Hardy Krüger – Movie Musings

Ryan O’Neal is Barry Lyndon in Kubrick’s brilliantly distant epic

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Ryan O’Neal (Redmond Barry), Marisa Berenson (Lady Lyndon), Michael Hordern (Narrator), Patrick Magee (Chevalier du Balibari), Hardy Krüger (Captain Potzdorf), Marie Kean (Belle Barry), Gay Hamilton (Nora Brady), Godfrey Quigley (Captain Grogan), Murray Melvin (Reverend Samuel Runt), Steven Berkoff (Lord Ludd), Frank Middlemass (Sir Charles Reginald Lyndon), Leon Vitali (Lord Bullingdon), Leonard Rossiter (Captain John Quin), André Morell (Lord Wendover), Anthony Sharp (Lord Hallam), Philip Stone (Graham), Arthur O’Sullivan (Captain Feeney)

Kubrick has been criticised as a director more interested in style and the technical tricks of cinema than emotion, and there is perhaps no argument for the prosecution than Barry Lyndon. It now seems to the cineaste’s choice du jour as the greatest Kubrick film (probably partly because it is less well-known). Barry Lyndon however is like an exercise in all Kubrick’s strengths and weaknesses, a film that you can admire at great length while simultaneously caring very little about anything that happens in it.

Based on a William Makepeace Thackeray (although it feels in spirit only), Barry Lyndon tells the story of Irish chancer Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) in the mid eighteenth century. Fleeing Ireland after (he believes) killing an English officer in a duel, Barry goes from the British arm to the Prussian army, to card-sharping the courts of Europe to marrying into the aristocracy, as husband to Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson). But, however hard he tries, it’s difficult for an Irish chancer to be accepted by the British aristocracy, particularly when he suffers from the vocal hatred of his wife’s son Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali).

Kubrick spent several years carrying out research for an epic biopic of Napoleon (he had Ian Holm lined up for the lead role – Holm read multiple biographies and spent months working on a script with Kubrick). The flop of Waterloo (with a deliciously hammy Rod Steiger as Napoleon) killed off the chances of that film making it to the screen. Never-the-less Kubrick now had a vast archive of research for the period – and how easy it was to shift the focus of this research back a few decades. Thackeray’s novel was his chance to put all this to use – and allow Kubrick to indulge what had become a passion for the style of the era.

Barry Lyndon won four Oscars – and all in the areas where the film deserves unqualified praise. This is a stunningly beautiful piece of work, surely a contender for one of the most strikingly gorgeous films ever made. Ken Adam’s set design utilises a superb range of locations across the UK, dressed to breath-taking effect. The costumes, completely accurate to the period, are exquisitely detailed (Milan Canonero and Ulla-Britt Söderland) and lusciously mounted. Leonard Rosenman’s score is a wonderful riff on a range of masterpieces from classical music, including Handel, Bach, Schubert and Mozart.

Most strikingly Kubrick decided to film as much as possible with natural lighting only, rather than the vast array of lighting bought in for most films. This was part of Kubrick’s intention to avoid any sense of the studio to his film – everything was to be shot on location and to help immerse the viewer in the detail of the period. Shots were framed to imitate artists of the period, in particular Hogarth. Evening scenes were shot lit only by candle-light, leading to truly stunning images, simply superbly lit. John Alcott’s photograhy utilised (and I’m serious here) NASA designed cameras used for the moon landings to capture images in such low light. Visually, Barry Lyndon may be one of the most perfect films ever made. It’s wonderful – and any doubts that Kubrick is not a true master of cinema should be dismissed.

But Kubrick’s problem, as always? He’s a technocrat artist who lacks some soul. So much time and energy has been expelled on the visuals and the design – the film took almost a year to shoot – that, while you are constantly almost hypnotised by its sublime imagery, it slowly occurs to you that you couldn’t care less about most of the events that happen in it. For all the film’s great length and beauty, it’s a cold and distant film. Kubrick turns Thackeray’s rogueish comic tale – a picaresque dance – into a chillingly sterile meditation on fate, with Barry transformed from a rogue and chancer into a lifeless, passive figure to whom things happen rather than ever attempting to instigate them.

Is this Kubrick’s idea of humanity? Perhaps it suits the director who was the great master of intricate design and traps, that he would be tempted to turn this story into one where humans are just another piece of set dressing moved around and manipulated by an unseen force (fate, or rather a director?). The distancing effect is further by super-imposing an all-knowing narrator over the events, who frequently pre-empts what will happen and stresses the powerlessness of men. (On a side note, the book is narrated by Barry as were early screenplay drafts – perhaps the idea of O’Neal’s flat voice narrating so much of the action horrified Kubrick. It’s a definite improvement to get Michael Hordern’s tones talking to us for three hours.)

