Two Comedies of British Colonialism: “The Devil’s Disciple” (1959) and “Barry Lyndon” (1975)

Today’s peculiar portmanteau-post arises from the coincidence of the birthdays of George Bernard Shaw and Stanley Kubrick, and the 250th anniversary of The American Revolution, and my attempt to loosely lash them together like some ungainly Gump. They two films we treat of are far from the best known works of any of the artists involved, which is all the more reason to investigate them.

The Devil’s Disciple (1959)

With a dearth of appropriate film classics to appreciate on Independence Day, I often think that this one, along with 1776, will have to do. The film is based on Shaw’s 1897 play of the same name, set during the Saratoga Campaign in the American Revolution. Why this setting grabbed Shaw at all is a question. The randomness of this Anglo-Irishman taking it on, combined with the film’s lackluster, muddled, and somewhat clueless take, are what have prevented it from clicking as a classic heretofore. As always, Shaw loves paradoxes. Here we have Kirk Douglas as a roguish young American colonist who’s an avowed atheist and is disapproved of by everyone in the community, but is nonetheless dutiful in his Antigone-like resolve to get a proper burial for his father, who has been hanged by the British as a spy. Meanwhile, Burt Lancaster plays a minister who not only helps him, but turns out to lead a military mission against the Brits. Laurence Olivier plays the actual General Burgoyne, tasked with trying Douglas, and leading the campaign to subdue the Americans, but nonetheless seems sympathetic and admiring of the Yanks. The legendary Eva Le Gallienne is in it too, as Douglas’s mother, a Loyalist.

The play of course is a Shavian talk-fest. Shaw is admiring of the anti-Colonialist Americans, but doesn’t seem to have a feel for the time or the place. The later John Bull’s Other Island, about the Irish question, is closer to what he knows. This Americanized screen version is even further afield than Shaw’s original. As the poster above indicates, it seems posited as a follow-up to the previous Douglas-Lancaster team-up Gunfight at O.K. Corral (1957). Misleadingly, Olivier is depicted on the posters as being on the same side as them in a shoot-out, though naturally nothing like that ever takes place in the film. There are lots of scenes of violence in the movie, which are very far from Shaw’s look-out. It’s directed by Guy Hamilton, who was later responsible for four James Bond films, as well as The Battle of Britain (1969) and Force 10 from Navarone (1978). Above all, as frequently happens, the production frequently seems to forget altogether that this is supposed to be a comedy.

Still, I find myself unexpectedly moved by certain scenes in the film, much as I am moved by Charles Laughton’s rendition of The Gettysburg Address in Ruggles of Red Gap. It is the sound of America being interpreted by an Englishman. As I say it is one of the few movies that one is tempted to watch as “Fourth of July classic”. There are some silent films about the Revolution, but they are deadly dull. And as for Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, it’s demented, practically rabid. Better the Devil’s Disciple You Know, Than the One You Don’t.

Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) is not about the American Revolution, but is set against the backdrop of the Seven Years War, the American component of which, known as the French and Indian War, precipitated the Revolution due to the Brits’ perverse insistence on taxing the Americans to pay for it. I said the connection between these movies was convoluted, and I meant it! But nevertheless, of the two films, this one is the more pressing to write about, as it turns 50 years old this year.

Barry Lyndon may well be the most obscure of all of Kubrick’s features, and that includes his early ones. Which is especially remarkable because it came out when he was still at the top of his game, his sole release between A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980). Kubrick’s original intention was to make a film about Napoleon, but he came up against competing projects that were in development at the same time. He decided to put his period research to use in the service of a different story. In light of that, if he was to do a Thackeray adaptation, it is curious that he didn’t choose Vanity Fair, which is after all set during the Napoleonic Wars. But Vanity Fair has been adapted a zillion times (I’m planning a post on that, btw!) So he chose this much lesser known, earlier Thackeray work. Thackeray loved writing about the 18th century. I can’t help comparing the book to Fielding’s Tom Jones, nor this film to Richardson’s screen version of same. It would make for an interesting double feature, but for the fact that Barry Lyndon is over three hours long.

