Every film has its own history. From the completion of the post production, when positive prints are made from the original negative, to initial release when the prints are distributed to a certain number of theaters in a certain number of cities, to the end of the film's first run, when the prints are returned to the production company. The only difference between now and then is that instead of reels of 35mm film to be mounted on a projector, special multi-layered digital discs are distributed to theaters. The reels of film or the discs are returned to the production company, they are destroyed and the negative is stored in a vault.
Such was the fate of the 1972 film The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. It was the second-highest grossing American film in release in 1973, and was the biggest hit for its director, Sam Peckinpah. But it received unfavorable reviews from the critics. The Getaway started out as a novel by Jim Thompson published in 1958. Steve McQueen, who owned the rights to a film adaptation, brought Jim Thompson on board to write a script that was to be directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but disagreements led to the exit of both Thompson and Bogdanovich. McQueen was a big enough star at the time that he could call the shots. Walter Hill was hired to write a screenplay and Sam Peckinpah, who had worked with McQueen on Junior Bonner the year before, was the director. Only McQueen had approval of the final cut, which bothered Peckinpah enough, on one occasion, for him to take out a full page ad in Variety thanking Jerry Fielding for the music he wrote for the film, which didn't satisfy McQueen. Quincy Jones replaced him.
Sam Peckinpah was no studio stooge. Stanley Kauffmann wrote of him: "He is not an oblique puritan, he is a talented maniac who loves his bloody work. And the work is significant."(1) But that was The Wild Bunch. Something as yet undefined inspired Peckinpah to go above and beyond conventional expectations of an American film. Ride the High Country, his second feature film, is a classic of its kind, but it's still well within the boundaries of the Western genre. The Wild Bunch, his fourth film, vivisected the genre and found its beating heart. Kauffman noted that its use of violence called to mind Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Pauline Kael was evidently so overwhelmed by Straw Dogs, Peckinpah's 6th film, that she was moved to write, "The siege is not simply the climax but the proof, and it has the kick of a mule. What I am saying, I fear, is that Sam Peckinpah, who is an artist, has, with Straw Dogs, made the first American film that is a fascist work of art."(2)
In The Getaway, Steve McQueen plays Doc McCoy, whom we first see not adapting very well to life in a Texas prison. His wife Carol, played - improbably - by Ali MacGraw, visits him and he tells her, from his side of the cage, to do whatever she has to do to get him out. She succeeds, on condition that he pull off one more heist for Jack Beynon, a San Antonio crime boss (Ben Johnson, a crime boss who wears a cowboy hat). The heist is put together so mechanically by Peckinpah (it reminded me of Kubrick's equally overwrought heist at the heart of The Killing), in such preposterous detail that it comes as no surprise when almost everything goes wrong. When it's over, with only Doc and Carol surviving (Rudy is left for dead), Doc goes to Beynon's house to give him his cut. What he doesn't know is that Carol is then supposed to shoot him in the back, as arranged by Beynon. She shoots Beynon instead, which justifies the remainder of the protracted "getaway."
The bank robbery takes up far too much time - its planning and execution are so carefully laid out for no appreciable reason. It isn't Fort Knox - it's only a savings & loan with one old security guard. There is a genuinely suspenseful sequence aboard a train. And the garbage truck scene is somewhat scary, but only because delicate Ali MacGraw is inside it. Watching her and McQueen together makes one wonder what the attraction was - I mean, other than sex. And not just from her perspective. What was McQueen doing with this beautiful girl who belonged on top of a Christmas tree, not in a heist movie? Sally Struthers, before All in the Family made her immortal, is just another excuse for Peckinpah to show us his misogyny. I mean, who wasn't relieved when, screaming "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!", McQueen knocked her out with a left jab?
When location shooting started, MacGraw was married to the producer Robert Evans. She and McQueen hit it off during shooting, and it shows onscreen. Although McQueen was known to be physically abusive, MacGraw's vulnerability brings out an unexpected tenderness in McQueen in other scenes, like the one in which they make love after McQueen's release from jail, and he finds that not being with a woman in three years has made him momentarily impotent. MacGraw's patience patience in the scene is touching.
Clearly, Peckinpah wasn't inspired when he made The Getaway. Even the violent scenes feel puffed up - the slowing down of the action that seemed to contribute another dimension to The Wild Bunch seem here to be nothing but highlighting. McQueen slaps Ali MacGraw repeatedly and knocks Sally Struthers out cold, just like a hardened criminal like his character should. But Peckinpah was angered by McQueen's choice of shots, showing him off from his best angles. Two scenes in particular, one inside a garbage truck trash-masher, and the final shootout in an El Paso hotel (or was it a motel?) are utterly gratuitous. And the sickly sweet happy ending, with the couple shuffling off to Mexico - some kind of ultimate sanctuary for Peckinpah's heroes - is unearned by these unlikely partners in crime.
