Drama in the House: Barry Lyndon

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents a new film series, Drama in the House.

Coinciding with the Museum’s exhibition Houghton Hall: Portrait of an English Country House, on view through September 21, a selection of films has been chosen to represent different aspects of the English country house.

Each of these directors has set his films in exceptional examples of homes like the one featured in the exhibition, and each film showcases the opulence and elegance from the time period.

Barry Lyndon
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1975, UK/USA, 184 minutes

Based on the William Makepeace Thackeray novel, the film stars Ryan O'Neal as an 18th-century Irish cad whose lack of integrity leads him down a path of self-destruction.

During adolescence, he falls foolishly in love, then must abandon the area after a duel. He absentmindedly enlists in the British Army and ends up deserting from not one, but both sides. Eventually he marries a beautiful and wealthy countess (Marisa Berenson) who learns firsthand what it feels like to lose everything.

Several of the interior scenes were filmed in Powerscourt House, a famous 18th-century mansion in County Wicklow, Republic of Ireland. The house was destroyed in an accidental fire several months after filming, so the film serves as a record of the lost interiors.

“Stanley Kubrick’s magisterial Thackeray adaptation now stands as one of his greatest and most savagely ironic films, not to mention one of the few period pieces on celluloid so transporting that it seems to predate the invention of cameras . . . The film's greatness can make a viewer feel like a speck in the cosmos.” —The Village Voice