Kirk Douglas

[It seems incredible to me that Kirk Douglas, who has died at the age of 103, was born three years after my father and two before my mother. (My father died in 1988 at the age of 75 and my mother died in 1998 at 80.) As a tribute to him, I'm rebooting a piece I wrote four years ago about a film he produced, which represented a giant step forward for its director, Stanley Kubrick. A few years later, when he needed a replacement for Anthony Mann to direct Spartacus, Douglas again hired Kubrick. Like his son, Michael, Kirk Douglas's contribution to film as a producer was crucial to the development and preservation of quality and talent.]

Paths of Glory

There is a curious history to Paths of Glory. The film that Stanley Kubrick made in 1957 was adapted from a novel by Humphrey Cobb. Cobb (1899-1944) was an American who enlisted in the Canadian army in 1916 and fought in France in the First World War. His novel, published in 1935, was based on an actual incident. The novel had no title when it was submitted for publication, so the publisher held a contest to find an appropriate title and the winner suggested the words from Gray's elegy.

Another book about the First World War called Paths Of Glory existed before 1935, a collection of journalism written for the Saturday Evening Post by an American named Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944). The earlier book, published in 1915, makes no mention of the incident on which Humphrey Cobb's novel concentrates. The two Cobbs were not related, although both of them wrote for Hollywood films - Irvin wrote titles for silent films and some of his Judge Priest stories were adapted to the screen by John Ford, and Humphrey wrote the script for the Humphrey (!) Bogart film, San Quentin - and both men died in New York City in 1944 within 45 days of each other.

In 1957, when Stanley Kubrick was hired by Dore Schary at MGM to work on film scripts, Kubrick remembered reading Humphrey Cobb's novel and he suggested it to Schary. When Schary showed no enthusiasm for it, Kubrick bought the rights to the book from (Humphrey) Cobb's widow. After writing a script with Calder Willingham, Kubrick and his producer James B. Harris showed it to Kirk Douglas, who saw its potential for his own company Bryna Productions. Douglas got distribution backing from United Artists, and shooting of the film Paths of Glory was scheduled for locations in Bavaria. According to Douglas, when Kubrick arrived in Munich at the Bavaria Filmkunst Studios for the shoot, he showed Douglas changes he had made in the script. Douglas told him to stick to the script he approved.

Being an American film director in the 1950s presented Kubrick with two problems - how could he be successful and keep himself independent of the Hollywood system, and how could he avoid becoming just another exception - like Orson Welles - that proved the rule? Kubrick did the opposite, quietly making a name for himself in America before finding a way, with Lolita (1962), of getting himself out of America altogether. Establishing his production company, Hawk, Ltd., in the UK, it was there that Kubrick produced his best work and where he resided until his death in 1999.

During the making of his film version of War and Peace, King Vidor claimed that he had an advantage over Napoleon when he staged the battle of Borodino for the film, since he was in command of both the French and Russian armies. Battle scenes have occupied the creative resources of some of the greatest filmmakers, quite understandably because of their extreme visual impact. Shots of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people doing violence to one another are unlikely to leave any viewer feeling ambivalent about them. Film is a kinetic art - hence the word cinema. Our eyes are attracted irresistibly to movement. And what could possibly be more kinetic in a film than a battle scene?

The trouble with battle scenes for the filmmaker is precisely their ability to thrill. Even when, as in Apocalypse Now, a filmmaker tries to show that war is of its nature insane, he often succumbs to the spectacular qualities of combat. If one were to ask viewers of Apocalypse Now to name their favorite scene, I doubt that many would fail to name the famous morning helicopter raid, with speakers on board the helicopters blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and a deranged Colonel telling us how the napalm smells like victory.

While he wasn't exactly a pacifist, Kubrick was avowedly anti-war. He tackled the subject of war head-on in Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket, both set amidst two conspicuously futile wars. The First World War had been tackled before in American films, most notably in King Vidor's The Big Parade and Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front. Kubrick used a German military adviser, a Baron no less, to help him re-create the trench warfare depicted so vividly in Paths of Glory. The trenchworks and the terrain of No Man's Land (the cratered, barb-wired stretch of land between the enemy trenches) that the production constructed reminded me of Siegfried Sassoon's lines from his poem "Aftermath":

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

The scenes also make one aware of how immobile and unchanging the war had been for two years. Having been a soldier myself (although I never saw combat), watching the battle scenes in Paths of Glory is tough going, even after watching it for the fourth time.

