Stanley Kubrick

by David Mikics

  A Clockwork Orange deals with freedom by depicting its opposite: the compulsive nature of both Alex’s enjoyment and the behaviorists’ programming. Kubrick also provides a hidden commentary on the lack of freedom in the cathartic release that most Hollywood movies provide. After its release the Hollywood Reporter enlisted a psychiatrist named Emanuel Schwartz to comment on A Clockwork Orange. “It is the recurrence of peak experiences in clockwork, mechanical fashion that makes this particular film instructive,” Schwartz said. “The pursuit of the peak experience is the manic search for omnipotence.”34

  Hollywood movies are all about repeating peak experiences to feed the audience’s fantasy. Kubrick was intent on troubling that fantasy. He said to Rolling Stone, “We have seen so many times that the body of a film serves merely as an excuse for motivating a final blood-crazed slaughter by the hero of his enemies, and at the same time to relieve the audience’s guilt of enjoying this mayhem.”35 A Clockwork Orange, unlike most Hollywood products, made the audience feel guilty about enjoying it—a key point that Kael failed to catch. The guilt gets mixed with the pleasure, so that neither feeling controls our viewing experience. A failure of mastery, then, to remind us what radically imperfect creatures we are.

  When it came to showing the movie, though, Kubrick exercised all his mastery. With A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick became more concerned than ever before that his films be screened properly. Julian Senior remembers that after the first print of Clockwork had gone out for the press screening at Cinema Five in Manhattan, Kubrick discovered that the wall around the screen was glossy white. “That’s going to be terrible. There’ll be reflections,” Kubrick said. “We have to repaint the theatre.”36 Kubrick then pored through the Manhattan phone directory for two hours to find painters who could redo the wall in matte black.

  Kubrick was hands-on with the European distribution of Clockwork as well. “Ask the managers if they know what lenses are being used,” Kubrick told Senior. “I want everything projected in 1.66.” The theaters didn’t have 1.66 lenses. “Well let’s get them some lenses,” Kubrick said. “He bought 283 lenses,” Senior remembers, “gave them to Andros [Epaminondas, his assistant], gave him the Mercedes and a map.”37 Kubrick got his way: A Clockwork Orange was projected in Europe with 1.66 lenses.

  “Let’s open with a Sicilian defence,” Kubrick would tell Senior, who didn’t play chess and so missed the point (be aggressive), before beginning one of his campaigns to ensure correct distribution and publicity. “I’ve been measuring the ads in the Frankfurt newspaper, they’re screwing us,” he might say.38 With publicity as with screening everything had to be right: this was Kubrick’s gift to the moviemakers who came after him, as well as his audience and himself.

  A Clockwork Orange has always done brisk business, and has remained the notorious must-see item among Kubrick’s oeuvre. Christiane, whose paintings appear in Mr. Alexander’s home, detested it for its violence. In the wake of Clockwork’s bloody mayhem, Kubrick would return to the slow, contemplative mode of 2001 with a grandly poised movie set in the eighteenth century, when people wrote with feathers, as far away from Alex and his droogs as could be imagined: Barry Lyndon.

  6

  You Can Talk for Hours about a Thing with Stanley:

  Barry Lyndon

  AT ABBOTS MEAD, Kubrick’s driver and courier Emilio D’Alessandro took the director’s daughters to school each day. In 1971, Anya was twelve and the rambunctious Vivian eleven. “Because of her wild character, Vivian needed constant attention,” D’Alessandro remembered. “She never meant any harm, but it was hard going.” Anya, by contrast, was “very calm and contemplative.” Katharina, Kubrick’s stepdaughter, was eighteen and an avid horseback rider, while Vivian studied piano and Anya took voice lessons. D’Alessandro drove them everywhere. “Stanley’s children spent more time with me than with him, and I spent more time with his children than with my own,” D’Alessandro said.1

  The Kubrick family had frequent dinner parties. “Socially, he was very much an American in Europe and did astonishing things that were very endearing,” Christiane said. Stanley liked to play chef. Christiane remembered, “Stanley had a secret fantasy of being a short-order cook. He was very good. The kitchen was a bit full of blue smoke and too many dirty pans, but he was very good at that. He did a sort of American food that Europeans find so astonishing—hamburgers, and then, later on, he was king of sandwiches. He would pile up high things. He was a good host and was trying desperately to tidy everything up so people didn’t say we’re sloppy.”2

  Kubrick was looking for another project to follow A Clockwork Orange. He wanted something from the Napoleonic era or the eighteenth century, radically different from the futuristic mise-en-scène of 2001 and Clockwork. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) was one of Kubrick’s favorite novels, with a wonderful scene of a party the night before the battle of Waterloo. But the story of Becky Sharp had been filmed several times already. Kubrick settled instead on Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), a rollicking picaresque zinger.

