Trailer
Plot summary
Redmond Barry grows up in a genteel but impoverished Irish Protestant family after his father is killed in a duel. He falls for his cousin Nora Brady, and when her suitor, the army captain John Quin, appears, the two meet in a duel. Barry leaves for Dublin, is robbed by highwaymen, and joins the Army with nothing. His regiment serves in Germany during the Seven Years' War, where a friend, Captain Grogan, is with him.
Cast
- Arthur O'Sullivanas Captain Feeny, the Highwayman
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Barry Lyndon (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A phone call during the shoot alleged that the Provisional IRA had Kubrick on a hit list and gave him 24 hours to leave the country; he left within 12, with production one-third completed and rumors spreading that the film would be abandoned.
- The production obtained three super-fast Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 lenses developed by Zeiss for NASA's Apollo Moon landings, which Kubrick had discovered; giving the film the lowest f-stop in film history, they were extensively modified by Cinema Products Corporation, and the rear element had to sit 2.5 mm from the film plane.
- Kubrick had originally intended to direct a biopic on Napoleon, but lost his financing because of the commercial failure of the similar 1970 Dino De Laurentiis-produced Waterloo; he eventually made Barry Lyndon instead, using his research from the Napoleon project.
- Several interior scenes were filmed in Powerscourt House, an 18th-century mansion in County Wicklow that was destroyed in an accidental fire a few months after filming in November 1974, so the film now serves as a record of the lost interiors.
- Secrecy around the film was so heightened that when Kubrick first approached Berenson she was told only that it was to be an 18th-century costume piece, and was instructed to keep out of the sun in the months before production to achieve the period-specific pallor he required.
- Leon Vitali, who played the older Lord Bullingdon, later became Kubrick's personal assistant, working as the casting director on his following films and supervising film-to-video transfers; their relationship lasted until Kubrick's death.
- The Financial Times attributed the film's popularity with 2020s audiences to an influential 2021 edit that overlaid scenes from it with 21 Savage's "A Lot", which "took the internet by storm".