But what makes the scenes most effective is Kubrick's avoidance of the worst mistake that so many directors make in such scenes: momentary departures from the perspective of the soldiers to a panoramic, or bird's eye, view. Even Steven Spielberg committed this error in Saving Private Ryan during the landing scene when he cut away to show us the view of the beach from a German pill box. Kubrick twice shows us a periscopic view of the French lines during his battle scene, but it was used to show us what General Murot sees from the safety of his command post in the rear.

It is 1916. After two years of fighting that has resulted in staggering casualties and a virtual strategic stalemate along a front stretching from Belgium to Switzerland, two French generals conceive yet another offensive to take a position known as the "Ant-Hill." General Murot, who sees it as an opportunity for promotion, goes directly to the front line to inform Colonel Dax, commander of a battalion holding the position closest to the objective of the plan. Dax objects to the plan but assures the General that he will lead the attack himself. When the attack takes place, and the Ant-Hill is not reached by the French soldiers, Dax discovers that many of the men in his battalion never left their trenches. When Murot learns of this, he orders the artillery battery to open fire on their own lines, but a radio operator refuses to relay the order to the guns. Murot demands that a hundred men from the battalion be shot for cowardice, but he settles for just three. Colonel Dax, a former defense attorney, volunteers to defend the three soldiers, who are chosen at random. But the trial is a sham and the men are sentenced to death. When Dax is offered General Murot's position, he angrily refuses it and he is told that the men of his battalion are being ordered back to the front.

The film has serious weaknesses. The acting is uneven because there were two different kinds of actors in the film. George Macready and Adolphe Menjou, crusty old Hollywood veterans, do their best with their roles. They were both expert at playing villains, except that their roles in Paths of Glory were based on actual people in actual situations. Their performances make this a little hard to believe. When they are onscreen with actors whose concentration is on their characters rather than the camera, they seem unreal.

But the two generals they play are quite good at reminding the viewer of what every soldier knows: that they are being commanded by old men who have neither knowledge nor interest in the hazards they endure daily. When it is agreed that some of the men will be court martialled for cowardice, General Murot wants a hundred men shot. He's talked down to twelve before he then proposes just three. The numbers are a clear reminder of Genesis, in which Abraham talks to the Lord, who "sat in the tent door in the heat of the day." He tells Abraham that Sodom and its inhabitants is to be destroyed, but Abraham asks him if within the city he can find fifty righteous would He "spare the place." The Lord agrees. Then Abraham talks him down to forty-five, then forty, then thirty, until he gets to ten.

Watching Kirk Douglas, who celebrated his 99th birthday on December 9, it's easy to see what attracted him to the role of Colonel Dax. We're reminded that it's his film when we see him for the first time, shirtless, showing off a physique he was evidently proud of. His impressive pecs are almost as famous as his cleft chin.Paths of Glory is a powerful indictment of the stupidity and ambition of the commanders who were prosecuting the war, but it does not go easy on the common soldiers, either, who are represented as sometimes courageous but also incredibly thick, even sheepish when ordered to go "over the top" to almost certain death. Some of the soldiers are played by actors whom Kubrick directed before and since, like Joseph Turkel and Timothy Carey (despite Carey's being fired during the shoot). They're familiar faces to Kubrick fans, but their acting is noticeably off. When Carey starts bawling when he learns he is to be executed, I wondered what kept Kubrick from firing him sooner.

Some of the film's irony is unnecessarily pointed. The music under the opening credits is the Marseillaise. I remember reading a review by Truffaut that contemptuously mentioned an inaccuracy in the comportment of the soldiers (Truffaut served in the French army). What Truffaut didn't know was that, by law, the uniforms and comportment of soldiers in a film cannot be a hundred per cent accurate. And I could be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that a firing squad would have been conducted smack in front of a chateau in which the general staff is headquartered.

Then there is the ending, which occupies the final six minutes of the film. There was, according to Kubrick's producer, James Harris, to be a "happy ending" that was actually in the novel and was put in the script. The ending that was shot wasn't exactly happy, but was so oddly inconsistent with the grim tone of the rest of the film that some critics (correctly, I think) regarded it as a cop out.  Many others, however, think the scene is some kind of affirmation of humanity.