  Fleeing the squalid council flats of Clockwork, in Barry Lyndon Kubrick takes refuge in the eighteenth century. Yet Thackeray’s novel has some similarities to Burgess’s. Thackeray’s Barry is an Alex type, a scurrilous charmer and a brute. Like Alex, Barry tells his own story. He is rough, disdainful, and hilarious, with a strong taste for violence. Kubrick’s screenplay alters the hero radically. Kubrick transforms the scabrous swaggerer of Thackeray’s novel into an innocent, a cynical innocent at that. He takes a hero with a defiant screw-the-world smirk and replaces him with someone who seems embarrassed even at his most confident moments.

  With Barry Lyndon, Kubrick could have made a tumultuous film full of gusto like Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), but he went in the opposite direction, creating a work of great poised beauty. Barry Lyndon is a gorgeous, painterly film, with strong echoes of Gainsborough, Constable, and Stubbs. A few times the light seems like Vermeer’s. These effects are especially stunning in the Blu-ray restoration of the film supervised by Leon Vitali, who played Bullingdon and later became Kubrick’s intensely hardworking factotum. (Tony Zierra’s documentary Filmworker [2017] gives a striking portrait of Vitali’s career with Kubrick.)

  The movie tells the tale of Barry’s rise and fall. A country boy from Ireland, he becomes a loyal servant to several masters and then sets his sights on a wealthy marriage and a title: society is his new master. He succeeds in part, achieving (and squandering) wealth, and hobnobbing with the aristocracy. Yet a fugitive sense of not belonging always haunts Barry. He leads a vicarious existence, and like Lolita’s Humbert, he never gets over the loss of a beloved, in Barry’s case his young son Bryan.

  Ryan O’Neal’s Barry is somewhat waiflike, though physically sturdy. He shares little with Thackeray’s vividly disdainful hero. Jack Nicholson would have made a delicious Thackerayan Barry, but would be hopelessly miscast in Kubrick’s movie. Marisa Berenson’s Lady Lyndon is nearly inert, reprising the disaffected, melancholy beauty she played in Visconti’s films. “There is a sort of tragic sense about her,” Kubrick said of Berenson.3

  Kubrick wanted the stolid, plain O’Neal and the languid Berenson not just for their contrast but for their similarity, since they both remain distant from every possible flamboyance. Like the astronauts in 2001, O’Neal and Berenson don’t seem to be doing much acting as Barry and Lady Lyndon. Yet O’Neal especially is solid, steady, and perfectly apt.

  O’Neal, fresh from success in Love Story (1970) and Paper Moon (1973), was a big box office draw. On the set Kubrick and O’Neal, a former boxer, bonded over their love of the sport: together they watched films of heavyweight matches. Berenson, granddaughter of the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, seemed haughty and standoffish to O’Neal, but Kubrick was happy with her performance.

  Barry is a quietly troubling Kubrick hero, since we can’t be sure of him. Against our better judgment, we tend to see him as a naïve youthful romantic r
ather than a mature conniver, even at his most selfish and shallow. When Barry first glimpses Lady Lyndon, he appears just as lovelorn as when he earlier looked at Nora, his first love, over the dinner table. We know he is out for Lady Lyndon’s money, not her love, yet we are swayed by his melancholy looks, and by the fact that he never seems wily or calculating.

  The status that Barry aims for remains artificial and unreal. He can never truly possess the gentlemanly stature he yearns after, so his aspiration has an air of the tragic. “I never saw a lad more game in all me life,” his lively friend Grogan tells Barry, yet Kubrick’s hero is not at all gamesome. While Thackeray’s Barry happily drinks, whores, and swindles his way across Europe, Kubrick’s dwells in a limbo of unfulfillable hope.

  As Geoffrey O’Brien notes, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is far richer and more ambiguous than Thackeray’s novel. Kubrick’s film, O’Brien comments, is “almost an exemplary catalog of life experiences, with all their variety and all their oppressive limitations.” Yet for all the movie’s range the world it shows still feels as far off as the noble rank that Barry sets his sights on. O’Brien writes that “the more intimately present [Barry Lyndon’s] reality becomes, the more ephemeral and ghostly the people in it seem. The past never stops being the past; the images freeze and recede into a frame, beyond our reach.”4 The camera specializes in slow backward zooms, enforcing our detachment from what we see. Meanwhile, Michael Hordern’s superbly restrained voice-over offers a continual dose of irony at Barry’s expense, and so keeps the hero at a distance.

