes were made during production. No shooting script was used: everything was organized in the director’s own head.
Kubrick originally planned to film in a converted aircraft hangar in Radlett, near his Hertfordshire home. However, the powerful film industry unions expressed their displeasure at any production outside of a purpose-built film studio. Because the idea of building his own studio was solely intended to maintain control of his unit, Kubrick then made a rapid U-turn and decided to film entirely in the Republic of Ireland. This could readily be justified in terms of the number of period settings available. Other historical films had recently used Irish locations: Lock up Your Daughters (1969) in which Kildare Town stands in for 18th-century London, Sinful Davy (1969) and Ryan’s Daughter (1970).
Aided by expert production designer Ken Adam, a roster of locations was chosen. Initially based in Waterford, from summer 1973 the cast and crew, about 160 people, roved around the countryside, castles and demesnes. Many Irish actors and technicians were employed: some 250 men from the Irish army were recruited as soldier extras, kitted out in costumes sent over from Radlett. At this time the Irish Troubles were at their height, affecting both North and South. In January 1974, a day’s filming in Dublin’s Phoenix Park had to be cancelled due to IRA bomb threats in the city. In February 1974 all production in Ireland was abruptly closed down. It has been widely reported that this was due to a bomb threat, but the truth remains murky. Maria Pramaggiore comments that it may have been a hoax threat made by an extra who had been fired. Following a hurried move, filming continued on English locations for the scenes corresponding to the second part of the story.
This free-wheeling method of production does reveal itself in little mistakes. There is an obvious costume continuity error in the scenes where Barry has temporarily promoted himself from private to lieutenant. When referring to the death of Lady Lyndon’s first husband, the novel states that it happened ‘in the Kingdom of Ireland’, but the film changes that to ‘the Kingdom of Belgium’, Kubrick being unaware that this country did not exist in the 18th century. One character, Lord Wendover, is introduced with the first name of ‘Gustavus Adolphus’ but was later addressed as ‘Neville’. Towards the end, mention is made of the Irish-sounding ‘Doolan’s Farm’, but whilst in the book this part of the narrative happens in Ireland, in the film we see recognizable English locations.
Still, the experience of watching the film is one I always find immensely compelling. We begin with a duel scene filmed in crepuscular light against a mountainous background5; as soon as we start to wonder who is fighting who, the narrator (Michael Hordern) explains that we are witnessing the death of Redmond Barry’s father. The first actor seen in close up is Marie Kean as the widowed Mrs Barry, as she walks through the garden of her Irish cottage on the arm of a would-be suitor, who never appears again. But the first dialogue is the word ‘Killarney’ spoken by Gay Hamilton as Nora Quin at the end of a card game she and Redmond have been playing in a shell-lined room beyond whose window rain is falling. The game leads to flirtation, but then flirtation inevitably leads to disappointment, as Nora is stolen away from Redmond by the comically abrasive English officer, Captain Quinn (Leonard Rossiter).
Although the film has a reputation for slowness, it does cover a period of some 30 years as Barry moves from minor Irish gentry to soldiering to gambling and then to great wealth as the husband of a countess: time jumps are handled with some economy. The narration, dryly written in the third person but closely adapted from Thackeray, streamlines the transitions between scenes. Every shot is beautifully set up. Often the zoom lens works dynamically, as a scene starts on a detail and then widens out to show an artfully arranged composition. For many interior shots, the backgrounds are soft, and indeed at times only the eyes of the actors remain in focus. This short depth of field was a consequence of the wide camera aperture that Kubrick required, due to his insistence that only (or mainly) candles should be used for lighting – an approach to authenticity which, like the frequent zooming, counterintuitively draws attention to very fact that we are watching a film.
As people are static and glorious music plays, whilst the mellifluous narration moves the story along, the effect is rather like being in an art gallery that tells a story. It is far from a silent film, however. Much dialogue is adapted from Thackeray, but there are also newly written scenes. Some of these are excellent: late in the film there is a dialogue between Mrs Barry and the chaplain Reverend Runt (Murray Melvin) which is a superb example of how two people’s long-tried civility can dissolve, when circumstances change.
Despite the 18th-century setting, the film’s tone resembles, ultimately, that of late Victorian melodrama, where morality triumphs and women are idealized. In Barry Lyndon only Barry’s mother is a vivid character – the other women are types. The German girl Lischen is used by Thackeray in a farcical mistaken identity scene which is probably the funniest part of the book, livelier than the film’s ponderous little romance between her (Diana Koerner) and Barry. Kubrick’s camera idolizes the beauty of Marisa Berenson, playing Honoria. Although she does good work with her eyes, her vocal variety is limited. Hence the script gives her little to say, and much of that dialogue is stiff. For example, she always calls her first son ‘Lord Bullingdon’ even within the family. Honoria is also a flat character in the book, where her marriage to Redmond takes place only 70 pages from the end. Whilst the film is better structured, she remains a distant ideal, quite different from the vibrant women in films based on 18th– century originals, such as Tom Jones (1963). The death of Barry’s son Brian is glossed over by Thackeray (he finds himself here with an incident at odds with his authorial tone), but in the film there is a poignant, arguably mawkish, deathbed scene and funeral, punishing the protagonist even more severely than Scarlett O’Hara was punished by the death of Bonnie Blue. Strelow calls this, with justification, ‘the most openly emotional sequence in any Kubrick film’. An 18th-century viewer might recognize the look of Barry Lyndon – Hogarth, Gainsborough and others – but be perplexed by its earnest moral tone. Considering how out of key this tone is with the 1970s, it is amazing that this film was funded by a Hollywood studio. Beauty overcomes a lot. This beauty, the notion that the past was more picturesque, as well as more eventful, is what draws a lot of us to creating historical fiction. When writing, I often find myself inserting little homages to Barry Lyndon.
Let the final word rest with Kubrick himself. In a magazine interview published in 1972, he laid down a challenge (which applies to us novelists too): ‘I don’t think anyone has ever successfully solved the problem of dealing in an interesting way with the historical information that has to be conveyed, and at the same time getting a sense of reality about the daily life of the characters.’ (quoted by Strelow). Having identified this problem, Kubrick then made a film which – despite the few shortcomings I mention above – overcomes it in magnificent style.
References:
- Pramaggiore, Maria, Making Time in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, London, Bloomsbury, 2015.
- Strelow, John, The Big Movie: A Guide to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, independently published, 2023.
- Two of these three are quite interesting, but rampant inaccuracy deprives Cromwell of any merit.
- Thackeray, W.M., Sanders, Andrew (Introduction), Barry Lyndon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
- John Strelow proves that the composition of this shot was modelled closely on one in Hell’s Angels (1930).
About the contributor: Ben Bergonzi is an HNS reviewer and a member of the organizing committee for the HNS conference to be held in Ireland this August. His first novel, A Cruel Corpse, published last year, is a crime story with an eighteenth-century military setting. Its sequel, with a theatrical setting, will be published this year.
Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 116 (May 2026)