In the closing scene, a crowd of French soldiers from Colonel Dax's regiment is drinking noisily in a tavern. Dax stops outside the tavern and looks inside. The owner of the tavern appears on an improvised stage above the tables and introduces a pretty young girl. The men react predictably with whistles and jeers. Calling for quiet, the man explains to the soldiers that the girl is German. The tavern owner tells the girl to sing, so she sings the only song she can think of - a sentimental song about a German "hussar." The effect of her quiet, amateurish singing brings tears to many of the soldiers eyes and many of them join her, humming the tune. Dax looks at the ground, knowing that the men are soon to return to the front, tells his adjutant to let them alone for a little longer, then turns and walks away.

The scene is so inconsistent with everything that comes before it that it almost seems transplanted from another film. The only excuse for its existence is the fact that the German girl, identified as Susanne Christian in the credits, became Christiane Kubrick, Kubrick's wife, shortly after shooting was completed, and they remained married for the rest of Kubrick's life.

Paths of Glory is much more than just an above-average Hollywood film. It is an achingly vivid, nervy, and highly original look at war. And Kubrick would expand on what he learned about shooting combat scenes in the assault on Burpleson Air Force Base in his masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, the ultimate statement about the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.). 

Schalcken the Painter

The Irish writer of horror fiction, J. T. Sheridan LeFanu (1814-1873), was much admired by M. R. James, author of "A Warning To the Curious," as well as several other Ghost Stories for Christmas made popular by Michael Hordern and the BBC. "I do not claim for this author any very exalted place," James admitted in a lecture on LeFanu, "but I desire to advance the claim that he has attained supremacy in one particular line: he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer." James wasn't necessarily a trustworthy authority on the subject, having already discounted the quality of the writings of Poe, which he attributed to the remoteness of their settings. Horror fiction attracted many great writers, probably because of its popularity as a genre.

Reading LeFanu lately, however, makes one wonder if anyone would be attracted to the following specimen of writing:

"To his dying day Schalken was satisfied of the reality of the vision which he had witnessed, and he has left behind him a curious evidence of the impression which it wrought upon his fancy, in a painting executed shortly after the event we have narrated, and which is valuable as exhibiting not only the peculiarities which have made Schalken’s pictures sought after, but even more so as presenting a portrait, as close and faithful as one taken from memory can be, of his early love, Rose Velderkaust, whose mysterious fate must ever remain matter of speculation.

The picture represents a chamber of antique masonry, such as might be found in most old cathedrals, and is lighted faintly by a lamp carried in the hand of a female figure, such as we have above attempted to describe; and in the background, and to the left of him who examines the painting, there stands the form of a man apparently aroused from sleep, and by his attitude, his hand being laid upon his sword, exhibiting considerable alarm: this last figure is illuminated only by the expiring glare of a wood or charcoal fire."

This excerpt is from the story, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter," which was one of his first short stories collected much later in The Purcell Papers, accounts by a fictitious 18th-century Catholic priest called Father Purcell. There was an actual painter from the 17th century named Gottfried Schalcken, who specialized in portraits and intimate scenes that are lit entirely by a single candle. LeFanu seems to have been acquainted with his specialty, and was familiar with certain details of his life. The story, however, is pure invention. The painting that LeFanu describes in detail doesn't exist.

LeFanu's limitations as a writer pose no problem for anyone attempting to adapt one of his stories to film. In 1979, Leslie Megahey adapted LeFanu's story for Schalcken the Painter (with the corrected spelling of the painter's name) for the BBC's Omnibus series. It approaches the story as if it were a docu-drama from the life of Schalcken. He was apprenticed to the painter Gerrit Douw, who was himself an apprentice of Rembrandt. Rembrandt even appears in the film (an actor made up to resemble the self-portrait from 1663, with Rembrandt wearing a painter's hat) as a sort of historical detail adding authenticity to the otherwise fictional account the film dramatizes. In love with Douw's young niece, Rose, but penniless, Schalcken is witness to a transaction between Douw and a wealthy old man from Rotterdam in which a small casket of fine gold is exchanged for his niece in marriage. But this is no ordinary old man. The scene of his face to face meeting with Rose is filmed exactly as LeFanu's relates it:

"Nine o’clock at length came, and with it a summons at the street-door, which, being speedily answered, was followed by a slow and emphatic tread upon the staircase; the steps moved heavily across the lobby, the door of the room in which the party which we have described were assembled slowly opened, and there entered a figure which startled, almost appalled, the phlegmatic Dutchmen, and nearly made Rose scream with affright; it was the form, and arrayed in the garb, of Mynher Vanderhausen; the air, the gait, the height was the same, but the features had never been seen by any of the party before.

