Barry Lyndon (1975) Queer Film (A)

DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick.

BOTTOM LINE: In Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” (1975), there is a moment where our peripatetic hero/anti-hero Barry (Ryan O’Neal), during the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, finds two soldiers naked and holding hands in a pond. They confess their love for each other.In times like this, I realize how much I care for you and how impossibly empty life would be without you. Barry overhears their conversation. He takes advantage of the situation, steals the clothes of one of the men, and assumes his identity.  The lovers’ encounter is played for laughs, and it has always pained me that one of my heroes, Stanley Kubrick, allowed this to happen. We never see these queer characters again, but the shabby way in which they are treated, and the audience response to their presence (nervous laughter), stay with the gay viewer.

Years later, traveling as a gambler through the German courts with the Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), Barry meets Lady Lyndon (Marissa Berenson) and her entourage, including the effete Reverend Runt, played by our old friend gay actor Murray Melvin from A Taste of Honey – see Book One: Hidden in Plain Sight – Queer Cinema During the Hays Code Era (1934-1968)  and The Devils (Queer Film number 48, above).  Oscar-winner John Alcott shot the movie’s famed candlelit card game sequence featuring O’Neal, Berenson and Melvin with all-natural light to the soundtrack of Schubert’s haunting Piano Trio in E Flat – not an anachronism since the source is non-diegetic.  Runt, who, by all appearances, is devoted to Lady Lyndon, is then cruelly dismissed by Barry’s mother (Marie Kean). Another queer character is tossed to the wolves.

The film was adapted from William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” and directed, produced and adapted by Kubrick.  At Oscar time, when the nominations were announced, he was three for three in the BEST FILM | BEST DIRECTOR | BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY categories but lost all three to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Of its seven nominations, it won four:

Best Costume Design (Ulla-Britt Soderlund and Milena Canonero)

Best Cinematography (John Alcott)

Best Production Design (Ken Adam, Roy Walker and Vernon Dixon)

Best Adapted Score (Leonard Rosenman)

The entire movie is such a magnificent work of art that I feel like rating it an A+. However, the homophobic pond scene, together with the film’s treatment of the Reverend Runt, allows me to dock a point: (A).

STREAMING: Amazon Prime, Apple TV+ and YouTube

https://thebrownees.net/88-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1968/

https://thebrownees.net/112-queer-films-from-the-new-hollywood-1968-1980/

A Taste of Honey (1961) Film Review B+ – TheBrownees

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Queer Film (A) – TheBrownees

Spartacus (1960) Queer Film (B) – TheBrownees