Yes that running time is among the reasons people don’t watch Barry Lyndon, along with the fact that it contains few recognizable stars (to Americans, at any rate), and that it moves with the same stately, stubbornly slow pace as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Shining, and several of his other late features. I’m pretty sure it was the last of Kubrick’s features I ever checked out (including the early ones), and that it took me more than one attempt (i.e., the first time I watched it, I grew impatient or distracted and gave it up). But once I did watch it, and watched it all the way through, I was converted, and I now love it whole-heartedly and have seen it several times. It’s a picaresque tale of a young member of the Irish gentry (Ryan O’Neal), who must go on the lam after killing a man in a duel (or so he thinks), and then has incredible good luck, repeatedly failing upward as he travels around Europe as a soldier of fortune and so forth, reaching a peak of wealth and success before his luck turns and his fortunes plummet. Luck is the theme — the original name of Thackeray’s 1844 novel was The Luck of Barry Lyndon. It would have been a terrific role for Buster Keaton at his artistic height in the 1920s.

Barry Lyndon was one of Ryan O’Neal’s best roles, and one of the first to show the mean side he actually possessed (in contrast with earlier things like Love Story and What’s Up, Doc?). But the real star of the film is Kubrick himself, painting on a huge canvas in the style of Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Watteau. The film is most famous for its innovation of shooting scenes illuminated only by candlelight, a huge technical leap for its time, but the sort of thing audiences don’t notice or appreciate. There are also many thematic tie-ins with Kubrick’s work as a whole. For example, the anti-war messaging of Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and Full Metal Jacket; and the decadence depicted in A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, and other films. From that day to this, Barry Lyndon has been a film that critics appreciate, and audiences ignore.

And I can’t help asking: why does an American make THIS film in 1975, the Bicentennial of the American Revolution, rather than a story that fit the occasion? You could use the same bloody costumes and visual effects and so forth and do a story set in the American colonies that would actually draw American audiences. The bigger question for me is why did NO ONE do that in 1975 and 1976? I guess it was deemed too “obvious”? And this was post-Vietnam, a time when American patriotism was very much out of vogue. The hell of it is, you wouldn’t have needed to make it slavishly patriotic! There was a generation of brilliant directors out there who ought to have known what to do. You can absolutely make a movie about the American Revolution and make it an allegory about the Vietnam War. Or, you can do a movie like Patton, that takes an ambiguous stance towards an American hero or anti-hero. Washington, Hamilton,Benedict Arnold? But Francis Ford Coppola who had written Patton, was beginning production on Apocalypse Now during the Bicentennial years. Robert Altman made Buffalo Bill and the Indians, which was about 1876, not 1776. Scorsese made Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver.Spielberg made Jaws. Hal Ashby made Shampoo. Sidney Lumet made Dog Day Afternoon. etc etc. It’s just kind of unfathomable to me. Yes, these were all hit movies. But it seems to me at least ONE of them would have been attracted to the topic. Even America’s uber-patriot John Wayne made The Shootist that year. That’s the movie where the cowboy gets sick and dies. Very much the mood of the country at the time.

But Barry Lyndon at least has redcoats, and chilling cold-blooded British aristocrats, and pewter mugs full of ale, and muskets, and women in bonnets. And to return to the topic of John Bull’s Other Island, Ireland, which is central to Barry Lyndon, was like a dry run for North America, a plantation based colony, with an unjust caste system imposed from without by violence. Ironically, Thackeray was no friend to Ireland. During the worst years of the Potato Famine, he was an anti-Irish propagandist for Punch. But Kubrick at least knew who the enemy was, and Barry Lyndon gives you ample opportunity to hiss at redcoats. And you know what they say: if you ain’t hissin’ a redcoat, chances are the redcoat is YOU. (Well, no one says that, but they say a lot of things LIKE it).