But all this would've been academic had it not occurred to a team of idiots to remake The Getaway in 1994. When a different team of idiots remade the Charles Bronson film, The Mechanic, in 2012, I wrote: "Contemporary American movies are so uniformly execrable that they make even the trashiest movies of the past seem splendid." The remake of The Getaway didn't make Peckinpah's film seem splendid, but it did give it almost iconic status among critics anxious to show off their comparative cinema skills. Alec Baldwin can't even act tough convincingly. Perhaps worried about his image, it's Kim Basinger, as Carol, who knocks out Rudy's girlfriend in the hotel scene. Compared to the remake, Peckinpah's The Getaway is what it always was - a competently-made heist movie. Trash, but skilfully made.
Peckinpah needed a hit when he made The Getaway and he got one. Just as the critical attention that his TV production of Noon Wine led to his contract to make The Wild Bunch, The Getaway gave Peckinpah a new lease on his directing career in 1973. He used it to make Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia the following year, which his fans admire so much but which goes to even greater depths than The Getaway in depravity. The only real difference is there is no sweet ending tacked on to the end of Garcia to carry the viewer out of the theater. Peckinpah managed to pull one more good film out of his hat - Cross of Iron (1977), the cumulative violence of which left me trembling, forty years ago, as I walked back to my car. John Simon was moved to admit that Peckinpah had a "Wagnerian sense of violence." Coincidentally, the heroes of Cross of Iron are Wehrmacht soldiers retreating on the Eastern Front.
(1) Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 180.
(2) Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, January 29, 1972.
When it was first released in 1975, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon suffered the fate of being labelled (by Pauline Kael) a "coffee table movie" - like a coffee table book, oversized, too unwieldy for a paperweight or a doorstop, beautifully illustrated but otherwise useless. Many, even Kubrick fans, were puzzled at his choice of subject, after the technical wizardry of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the physical energy of A Clockwork Orange, both set in a not-too-distant (or not distant enough) future.
Thackeray's novel, serialized as The Luck of Barry Lyndon but published later as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., is not up to his best work.(1) He labored over it and was only satisfied when it was finished. In Malta, on a journey he described in From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, he wrote in his journal "Wrote Barry but slowly and with great difficulty." "Wrote Barry with no more success than yesterday." "Finished Barry after great throes late at night." Intended as a throwback to the picaresque novels of Fielding and Richardson, it lacked the robustness and humor of the originals, and Redmond Barry's adventures are not very edifying. What goes up must invariably come down. But it is also a short novel, just two hundred pages with nineteen chapters. So it comes as no surprise to read Thackeray's title to chapter eleven "In Which The Luck Goes Against Barry".
Kubrick's adaptation of the novel required changes, the most obvious of which was dispensing with Barry's first person narration and creating a third person narrator. This alteration distances us from the narrative, which was clearly part of Kubrick's design. (A significant part of Kubrick's design with A Clockwork Orange was the retention of Alex's first person narration, which makes the viewer root, however reluctantly, for Alex.) It isn't that Barry is an unreliable narrator. Kubrick's narrator merely helps gloss over the scenes that Kubrick had deemed superfluous - or logistically impossible. Near the end of his tale, Barry says unapologetically of himself, "I am of the old school; was always a free liver and speaker; and, at least, if I did and said what I liked, was not so bad as many a canting scoundrel I know of who covers his foibles and sins, unsuspected, with a mask of holiness."
As for the film narrative, Kubrick follows Thackeray closely, without placing emphasis on one incident more than another. Some details are altered or eliminated. For example, in the novel Barry recognizes the Chevalier de Balibari to be his uncle, whereas in the film he is only a fellow Irishman. Also in the novel, Redmond, a child of Nora's (Barry's first love) to whom Barry is godfather (it is easy to infer, given his first name, that he is Barry's son) is the source of considerable trouble to Barry in the late stages of the story. And Lord Bullingdon is sent to America to fight the rebels, is reported killed, but returns to England, by then a Viscount. He delivers a thrashing to Barry, but there is no duel, Barry is not wounded and does not lose part of one leg. Barry dies in prison in the novel, but the film tells us nothing of him after his return to the Continent. Aside from its dramatic impact, Kubrick may have added the duel with Bullingdon because Andrew Robinson Stoney, the adventurer whose exploits inspired Thackeray to write his novel, had once fought a mock-duel to trick his titled lady into marrying him. The film leaves us believing that Lady Lyndon still loves Barry, whereas the situation in Thackeray is much more complicated.
In Kubrick's films, he seems to have been driven by problems of visualization, like how to intelligently depict ape-men as well as man-made space ships in their element, or how to realize a dystopian vision of a world deeply different from our own that yet appears only slightly different. With Barry Lyndon, Kubrick apparently wanted to reproduce an 18th-century Europe that exists today only in paintings from the period, and to do so while being faithful to the light that he saw in them. "Natural lighting" is a misleading term. It doesn't always mean using existing light, the light we can see with the naked eye. To capture that would require the use of "fast" film lenses with adjustable irises - opening the iris to let in more light the same way the iris in our eyes dilates when the light is low. For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick acquired a still camera lens developed by the German camera firm Zeiss for NASA that they used to photograph the dark side of the moon. Kubrick had the lens attached to his film camera and used it when he wanted to photograph any interior scenes lit entirely by candlelight. Exterior scenes that required more flexibility with available light were shot with Arriflex cameras.