  Kubrick carefully planned Barry Lyndon’s preproduction. The film’s elaborate sets, he thought, required the man he saw as the best art director in the business, Ken Adam. One day in 1972 Adam, who had last worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove, got a phone call from the director asking him to design the sets for Barry Lyndon:

  Kubrick directing Barry Lyndon (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)

  Stanley said he’s got this film for me and he can’t afford my money. So I said, “Stanley, it’s not a good way to start talking to me, you know.’’ So we had an argument. . . . Five weeks later, I got another phone call from him saying . . . money is no problem and will I do the picture? Our relationship was almost like a marriage in a way, a love-hate relationship. I felt to go through another film, you know, life is too short. But I was stuck.5

  So at the beginning of 1973 Ken Adam began work on Barry Lyndon. He went scouting for eighteenth-century houses with Kubrick, who was determined that the movie be shot entirely on location. Adam wanted quite reasonably to use sets instead. He was worried about the smoke damage that might be done to the houses by the many candles that Kubrick wanted to use in the film. But Kubrick insisted, and as usual prevailed.

  Kubrick was fanatical about relying on clusters of candles in Barry Lyndon because he had found a revolutionary lens made by Zeiss that could photograph candlelight. The disadvantage for his art director Adam was that repeated takes had to show the candles burned down to exactly the same level each time.

  “Eventually I became very ill,” Adam remembered. “Utterly exhausted—because he used to run dailies with me late at night. Stanley could really get away with four hours’ sleep. Obviously, I couldn’t. So I went back to London, and he was unbelievably concerned. His letters to me at the time were really quite touching.” Roy Walker replaced Adam, who, as Julian Senior put it, was “taken off the set by men in white coats.”6

  During preproduction Kubrick decimated a pile of eighteenth-century art books, cutting out and studying their images. It took a year and a half to make the costumes: thirty-eight for O’Neal and twenty for Berenson. Kubrick had liked two Swedish films, Jan Troell’s The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), in which the costumes looked like actual clothes, properly weathered rather than freshly sent from wardrobe. So he hired Troell’s costume designer, Ulla-Britt Söderlund, who worked on the clothes for Barry Lyndon along with Milena Canonero, the designer for A Clockwork Orange.

  Kubrick’s perfectionism with the costumes extended to every other aspect of his movie’s mise-en-scène. The look of Barry Lyndon is unique, full of artifice and décor, yet somehow still open to the freshness of the landscape. Though the actors wear heavy makeup, their flesh shines through, and you can see the wickedness in their faces. Class-based cruelty comes naturally to these vain aristocrats in their shark tank, as the nobles first siphon off Barry’s riches and then swiftly discard him after his cataclysmic tussle with Bullingdon.

  Barry Lyndon’s shooting ran nearly nine months: with each movie Kubrick was taking longer to get what he wanted on film. During 1973 Kubrick and his crew shot for seven months, mostly in Ireland, then abruptly suspended production in January 1974 because of IRA bomb threats. The next month production resumed in Wiltshire, England, a hundred miles southwest of London. Kubrick filmed at Wilton House, then at Longleat House and Petworth House, both near Bath.

  At Petworth House, D’Alessandro remembered, Kubrick hired the magician David Berglas to teach O’Neal and Patrick Magee, who played the Chevalier de Balibari, how to cheat at cards. Kubrick was fascinated by Berglas’s card tricks and tried to unlock their secrets. He made Berglas do the tricks over and over and questioned him at length. D’Alessandro said to Berglas, “When something new comes along, first [Stanley] wants to know if it works, then when it works, he wants to know how it works. And when he knows how it works, he wants to know when it might not work. You can talk for hours about a thing with Stanley.”7

  The crucial arena for seeing how things work was, as always, in front of the camera. Kubrick on Barry Lyndon demanded many takes from his actors, typically saying something like “Let’s go again” instead of telling them what he wanted. Murray Melvin, who played the diminutive, wormlike Reverend Runt in the film, explained Kubrick’s shrewd practice of simply asking for repeated takes. “If someone tells you you’ve done a good bit,” Melvin told Richard Schickel, “then you know it and put it in parentheses and kill it.”8

