techniques, reverting to the scope, the splendor and thoughtfulness of the classics.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times says of Barry Lyndon "So glorious to look at, so intelligent in its conception and execution, breathtakingly beautiful, serious, witty.. .elegant.. ."

And, of Kubrick himself, one critic observed: "He has made a motion picture extravaganza that combines art, literature and love, raising the movies to a cultural zenith that will be hard to equal."



"The Luck of Barry Lyndon' was the first novel of William Makepeace Thackeray, Victorian writer, contemporary of Dickens and author of "Vanity Fair." It was first published in monthly installments in 1844 and is considered by critics as a work of great importance in the pattern of Thackeray's career and as a work of art.

It relates the adventures of a favorite kind of Thackeray character, the scoundrel-gentleman, in 18th century society where money is the most important object and 'honor" the most misused word.

Thackeray's point, as critic Martinj. Anisman has remarked, is to show how completely Barry's unscrupulousness in achieving worldly success fails to bring him any happiness or contentment. "The level of realism that Thackeray reached in his novel," Anisman says, "is quite possibly unmatched in the rest of his fiction." Thackeray himself was a great traveller and a ha -bitual gambler. Both aspects influenced his book which moves from Ireland to England and the Continent of Europe, following Thackeray's familiar routes, and draws on the novelist's own experiences for its descriptions of the gaming rooms and games of chance. Thackeray 'used such histories ... not as a substitute for thought, but as a means of gaining profound insight into the complexities of the human mind and its emotions." The period covered by the novel is roughly the first half of the 18th century and focuses on Barry's Irish peasant upbringing, marriage into the English aristocracy, and acquisition and loss of great wealth, as well as his military adventures in the armies of England and Frederick the Great of Prussia during the Seven Years' War. As a soldier, gambler, professional spy, wencher, wife-beater, man-about-town and debtor, Barry Lyndon is one of the roundest portraits ever drawn of the romantic anti-hero at large in a society that was generally no better than he and wide open to its exploitation by someone of cunning, daring and luck.