Is Barry Lyndon worth watching? It flopped in 1975 — Scorsese now calls it his favourite Kubrick
Kubrick's 1975 period picture underperformed in America, got written off as cold, and has since climbed most serious lists of the best films ever made. Here's what the reversal was actually about, and what three hours of it asks of you.
It is the Kubrick film with the worst opening weekend and the best long game. Whether it is worth your evening depends almost entirely on what you think a film is for.
The numbers first, because the word "flop" gets used loosely. Barry Lyndon cost around $11–12 million and took $9.1 million in the United States, which is a loss. Worldwide it made $20.3 million, and it did substantially better in Europe than at home — France in particular took to it immediately. It also won four Academy Awards at the 1976 ceremony: cinematography, art direction, costume design and adapted score, from seven nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. So the failure was specifically an American commercial failure, dressed up ever since as total rejection.
What the 1975 reviews actually said
They split along a line that has never really moved. Pauline Kael dismissed it as a "coffee-table movie". Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars and conceded, in the same breath, that "this must be one of the most beautiful films ever made". Gene Siskel put it among the year's best and praised the way it conveyed "the stunning emptiness of upper-class life", which is either the point of the film or the complaint about it, depending on the critic.
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Ebert came back to it in 2009 for his Great Movies series and raised it to four stars.
The film is "technically awesome, emotionally distant, remorseless in its doubt of human goodness", Ebert wrote in 2009 — offered, by then, as praise.
The technical case
Kubrick shot interiors by candlelight using Zeiss Planar f/0.7 lenses originally made for NASA stills photography, adapted for the camera so that a scene could be lit by the candles that are visible in it. Exteriors were composed after eighteenth-century painting — Gainsborough, Hogarth, Watteau — and the film's signature move is the slow zoom out, which starts on a face and ends with a landscape that has swallowed it.
Production ran around 300 days from spring 1973, beginning in Ireland and relocating to England, Scotland and Germany after security threats made the Irish shoot untenable. John Alcott's cinematography Oscar is the least controversial award in the film's cabinet.
What you're actually signing up for
- 185 minutes, in two parts with an intermission built in. It is designed to be paused.
- A narrator — Michael Hordern — who tells you what will happen before it happens, removing suspense on purpose.
- A protagonist who is not admirable and is not meant to become admirable.
- Handel's Sarabande as a main theme, plus Schubert's Piano Trio in E-flat, both deployed as inevitability rather than emotion.
- Ryan O'Neal, cast against the grain and frequently the thing people argue about.
So: worth it?
If you want a story that moves, no. The film's whole method is to slow things down until you notice the arrangement rather than the plot. If you want to watch a director demonstrate exactly how much of a person's life is decided by money, rank and other people's manners, it is the most complete argument Kubrick ever built.
The industry has come round. It placed twelfth in the directors' poll of Sight & Sound's 2022 survey, and Martin Scorsese has named it his favourite of Kubrick's films — a verdict that would have read as eccentric in 1975 and reads as conventional now.