The stranger stopped at the door of the room, and displayed his form and face completely. He wore a dark-coloured cloth cloak, which was short and full, not falling quite to the knees; his legs were cased in dark purple silk stockings, and his shoes were adorned with roses of the same colour. The opening of the cloak in front showed the under-suit to consist of some very dark, perhaps sable material, and his hands were enclosed in a pair of heavy leather gloves which ran up considerably above the wrist, in the manner of a gauntlet. In one hand he carried his walking-stick and his hat, which he had removed, and the other hung heavily by his side. A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and its folds rested upon the plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck.

So far all was well; but the face! — all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue which is sometimes produced by the operation of metallic medicines administered in excessive quantities; the eyes were enormous, and the white appeared both above and below the iris, which gave to them an expression of insanity, which was heightened by their glassy fixedness; the nose was well enough, but the mouth was writhed considerably to one side, where it opened in order to give egress to two long, discoloured fangs, which projected from the upper jaw, far below the lower lip; the hue of the lips themselves bore the usual relation to that of the face, and was consequently nearly black. The character of the face was malignant, even satanic, to the last degree; and, indeed, such a combination of horror could hardly be accounted for, except by supposing the corpse of some atrocious malefactor, which had long hung blackening upon the gibbet, to have at length become the habitation of a demon — the frightful sport of Satanic possession.

It was remarkable that the worshipful stranger suffered as little as possible of his flesh to appear, and that during his visit he did not once remove his gloves.

Having stood for some moments at the door, Gerard Douw at length found breath and collectedness to bid him welcome, and, with a mute inclination of the head, the stranger stepped forward into the room.

There was something indescribably odd, even horrible, about all his motions, something undefinable, that was unnatural, un-human — it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery.

The stranger said hardly anything during his visit, which did not exceed half an hour; and the host himself could scarcely muster courage enough to utter the few necessary salutations and courtesies: and, indeed, such was the nervous terror which the presence of Vanderhausen inspired, that very little would have made all his entertainers fly bellowing from the room. They had not so far lost all self-possession, however, as to fail to observe two strange peculiarities of their visitor.

During his stay he did not once suffer his eyelids to close, nor even to move in the slightest degree; and further, there was a death-like stillness in his whole person, owing to the total absence of the heaving motion of the chest, caused by the process of respiration.

These two peculiarities, though when told they may appear trifling, produced a very striking and unpleasant effect when seen and observed. Vanderhausen at length relieved the painter of Leyden of his inauspicious presence; and with no small gratification the little party heard the street-door close after him.

‘Dear uncle,’ said Rose, ‘what a frightful man! I would not see him again for the wealth of the States!’

‘Tush, foolish girl!’ said Douw, whose sensations were anything but comfortable. ‘A man may be as ugly as the devil, and yet if his heart and actions are good, he is worth all the pretty-faced, perfumed puppies that walk the Mall. Rose, my girl, it is very true he has not thy pretty face, but I know him to be wealthy and liberal; and were he ten times more ugly ——’

‘Which is inconceivable,’ observed Rose.

‘These two virtues would be sufficient,’ continued her uncle, ‘to counterbalance all his deformity; and if not of power sufficient actually to alter the shape of the features, at least of efficacy enough to prevent one thinking them amiss.’

‘Do you know, uncle,’ said Rose, ‘when I saw him standing at the door, I could not get it out of my head that I saw the old, painted, wooden figure that used to frighten me so much in the church of St. Laurence of Rotterdam.’

Gerard laughed, though he could not help inwardly acknowledging the justness of the comparison. He was resolved, however, as far as he could, to check his niece’s inclination to ridicule the ugliness of her intended bridegroom, although he was not a little pleased to observe that she appeared totally exempt from that mysterious dread of the stranger which, he could not disguise it from himself, considerably affected him, as also his pupil Godfrey Schalken."

