The Genius of Barry Lyndon

Patrick Webster is a musician, writer and university lecturer. A graduate and postgraduate of the University of Leeds, he has written on subjects including the films of Stanley Kubrick, the songs of Bob Dylan, the television drama, The West Wing, as well as other issues such as ecology and dyslexia. He lives in Leeds, in the North of England.

Table of Contents


Introduction

Part I: By What Means Stanley Kubrick Acquired the Way to Make the Film Barry Lyndon

1. How Did They Make a Film Like Barry Lyndon? The Making of the Film: The Initial Screenplay, Budgets, Locations, Cast and Crew, Academy Awards, Artistic Legacy, and Other Diverse Concerns

2. “Don’t touch that, it’s a very important work of art!” The Critics Respond to the Film

3. “Tragical-historical, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral”: The Use of Genre in Barry Lyndon

4. Barry Lyndon as Palimpsest: The Influence of the Film’s Unmade Precursor—A Masterpiece Unsigned

5. A Dreamer of Pictures: The Visual Aesthetics of Barry Lyndon

6. The Age of Reason: The Eighteenth Century in the Work of Stanley Kubrick

7. Makepeace, Not War: The Adaptation of Thackeray’s Source Novel

8. Of Course, the Story Could Be Wrong: Reliable and Unreliable Narrators in Barry Lyndon

9. Grande Musicale: The Soundtrack of Barry Lyndon

Part II: Containing an Account of the Film Barry Lyndon from a Diverse Range of Theoretical Approaches

10. “This is one of my best pictures”: A Structuralist and Semiotic Reading of Barry Lyndon

11. “Women of Ireland”: A Feminist Reading of Barry Lyndon

12. “Gentlemen, cock your pistols”: A Psychoanalytical Reading of Barry Lyndon

13. “I’m a man of property”: Marxist and Postcolonial Readings of Barry Lyndon

Conclusion

Epilogue

Appendix I: A Timeline

Appendix II: The First Screenplay, February 18, 1973

Appendix III: Narrative Structure: Chapter by Chapter, Scene by Scene, Shot by Shot

Appendix IV: A Barry Lyndon Miscellany: Additions, Addendums, and Anecdotes

Deleted Scenes 216 delete• deleteErrors 217 delete• deleteUncredited Speaking Roles 218 delete• deleteChild Actors 218 delete• deleteVivian Kubrick and Barry Lyndon 219 delete• deleteTatum O’Neal and Barry Lyndon 219 delete• deleteLocations 220 delete• deleteMultiple Takes 221 delete• deleteBarry Lyndon ­and Kubrick’s ­Twentieth-Century Novels 222 delete• deleteBarry Lyndon’s Palimpsest—Napoleon—an Original Narrative Source 223 delete• deleteBarry Lyndon Unmade/Napoleon Accomplished: An Alternate History 224 delete• deleteBarry Lyndon—Kenneth Griffith—and The Man on the Rock 225 delete• deleteSexual Content 226 delete• deleteMajor and Minor Keys 226 delete• deleteThe Final Title Card: An Existentialist Reading 227 delete• deleteChess and Filmmaking 228 delete• deleteIntertextual Felicities: Voyage of the Damned, Uncle Vanya, Heaven’s Gate, and Barry Lyndon 229 delete• deleteBarry Lyndon and the 1964 US Presidential Campaign 230 delete• deleteConspiracy Theories: The JFK Assassination and Barry Lyndon 230 delete• delete“It’s What’s in the Frame!”: Kubrickian Studies and Barry Lyndon 231 delete• deleteKubrick and the Queen 232 delete• deleteThe IRA Revisited 233

Appendix V: Cast and Crew Credits

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

Index