Perhaps though, the failure to capture any sense of Thackeray’s satirical wit, is a sharp reveal of Kubrick’s own inability to appreciate comedy – without the guiding hand of a Peter Sellers to support him. The problem is exacerbated by Ryan O’Neal in the lead role. Kubrick was ordered to hire one of the top ten box office draws of 1972 in the lead role – alas only O’Neal and Redford were the correct age and sex, and Redford (first choice) could never see himself as an Irishman masquerading as an Englishman. So O’Neal got the job – and the film is a damning indictment of his lack of charisma, flat and dry delivery and inability to bring life and energy to the proceedings (although O’Neal has blamed the editing partly for this, as well as the extended shoot). The film helped put an end to O’Neal’s career as a star (already on the wane) – and he is the film’s greatest weakness, in a role that needed more of the impish charm of Malcolm McDowell (although the lead actor from any of Kubrick’s films would have been superior). O’Neal’s presence turns Barry into a character we care nothing for, in a story already coldly distant.

O’Neal is also not helped by Kubrick’s utilising again his great love of striking British character actors – every role is filled with a recognisable face from 1970s British film and TV, each bringing colour and vibrancy to their (often brief) scenes. From Leonard Rossiter – weasily as you’d expect – as the captain Barry thinks he kills, through Patrick Magee’s ambivalently sinister Chevalier, Marie Kean’s loving mother, Murray Melvin’s obsequious priest, Godfrey Quigley’s matey army officer there is not a weak turn elsewhere in the movie. Leon Vitali brings real depth and energy into the film late on as Barry’s son-in-law and hated rival. Even Marisa Berenson – reduced to a dozen lines at most – makes an emotional impression as a woman trapped into serving the needs of the men in her life.

All these actors however are revolving in a movie that gets stuck and overwhelmed in its own grandeur and beauty. There are many wonderful sequences – with the film bookended by two duelling sequences that explore the strange rules and conventions with this society with a vicious black humour. Kubrick’s points about the oppressive insularity of the establishment – and the amount of forgiveness it has for its own, compared to the instant judgement of the outsider – are generally well-made, but are at times so laced with the director’s own cynical views of humanity in general (an increasingly clear trait in his later work) that they carry little impact. Despite this the film is never less than strangely captivating, even if its very easy to let it drift past you rather than invest in it.

But above all, while the film is stunning and the direction of Kubrick near faultless, the film itself gets so close to a great painting that it becomes something you hang on the wall to admire, but not to invest in. Kubrick couldn’t match his genius with the sort of emotion or wit that the story needed (much as it’s vastly superior to Tom Jones, that film gets closer to the spirit of authors like Thackeray than this ever does). Instead, he creates a coldly sterile world, like a perfect experiment in form and style that totally forgets such trivial elements as character and story. For all the film is full of character and events, you’ll find you care very little about them – and that the brilliance of Kubrick is only a partial consolation for that loss.

Fury and despair are never far away in brilliant survivalist film The Flight of the Phoenix

Director: Robert Aldrich

Cast: James Stewart (Captain Frank Towns), Richard Attenborough (Lew Moran), Hardy Krüger (Henrich Dorfmann), Peter Finch (Captain Harris), Ernest Borgnine (Trucker Cobb), Ian Bannen (“Ratbags” Crow), Ronald Fraser (Sergeant Watson), Christian Marquand (Dr Renaud), Dan Duryea (Standish), George Kennedy (Mike Bellamy)

Every so often you watch a film and say “where have you been my whole life!”. That’s the case with The Flight of the Phoenix– I can’t even imagine how much I would have loved this film if I had seen it when I was younger. This one has got it all for fans of anything from disaster movies to personality clashes. Aldrich’s film is a Sunday afternoon classic with bite, a brilliantly constructed actors’ piece set in the claustrophobic confines of the only shelter for miles around in the Gobi Desert.

Frank Towns (James Stewart) and Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) are the pilot and navigator on a cargo plane flying to Benghazi, with several passengers. Caught in a sandstorm, the plane crashes in the desert over 100 miles off course. The chances of being located are small and the survivors have only enough water for a little under a fortnight, so long as they avoid exertion. While Towns quietly struggles with the guilt, and different (hopeless) solutions are suggested, German aeronautical engineer Heinrich Dorfman (Hardy Krüger) believes that they can build a new airplane from the wreckage to fly themselves to safety. Towns and Dorfman are incompatible people, leaving Moran to play peacemaker and to support the building of the new aeroplane which may be (as Towns believes) a forlorn hope in any case.

Amazingly the film was a box-office flop on release – but time rewards skill, because you watch the film and marvel at the economy of its storytelling, its expert direction, wonderful acting and fantastically drawn characters. It’s a film of immense tension, with nearly all of this coming from the bubbling potential for deadly clashes between the trapped men. The rest is supplied by the ever-present threat of diminishing resources – none more so than the limited supply of cartridges needed to start the new plane’s engine (they’ve got seven and, best case, need at least five).