In one respect, the LeFanu story has a relevance for contemporary readers that wasn't lost on Megahey:

"Marriages were then and there matters of traffic and calculation; and it would have appeared as absurd in the eyes of the guardian to make a mutual attachment an essential element in a contract of marriage, as it would have been to draw up his bonds and receipts in the language of chivalrous romance."

Marriages in the 17th century were financial transactions among men, in which women had little or no say. The arranged marriages that we hear about in some Asian and African countries today are widely deplored, but such practices were common in Europe well into the 20th century.

Despite Rose's misgivings and protests, Douw bundles her off to her wedding in Rotterdam and she is literally carried away in an ornate litter with her husband. Days, weeks pass without word from Rose. Then, without warning, she returns to her uncle's house in obvious terror, dissheveled and distraught, begging him and Schalcken to save her. Believing her to be hysterical, they put her to bed and send for a minister. But she keeps babbling incoherently, the words "The dead and the living cannot be one — God has forbidden it!" and "Rest to the wakeful — sleep to the sleep-walkers." She calls for more candles, the room is too dark, and claims that "he" is already there. But Douw and Schalcken see no one. Finally the minister arrives, but a gust of air blows out the candle and Douw, who had been holding her hand, lets go of it and steps through the chamber door. Instantly the doors of the chamber slam shut, with Rose alone within. They hear screams of terror coming from behind the closed door, then one final shriek. Douw and Schalcken finally wrest open the door, but Rose has vanished. They look out of the window to the canal below, but there is nothing to see except "the waters of the broad canal beneath settling ring after ring in heavy circular ripples, as if a moment before disturbed by the immersion of some large and heavy mass."

I won't give away the ending (closely following LeFanu's tale) but the film elaborates on Schalcken's career after Rose's disappearance, on his obsession with painting models resembling Rose, and on his work on the (fictitious) painting that inspired the tale. It would be an understatement to point out how much care was taken to capture the look of the paintings of the time, especially paintings by Vermeer. We watch as Gerrit Douw oversees his students at life drawing and a still life, but what we see of Douw's house, with its parquet floors and latticed windows, is directly reminiscent of the interiors in Vermeer's painting. On a much more intimate scale, Schalcken the Painter repeats what Stanley Kubrick achieved with Barry Lyndon - recreating the past by painstakingly copying period artworks. The end credits of Schalcken thank several European art galleries for their contributions to the production, not just by supplying the originals of paintings by Gottfried Schalcken, but by providing the director, designer, and cinematographer with inspiration for their work on the film. Christine Rawlins designed the sumptuous costumes, Anna Ridley was the production designer, and John Hooper is credited as the "lighting cameraman" - presumably in charge of the cinematography and lighting. Leslie Megahey, the film's director, deserves the highest praise. As I have already pointed out, he reportedly accepted the post as editor of the BBC documentary series Omnibus on condition that he make Schalcken the Painter. Omnibus is a documentary program, but Megahey shot his film as if it were a docudrama about events in the lives of historical personages, making LeFanu's tale seem authentic. The excellent cast includes Jeremy Clyde as Schalcken, Cheryl Kennedy as Rose, Maurice Denham as Dou, and John Justin, who was the handsome hero in the 1940 (!) The Thief of Baghdad, plays the dreadful Mynher Vanderhausen. 

Barry Lyndon

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.

Gullible Gilliam

The following thoughts are completely off-the-cuff - in fact they are provoked by a clip I ran across on YouTube, taken from what (I guess) is a longer discussion by Terry Gilliam for Turner Classic Movies, and I have had to transcribe his remarks on scraps of paper (I wasn't wearing cuffs at the time) in order to copy them here.

The short clip (just shy of 2 minutes) that caught my attention (without rewarding it) was titled "Terry Gilliam criticizes Spielberg and Schindler's List." By no means do I intend to add emphasis to Gilliam's utterly glib comments [I examined the merits of Gilliam's work a few years ago in "One Trick Python"], but the subject is fascinating to me because I still haven't quite recovered from the surprise (more like the shock) of finding so much in Schindler's List that is brilliant and moving and disturbing in quite positive ways, when it was made by one of Hollywood's most phenomenally successful whizkids, maker of Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Jurassic Park. Though he indicated now and then (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) a capacity for seriousness - that is, the ability to distinguish intelligence from mere cleverness and to reflect that ability in his approach to his material, it wasn't until Schindler's List that Spielberg showed us all what he could really do. Most of the time, the efforts of commercially successful film directors, writers, and composers to create something that they want people (critics) to take seriously end in disaster. Think of Liberace's first recording of his interpretations of works by Chopin, Liszt, and Beethoven. The music critics savaged it because, without the charming presence of Liberace himself in concert, the music sounded terrible. The recording quickly outsold every other available classical recording. When asked for his reaction to the critics' verdict on his recorded piano stylings, Liberace famously said, "I cried all the way to the bank." Who needs to be taken seriously when you're rolling in cash?

