Where to watch Barry Lyndon (1975)
Barry Lyndon is available to stream in US on Kanopy. It can also be rented or bought from Amazon and AppleTV.
An ambitious Irish rogue rises through 18th-century European society by exploiting opportunities, surviving military adventures, and pursuing wealth and status. His ascent into aristocratic life brings luxury and influence, but also strains family relationships and exposes the risks of building a future through deception and opportunism.
Cast: Marisa Berenson, Ryan O'Neal, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean, Diana Körner, Murray Melvin, Frank Middlemass, Leon Vitali, Arthur O'Sullivan
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Trivia & production notes
- Kubrick abandoned his planned Napoleon film after financier Dino De Laurentiis's Waterloo flopped at the box office, leaving him without funding.
- Kubrick rejected adapting Vanity Fair because he felt the story couldn't be compressed into a feature film's timeframe, leading him to choose Barry Lyndon instead.
- Marisa Berenson was instructed to avoid sunlight for months before production so she would have the pale complexion Kubrick wanted for the 18th-century period piece.
- Kubrick altered the source material by using an omniscient narrator instead of Barry's unreliable first-person perspective, believing the objective visual medium of film couldn't replicate Thackeray's literary technique.
- Principal photography lasted 300 days from spring 1973 through early 1974, with production interrupted when Kubrick received a death threat allegedly from the Provisional IRA during filming in Dublin.
- After receiving a credible threat during filming in Dublin in January 1974, Kubrick left Ireland within 12 hours and resumed shooting in England, Scotland, Germany, and other locations to complete the film.
- Powerscourt House, an 18th-century mansion in County Wicklow where interior scenes were filmed, burned down accidentally just months after production wrapped, making the film a historical record of the lost interiors.
- Barry Lyndon was shot largely without electric lighting, using specially developed ultra-fast lenses to film interior scenes by candlelight alone, a technical innovation for its time.
- Cinematographer John Alcott won an Oscar for his work achieving photography without electric light, including densely furnished interior scenes shot entirely by candlelight.
- Kubrick drew visual inspiration from 18th-century painters Watteau and Gainsborough for the film's cinematography, with the production team collaborating closely on period-accurate aesthetics.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article Barry Lyndon, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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