  Kubrick was running an experiment on his actors, waiting to see where more and more takes might lead them. “I had a funny feeling that Stanley liked to see the actor break a little bit perhaps because he would see them reveal something else,” Steven Berkoff (Lord Ludd) remembered. “I said to myself, ‘I will never break down—never!’ . . . I started to relish each take. After about twenty-five takes, Stanley said, ‘Okay, we’ve got it.’ I said, ‘Oh, is that all?’ ”9

  Barry Lyndon is a subtle, deliberately paced movie, and initially it didn’t inspire great box office enthusiasm. Time magazine journalist Lawrence Malkin remembers flying to England in the middle of a raging snowstorm with colleagues Martha Duffy and Richard Schickel to see a screening of Barry Lyndon, which Malkin had championed as a Time cover story. “About half an hour into the movie,” Malkin recalls, “we turned to each other and said, this is beautiful, but this is not the kind of movie that usually winds up on the cover of Time.”10 Marisa Berenson stared hauntingly out from Time’s cover on December 15, 1975, and it was one of the magazine’s worst-selling issues.

  Barry Lyndon premiered in New York on December 18, 1975. The picture cost eleven million dollars and, though it lost money at the American box office, it eventually broke even worldwide. Slowly but surely, it started doing well with European audiences. The film won four Oscars, for Ken Adam’s production design and John Alcott’s cinematography, as well as for the adapted score and the costumes. European showings made up for the shortfall in the United States, and the movie turned a profit for Warner Bros. But MAD magazine’s parody “Boring Lyndon” hit a nerve. Kubrick’s movie demanded a kind of patient attention that the American masses weren’t quite ready for. Barry Lyndon lacked the far-out futuristic appeal of 2001. Instead it was an ornate journey into eighteenth-century Europe with an aura of the art house, including an allusion to Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) when Lady Lyndon performs a slow moonlit pavane before Barry.

  The sheer slow poise of Barr
y Lyndon, the serene pacing of it, the perfection, never finicky, of each shot, marks it as the mighty opposite of seventies filmmaking, with its ragged, shoot-from-the-hip verve. It is an anti-Zeitgeist movie, harking back to the eighteenth century with its rage for order. Kubrick insists on careful battlefield design in a flat-out absurd yet historically real skirmish, with the British, including Barry, marching steadily to fife and drum toward a group of kneeling French soldiers, and getting just as steadily mowed down, since they cannot reload their muskets while marching. As in many of Kubrick’s war scenarios, utter irrationality unites with regimented control.

  Kubrick makes Barry Lyndon poised and sumptuous, but it also harbors sudden scenes of violence, just as 2001 combined the stability of space flight with the killing thrusts of the prehistoric Moonwatcher. The steady decorum gets ripped apart by sudden tumults like the brawl between Barry and his stepson Lord Bullingdon, who fight like the apes of 2001, as Kubrick scholar Michel Ciment remarks—a jolting sequence with Kubrick himself manning the handheld camera.11 There is a rough energy in Barry Lyndon lurking behind its tableaux.

  There’s more to Barry Lyndon than there is to most movies, more to every painterly frame. Kubrick often nods to the era’s artists. Like Hogarth, he arranges groups of characters so that they tell a story. One shot, of a drunken, sleeping Barry surrounded by hangers-on, stylishly cites The Rake’s Progress. Marisa Berenson’s Lady Lyndon evokes the languid beauties depicted by Reynolds. Barry and his young son Bryan sit beneath a monumental van Dyck family portrait in Wilton House, the setting for Castle Hackton, the home that Barry acquires when he marries Lady Lyndon. The van Dyck dwarfs Barry and his son, art historian Adam Eaker notes: Barry is still the lonely Irish upstart out of place in this vast aristocratic home.

  The detailed pattern that Kubrick weaves in Barry Lyndon is best explored step by step, by retracing the narrative. The film’s story begins when Barry, a romantic youth, falls in love with his cousin Nora. But Nora’s family matches her with the wealthy, cowardly Englishman Captain Quin, played with delightful strutting relish by Leonard Rossiter. Forced to leave Ireland in disgrace after dueling with Quin, Barry is briefly dragooned into the Prussian army (the Seven Years’ War is on), then finds a patron in the crafty Chevalier de Balibari, a cardsharp and con man who preys on the aristocracy. Barry, who has become Balibari’s right-hand man, helping him cheat at cards and fighting his duels for him, looks innocent as ever, but like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, another boyish charmer, he’ll stop at nothing.