Topic: HOLLYWALD - on August 9, 2016 at 5:42:00 PM CEST
Why Barry Lyndon is Stanley Kubrick’s secret masterpiece
Misunderstood and underappreciated, the 1975 film has emerged as one of the icon’s most seminal creations
In 1975 Barry Lyndon was underappreciated and misunderstood, at least in Britain and the US. Some critics described Kubrick’s adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, which charted the life of Redmond Barry, a young Irish chancer climbing society’s ladder searching for wealth and titles, as detached and cold, even boring. Pauline Kael called it “glacial”, a “coffee-table movie”. In Europe, however, the response was different and both critics and audiences recognised Barry Lyndon as a film of extraordinary beauty. To describe Stanley Kubrick as a director for whom preparation and research were important would be to deliver the biggest understatement in cinema. It was Kubrick’s fastidious, almost obsessive attention to detail that made Barry Lyndon more than just another costume piece and more an actual documentation of the 18th Century.
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