Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Part of the film wants to be a fairy tale, part a travelogue, part a Victorian novel, part an accurate reconstruction of eighteenth-century life. At least Kubrick can't be accused of what many critics are now attacking Costa-Gavras for, being a director condemned--as a bad director might have been in Dante's Inferno--to making the same film over and over again. Barry Lyndon is as unlike anything Kubrick has ever done as it is below the level of anything Kubrick has ever done...
After a pretentious intermission, Barry Lyndon goes from bad to worse. The fairy tale atmosphere of the first part dissolves into a full-fledged Victorian novel of materialism--a family struggle over inheritance, Barry's mother's desire for her son to get a peerage, the social ostracism that Barry faces after an outburst of physical violence. Kubrick's elegant touch is not entirely lost, but it is squandered and irreversibly diluted. At last a strange plot line emerges. The Countess of Lyndon's son by her first husband, Bullingdon, conceives a hatred for his stepfather that is largely justified...
...arrogance of science and the revenge of nature. Seventy years later, in 1886, the point of the Frankenstein story was sharpened by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By combining the scientist and the monster in the same personality, a typical Victorian, Stevenson forced his readers to identify and to ponder...
...developed a new kind of horror story. Even the tyrannical computers and the Things from Outer Space were foreseen by H.G. Wells and others. What has changed is the technology that transmits the frisson. The shudders that came in books now emanate from screens. But the stories are essentially Victorian or gothic. Lon Chancy dominated the horror market of the '20s playing 19th century monsters like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the superstars of horror in the '30s, won their fame as Frankenstein's monster...
...when I was twelve. I was the apple of her eye and, God knows, she was my entire world. As one gets older and the grave begins to yawn, one feels closer and closer to one's father. [Olivier's father was an Anglican parson of austere Victorian rectitude.] I remember Tony Guthrie, a year or so before he died, saying, "Do you find yourself thinking about your father more and more?" and I said, "I do." It's as if an old man in a long white beard were waiting to fold you in his arms...