When looking back on the making of the film and their experiences of working with Kubrick, Ryan O'Neal and Marisa Berenso tell us a great deal about his technique. He never planned his camera positions, which required an extra amount of waiting by his actors for the setups. He kept his principal actors under contract for months (the film took a year to shoot) and in costume on the set because he never knew when he might need them. And he refused to use stand-ins for matching shots where they were not even on camera. Ryan O'Neal, stupidly ridiculed for being so out of place in the lead role, mentioned that, once stumped for an idea during shooting, Kubrick consulted a coffee table book of reproductions of 18th century paintings and, finding a domestic scene of a man and a woman seated together, told O'Neal and Marisa Berenson (who impersonated Lady Lyndon) to sit just like the figures in the painting.
The climax of the film is Kubrick's only improvement on Thackeray. The duel in the dovecote between Barry and Bullingdon is superbly staged and executed, and provides the film with its parabola, from the first duel that set Barry on his adventures, to the last that effectively ends them. Barry is banished, paid off with an annuity. The narrator (the lovely voice of lovely old Michael Hordern) tells us: "Utterly baffled and beaten, what was the lonely and broken-hearted man to do? He took the annuity and returned to Ireland with his mother to complete his recovery. Sometime later he travelled abroad. His life there, we have not the means of following accurately. He appears to have resumed his former profession of a gambler, without his former success. He never saw Lady Lyndon again."
Kubrick's terse epilogue (a closing title before the end credits) isn't Thackeray's: "It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now. Thackeray's close is neither as sad nor as weak: "The [Lyndon] estate has vastly improved under his Lordship's [Bullingdon's] careful management. The trees in Hackton Park are all about forty years old, and the Irish property is rented in exceedingly small farms to the peasantry; who still entertain the stranger with stories of the daring and the devilry, and the wickedness and the fall of Barry Lyndon."
I have watched the film several times, in a movie theater when I was 17, on video and on dvd.(2) So, after more than three hours of breathlessly beautiful photography, what does Kubrick's film leave me with in 2018? I suspect that the varying critical appraisals in 1975 can be traced to the writers' attitude toward the setting which, like it or not, Kubrick brings to vibrant life. Vernon Young in The Hudson Review took the time to describe the scene of the closing duel in detail, and concluded: "Barry Lyndon, a work of great beauty, striped with the bizarre, is substantiated by its historical location; it takes place in Europe of the 1700s." Young, of a reactionary bent, loved Europe, even as he hated what it was becoming in the 1960s and '70s.
Pauline Kael was (in)famous for never watching a movie more than once and for always going with her gut reaction. (Roger Ebert was her worthy successor in this practice.) I doubt that her assessment of Barry Lyndon had anything to do with its failure at the box office - the only Kubrick film to suffer such a snub from filmgoers. But I'm afraid she got as close to the truth as anyone in the intervening 43 years. In The New Yorker she wrote: "This film is a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures. Barry Lyndon indicates that Kubrick is thinking through his camera, and that’s not really how good movies get made—though it’s what gives them their dynamism, if a director puts the images together vivifyingly, for an emotional impact."
Barry Lyndon is as useless as it is exquisite. I am not entirely utilitarian in my judgements. A film can serve no purpose whatsoever and still provide one with a rewarding expense of one's time. But, like the paintings that evidently inspired it, Barry Lyndon just sits there on the wall (or the screen) in beautiful repose. While it comes closest than any other film to capturing, not the look of the 18th century, but how the 18th century wanted us to see it, it is a series of tableaux non-vivants. So we get the architecture and the clothes and how they appeared without artificial lighting. Given the relative dark of drawing rooms lit entirely by burning candles, we can at last understand why everyone wore so much makeup - otherwise no one (not even a Zeiss lens) could see their faces. As for the wigs, none of the characters in the film appears to age, but their wigs turn grey. But isn't the reason why they wore wigs to conceal their true age?
Alfred Hitchcock once argued that complaining about the content of his films was like wondering whether the fruit in a still life painting was sweet or sour. But if the painter is any good, we would know from the fruit's appearance whether it was sweet or sour. In Barry Lyndon all the fruit is made of wax, with all the appearance of life, but inedible.
But it was also the last Kubrick film of any substance, however lifeless. His next film was The Shining, which is so overwrought that it fails miserably even as a horror movie. (I laughed when Jack Nicholson went berserk.) It made me wonder if Kubrick intended the film to elicit frights at all. Barry Lyndon was revived in theaters in 2016, prompting a new audience to marvel at it. I marvel at how precipitously movies have declined that audiences can now find Kubrick's lost art so marvelous.
(1) Thackeray was an enthusiastic gastronome. The facsimile of the 1886 edition of The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. that I have incorporates A Little Dinner at Timmin's, which presents Thackeray's talents at their best.
(2) Kubrick personally supervised and approved the video and digital transfers of all his films.
