Barry Lyndon (1975)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
A Film by Stanley Kubrick
Full BluRay 1:1 | 1080p MPEG-4 AVC @ 19929 Kbps | 03:05:03 | 37,75 Gb
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1 @ 2086 Kbps; French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish - AC3 5.1 @ 640 Kbps
Subs: English, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
Genre: Drama, Romance, War, Classics | Won 4 Oscars | UK, USA
A Film by Stanley Kubrick
Full BluRay 1:1 | 1080p MPEG-4 AVC @ 19929 Kbps | 03:05:03 | 37,75 Gb
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1 @ 2086 Kbps; French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish - AC3 5.1 @ 640 Kbps
Subs: English, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
Genre: Drama, Romance, War, Classics | Won 4 Oscars | UK, USA
How does an Irish lad without prospects become part of 18th-century English nobility? For Barry Lyndon (Ryan O’Neal) the answer is: any way he can! His climb to wealth and privilege is the enthralling focus of this sumptuous Stanley Kubrick version of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel. For this ravishing, slyly satiric winner of 4 Academy Awards, Kubrick found inspiration in the works of the era’s painters. Costumes and sets were crafted in the era’s designs and pioneering lenses were developed to shoot interiors and exteriors in natural light. The result? Barry Lyndon endures as a cutting-edge movie that brings a historical period to vivid screen life like no other film before or since.
IMDB - Top 250 #213
DVDBeaver - BluRay Review
blu-ray.com
Grave, painterly, and bitterly satirical, BARRY LYNDON baffled viewers who expected picaresque breeziness along the lines of TOM JONES. Kubrick's translation of the Thackeray novel downplays its frivolity and foregrounds its acerbic social critique. With an actor only slightly more expressive than Ryan O'Neal in the lead, this sombre costume epic might have reached the level of tragedy; as it is, the film is langorous to a fault, but so visually delightful and keenly observed that its excesses demand forgiveness.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
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The title character (Ryan O'Neal) is a rustic Irish boy who falls in love with a local lass (Gay Hamilton). When he threatens to disrupt her financially desirable match with an English officer (Leonard Rossiter), her family tricks him into leaving town. Barry's subsequent adventures encompass triumph and disaster: among other things, he is impressed into (and deserts from) two warring armies, becomes assistant to an itinerant society card sharp, and woos a widowed aristocrat (Marisa Berenson). His decision to marry her–dictated solely by his desire to acquire social standing–is a tragic misstep; thenceforward, Barry's life describes an inexorable downward trajectory.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
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BARRY LYNDON received mixed notices, but even its detractors had to concede that it was one of the most visually beautiful movies ever shot: Kubrick lavished on his film a kind of attention to period detail that remained unmatched until the release of Scorsese's THE AGE OF INNOCENCE nearly 20 years later. In an effort to recreate the look of 18th-century canvasses, the director resolved to shoot the film wholly without artificial lighting; with cinematographer John Alcott, he pioneered the indoor use of ultra-high-speed color film–some scenes are lit only by candles! Music, as always with Kubrick, is integral to the project; Irish folk tunes by The Chieftains and Schubert's E-minor Trio (which has since become something of a movie cliche) are particularly well used.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
This often breathtaking exploration of the world of Thackeray’s titular eighteenth-century Irish adventurer – showing at the centre of the BFI Southbank’s unmissable two-month Stanley Kubrick season – is the nearest the great director ever came to realising his uppermost ambition, to film a life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Thus all the grand armies, dashing uniforms and suffusion of gunsmoke (here pertaining to the pre-Bonaparte Seven Years’ War). Another kind of smoke pervades the series of lowly Irish farmsteads, elegant brothels and imposing country houses through which the film’s antihero, Redmond Barry (played by then fashionable, fresh-faced hot property Ryan O’Neal), fights, duels, gambles and seduces his way to success and back again – that of a million candles, the natural source of illumination that Kubrick insisted on using, to the astonishment of cinematographer John Alcott, to render authentic interiors.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
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Despite that, much of the atmosphere, decor, mannerisms and performances are fake (not least the ridiculous turns by Murray Melvin, Leonard Rossiter and the insipid Marisa Berenson) – not that it matters much. It’s not only the beautifully intoned third-person narration (by Michael Horden), the consummate mise-en-scène and stunning photography but the iron-strong confidence of direction that help transform Thackeray’s lively picaresque tale into one of cinema’s most heartfelt and sustained (it runs over three hours), if cynical, visions of an individual’s powerlessness when confronted with the impersonal, mangling machinery of power and fate. What a magnificent, mesmeric slow dance it is, not merely of death but of an ambitious man’s inexorable decline.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
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A relative failure at the time (1975) – despite Ken Adam’s Oscar for design – it improves with each passing year, although it must take part of the blame for making the immortal strains of Handel’s Sarabande the evergreen Classic FM favourite it is.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
While not too well-regarded on its initial release, Barry Lyndon, like most of Stanley Kubrick's work, has stood the test of time as a dramatically compelling and visually stunning motion picture. Kubrick's retelling of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel has often been accused of moving too slowly for its own good, but if you allow yourself to slip into its admittedly deliberate rhythm, you'll discover an absorbing, complex, and dryly witty tale packed with sex, violence, gambling, war, family feuds, romantic betrayals, love, death, and all the other things that make historical dramas so much fun. Though no one has ever accused Ryan O'Neal or Marisa Berenson of being expressive actors, their limited emotional palettes work in their favor here; Kubrick structures the film so that the audience reads triumph and tragedy in the subtle emotional variations of his cast, allowing many of them to register onscreen as they never would otherwise. (And, in fairness to O'Neal, Barry Lyndon is doubtless this actor's strongest and most expertly modulated performance.) And no one has ever contested Barry Lyndon's visual splendor. Attempting to recreate both the aesthetic style of 18th century paintings and the physical look of the period, Kubrick, cinematographer John Alcott, and production designer Ken Adam used authentic antique props and costumes to brilliant effect, and they lit their scenes with only natural sunlight or candles, for a look that no other movie has ever touched. The result is a film of singular visual style and beauty, and one of the richest and most evocative period pieces ever made.Mark Deming, Rovi
Barry Lyndon (1975)
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