It’s this grim awareness of the knife-edge everyone is living on that powers the film. Every single resource is precious, and the pressure and fatigue show in every scene. As the film progresses, each of the men slowly disintegrates, growing increasingly scruffy, unshaven, dry skinned and weak and more and more susceptible to anger. Aldrich charts all this with professional excellence, the editing skilfully cutting away at several points to reaction shots from the actors as feuds come to a head, helped by some gloriously subtle and intelligent acting.

And it’s not surprising really – few films capture the grim pressure of the desert better than this. Sand dries out skin and throats, reflecting the beating heat of the sun everywhere. The clear sky and burning sun turn every surface into smouldering heat – even the shade offers little respite. The viewer is left with no doubt about the insanity of spending time out of the shade in these conditions. You know immediately Captain Harris’ plan to walk 500 miles over the desert with a single canteen of water is absurd (it doesn’t end well of course). It’s a beautifully shot film that makes the mystical glamour of the desert beautiful and terrifying.

One of the things I like best about the film is that it is almost impossible to predict who will come out alive and who won’t. Unlike most Hollywood films, characters are not punished for deviating from goodness and purity – some of the most noble characters don’t come out alive, while some of the most self-serving, selfish and cowardly ones do. Even the central heroes are flawed: Towns is struggling with depression and a near crippling guilt that almost leave him fatalistically accepting death; Moran is a drunk possibly to blame for the whole disaster; Dorfman is arrogant, difficult, prickly and in many ways flat out unlikeable.

Ah yes, Dorfmann. What a superb performance from Krüger (the first actor cast). In a masterstroke of invention, the character was changed from British (in the novel) to German. This opens up a whole world of additional prejudice between Dorfmann and the other passengers. “What did you do during the war?” antagonistic joker Ratbags asks Dorfman pointedly. It’s a tension that underlies most of the clashes. Dorfmann doesn’t help with his almost complete lack of awareness of social etiquette and his Germanic insistence on probabilities of survival: he sees no problem with treating the rest of the survivors like staff, openly debates the wisdom of helping the critically wounded, refuses to explain his thinking until absolutely pressed and has no empathy for their flagging strength and morale. But he also has a strange naivety which plays into a late plot reveal hinging on Dorfmann’s inability to read the reactions of the people sitting next to him. The film and Krüger flirt brilliantly with Germanic stereotypes – is there a more “German” character in film than Dorfmann? He’s about as far from a white knight as you can get.

But then so is James Stewart’s Towns. One of the things I like most about the film is the difficult psychology of survival. Towns is clearly struck with a barely understood guilt about the people killed in the crash, and seems ready to fatalistically accept death. His clash with Dorfmann is powered by numerous factors, not least a sense Towns has of his generation being replaced by a younger, technically minded one and a sense of losing control of his destiny. Nevertheless, Towns almost fanatically opposes the project at one point – and basically only accepts it when Moran and Dr Renard (an immensely noble Christian Marquand) tell him it’s better to have a chance of something to live for than to sit around dying. Stewart brilliantly taps into the ambiguity in his screen persona – a decency beneath the surface, but also a psychological weakness, a need for control under the nice-guy persona, a man struggling to accept he is out of his depth. It’s a brilliantly low-key psychological performance of a man struggling to button up guilt, pressure and unease.

The whole cast is superb. Attenborough plays the closest to type as a loyal number 2, but even he is clearly struggling to hold acres of despair while constantly playing peace-maker. Ronald Fraser is exceptional as a career army sergeant tottering on the edge of open-rebellion throughout the film, who betrays his commander’s trust no less than three times and is the most unknown wildcard in the pack. Ian Bannen was Oscar-nominated for his electric performance as a bitter, sarcastic Scots oil-worker who surprises everyone with his hard work while never letting up for a moment his bitter commentary on events. Peter Finch gives an excellent, ram-rod straight, almost naively decent stiff-upper lip performance as Captain Harris, a man a few degrees away from a noble idiot. Ernest Borgnine is touching as an oil foreman suffering from exhaustion and stress.

All this comes together in a superior package of film making, expertly made and superbly directed, with the actors embracing their well-developed characters with glee, making this in many ways part disaster movie, part chamber piece play. I love the little surprises it throws at you – just as you think you know a character there is a moment that surprises you or makes you reassess them. The tensions and dangers of survival in extreme conditions are brilliantly captured. There isn’t a weak moment in the film, and plot twists and surprises throw curveballs at the audience, some of which bring terrifying consequences. For any lovers of survival stories, acting or tense movies this is an absolute must.