Director Stanley Kubrick with Ryan O’Neal

I remember when this came out; the media were full of it – as they had been with The Great Gatsby the previous year. There was little chance of my seeing either film at the time; I wasn’t fussed about Gatsby, but Barry Lyndon sounded fascinating. So long in the making (and so long in the watching!), the technical difficulty of shooting “by candlelight”, so many extravagant scenes and so many extras, and so many publicity stills that made it look unlike any other film. (Some stills came back to me as I watched the film.) Given that my experience of films then was basically what was shown on television, that was hardly surprising. (Although it did give me a good grounding in westerns, the Hollywood classics and war films.)

So, finally, after 50 years I got to see it on a big screen. It is slow, detached, painterly, amoral, brutal, farcical and tragic all at once. Full of familiar faces on screen for short cameos. I shall not forget in a hurry Leonard Rossiter dancing a jig in thigh-high black boots. The scene where Lady Lyndon encounters Barry for the first time is just wonderful: the lighting, the colour, and such restrained expression in the faces of Murray Melvin and Marisa Berenson. Norma Desmond would have given top marks for their eye work. Acting is done by looks and action/stillness as much as words; Ryan O’Neal is a constant presence, but more often seen than heard. It’s as if figures in half-remembered paintings by Hogarth or Rembrandt come to life to hold the stage for a while and then step back into their frames to the accompaniment of Handel or Mozart.

Had I seen it 50 years ago I think I would have found it overlong and its tone incomprehensible. It was definitely worth waiting for.

As an aside: I have been pondering on male dominance in the external world until very recently, and here is yet another example after Key Largo and The Return. (Gross generalisation alert, obvs.) So much fighting (both in the Seven Years War and informally) and yet more shoot-outs – here the duels that bookend Barry’s career from farce to tragedy. So many images and actions that were once the norm – here the bare-knuckle fight with the regimental heavy. All these might now come under the heading of “toxic masculinity”, but perhaps another way of looking at them is as a signifier of underlying violence in the world.

I see why I so often read female novelists.