NASA, the IRA and a nervous breakdown: The making of Barry Lyndon,' Stanley Kubrick's most underrated film

"In the early 1970s, Stanley Kubrick had Hollywood at his feet. He had completed three highly influential works in succession: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. His films, not without controversy, had impressed both critics and audiences. He was a different kind of auteur, a distinctive voice capable of generating interest just with his name,"

"His next idea was to adapt William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, though he discarded it as too vast to fit into a single feature film. The final choice combined elements of both ideas: the extensive research conducted for the Napoleon project and Thackeray's work. But this time, it would be a lesser-known story, more suitable for a feature-length film: The Luck of Barry Lyndon, the tale of Redmond Barry, an ambitious opportunist in the 18th century."

"Knowing the director's perfectionism, it was clear that Barry Lyndon would not be an easy movie to make, but it proved even harder than expected. Filming stretched over eight months, the budget tripled, the head of art direction suffered a nervous breakdown, the IRA forced a change of filming location, and finally, when that mammoth production reached theaters, Pauline Kael, the queen of New York critics, was merciless: It's a coffee-table movie; we might as well be at a three-hour slide show for art-history majors."

Stanley Kubrick entered the early 1970s with major prestige after three influential films. He considered projects such as Napoleon and Vanity Fair before combining Napoleon research and Thackeray elements into The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Barry Lyndon narrates Redmond Barry's rise as an ambitious 18th-century fortune hunter who marries a wealthy widow to climb socially. Production proved arduous: filming spanned eight months, the budget tripled, the head of art direction suffered a nervous breakdown, and the IRA forced location changes. Upon release, certain critics, notably Pauline Kael, dismissed the film as an overly formal, artful spectacle, creating mixed reception.

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