Here is everything Gilliam said in the clip:

"The great difference between Kubrick and Spielberg is Spielberg is more successful. His films make much more money. but they're comforting, they give you answers - always the films are answers. And I don't think they're very clever answers. And 2001 had an ending - I don't know what it means. I don't know, but I have to think about it, I have to work. And it opens up all sorts of possibilities and probably the next person I speak to has a different idea of what that end means. Suddenly we're in discussion, now we're talking. Ideas come out of that. That's what I always want to encourage. Spielberg, and the success of most films in Hollywood these days, I think is down to the fact that they're comforting, they tie things up in nice little bows, gives you answers - even if the answers are stupid, they're answers. You go home and you don't have to worry about it. The Kubricks of this world and the great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.

"There's a wonderful quote in the book that Freddie Raphael wrote about the making of Eyes Wide Shut. It's called Eyes Wide Open, and he's talking to Kubrick about Schindler's List and the Holocaust, and he says, 'The thing is, Schindler's List is about success. The Holocaust was about failure.' And that's Kubrick, and that's just spot-on. Schindler's List had ... we had to save those few people - AH! Happy ending. A man can do what a man can do, and stop death for a few people. But that's not what the Holocaust was about. It was about the complete failure of civilization to allow 6 million people to die. And I know which side I'd rather be on. I'd like to have a nice house like Spielberg, but I know which side I'd be on."

I don't know what the context of Gilliam's remarks was, but it was probably Spielberg's film A.I., which was based on ideas developed by Kubrick. Evidently, Stanley Kubrick saw the serious streak in Spielberg that I mentioned above, which explains why he consulted Spielberg extensively in preparation for the project A.I. When Kubrick died suddenly, Spielberg felt obliged to take over and finish the project. Heaven only knows what Kubrick would've made of the project, but Spielberg made a great mistake in taking the helm. As Stanley Kauffmann commented: "Spielberg's roseate view of science fiction--as a means to glimpse future possibilities--grated with the view of Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, in which the human race is riven by disjuncture between moral stasis and scientific advance." (1)

For several years, in the 1960s and into the '70s, Stanley Kubrick was the Great Hope of American film, just as Orson Welles had been for a short time in the '40s, before a series of tough breaks and bad choices effectively dashed that hope. After the success of Dr. Strangelove in 1966, Kubrick was in a position, with his own production company (Hawk Films, Ltd.), to make virtually any film he wanted. The first result was 2001, which was technically interesting, and remains the finest example of the science fiction film genre. But the "ideas" behind the film are damned silly. And the phantasmagorical ending, which makes perfect sense given the premise that some alien intelligence immensely more advanced than our own has visited the human species in the form of a black monolith that emits Gyorgy Ligeti music at certain moments in our evolution and has helped us along toward the ultimate immaculate conception of the "star child" who appears in the size of a planet to the grandiose opening notes of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra - to me, that ending didn't provoke discussion. It ended discussion.

Kubrick's next films, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining ... to list them is to relive one's mounting dismay at Kubrick's squandered talents. He left a number of unrealized projects at his death. Steven Spielberg adopted some of them - like Kubrick's long-cherished Napoleon project, which is being developed (the last time I checked on it) as a series for HBO.

But, Schindler's List is a success story? It's the story of real people, some of whom lived through the Holocaust. Spielberg's film doesn't elaborate on their subsequent lives, but that they owed their lives to the reluctant heroism of Oskar Schindler is not arguable. Spielberg's treatment of the story has its momentary missteps, but it is a formidable, if utterly unexpected, achievement from a filmmaker who proved that he had it in him. The fact that the importance of the film has sparked so much "discussion" is proof enough against Gilliam's point. I, too, know which side I'd rather be on.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 23, 2001.