Barry Lyndon, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, is one of those films that have crept gradually – almost imperceptibly – up the critical charts since their initial release. In Sight and Sound magazine’s most recent Greatest Films of All Time lists, Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 movie, which opened to mixed reviews and disappointing box-office numbers, ranked 12th in the directors’ poll and 45th among critics. Helmers and hacks alike rated 2001: A Space Odyssey higher, but I think most of the director’s fans while he was alive would have been surprised that this chilly period piece would come to be seen as his silver-medal work.
Barry Lyndon was also, slightly controversially for those who care about these things, named best Irish film of all time by The Irish Times in 2020. It is, after all, the story of an Irishman, with many scenes set in Ireland and some shot here, before Kubrick abruptly fled with his family on a ferry from Dún Laoghaire, following alleged IRA death threats.
[ Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon: terribly beautiful, relentlessly authenticOpens in new window ]
When they greenlit the film, Kubrick’s long-term studio backers at Warner Bros presumably expected a bawdy picaresque following the military and amorous escapades of an 18th-century rake. What they got was a bleak, hauntingly beautiful tragicomedy about the folly of human vanity and ambition. “It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled,” runs the mordant epilogue. “Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.”
But much of what makes Barry Lyndon famous are its exquisite visual compositions: the Hogarthian tableaux of Georgian dissipation; the technical bravura of using lenses designed for Nasa’s moon shot to capture scenes lit solely by candlelight. So you might have imagined that Warners would mark this year’s anniversary with a spiffing new 4K release on Blu-ray. Instead, to some surprise, it has made it available for free on YouTube.
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Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, six years before the launch of the video-streaming platform, so we have no idea what he might have made of it. We do know that he was an obessive perfectionist who exerted complete control over every aspect of the film-making process, from writing, filming and editing to promotion and exhibition. He took an intense interest in the quality of projection in the cinemas that showed his films.
Leon Vitali, who plays the eponymous hero’s nemesis Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, went on to become the director’s confidant and personal assiatant right up until his death, and worked to ensure that the quality of his films’ transfer to video and other formats was up to his exacting standards. One can only wonder what Kubrick would have thought of people being able to watch Barry Lyndon on their phones.
So it was with some trepidation that I went looking for this new, free version. What sort of quality would the image be? Would it be at the correct frame ratio? (Kubrick specified 1.66:1.) Would ads pop up every 15 minutes? Unfortunately, the film was unavailable this week on Warner Bros’ YouTube channel in Ireland. It may have been withdrawn, at least temporarily, after widespread complaints from those who did see it that the music was out of sync and that – even worse – parts of the score had been stripped from certain scenes, presumably for copyright reasons.
We can only await further developments, but that is not the end of Warners’ Irish-themed largesse in 2025. On New Year’s Day the company also released a free version of Michael Collins. That does still seem to be available, and it has racked up a respectable 457,000 or so plays. In Warners’ free feed, Neil Jordan’s 1996 epic sits rather uneasily alongside such other archival treasures as Critters 4.
What exactly is going on here? Two years ago, for its centenary, Warner Bros granted access to a select handful of journalists (including my colleague Donald Clarke) to explore the riches of its archive in Los Angeles, which houses props, costumes and scripts. Like many of its peers, the studio has a rich past and an uncertain future. Also like its peers, it is tied up in all sorts of unprecedented contortions as it attempts to reshape itself to contemporary realities.
The decline of theatrical exhibition and linear television, along with the extinction of DVD, makes it harder than ever to monetise the studio’s trove of cinema classics. It appears that Warners is exploring the possibilities offered by an ad-supported YouTube channel. In a way, that makes sense; media analysts increasingly point to YouTube as the natural successor to old-fashioned free-to-air TV.
That is all very understandable. But please, Warners, just don’t screw around with Barry Lyndon.
