Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.
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Supplements
- Interviews with the cast and crew as well as archival audio featuring director Stanley Kubrick on the film’s cinematography, costumes, editing, and production
- New program about the film’s groundbreaking visuals, featuring focus puller Douglas Milsome and gaffer Lou Bogue, as well as excerpts from a 1980 interview with cinematographer John Alcott
- Interview featuring historian Christopher Frayling on production designer Ken Adam
- Interview with editor Anthony Lawson
- French television interview from 1976 with Oscar-winning costume designer Ulla-Britt Söderlund
- Interview with critic Michel Ciment
- Interview with actor Leon Vitali about the 5.1 surround soundtrack, which he cosupervised
- Interview with curator Adam Eaker about the fine-art-inspired aesthetics of the film
- Trailers
- An essay by critic Geoffrey O'Brien and two pieces about the film from the March 1976 issue of American Cinematographer