Clubs in Film: Barry Lyndon (1975)

"It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."

I’ve long been fascinated by the way clubs have been represented (and misrepresented) in film.

I want to look at the way that clubs are portrayed in one of my favourite films, Stanley Kubrick’s 18th century drama, Barry Lyndon (1975), based on the picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. The film chronicles the rise and fall of an Irish rogue, adventurer and gambler.

I should firstly disclose why I like this film so much, since it has a direct bearing on how clubs are shown. It’s a magnificent film for anyone interested in history. Not only was it meticulously researched, it also remains sumptuously and achingly beautiful - I dare you to take any screenshot, of any moment of this film, and to not find that it resembles a finely-composed contemporary painting. Yet the film’s genius lies not in its superficial beauty, but in the behaviour of the characters. There is not one sympethatic character in the whole film: this is a three-hour tale of unrelentingly flawed people, usually doing reckless, sordid and/or horrible things to one another. Accordingly, it’s an exceptionally good antidote to the nostalgic idealisation of the past, which all too often stands in the way of anything approaching historical truth. The characters are almost always flawlessly well-mannered, and beautifully turned out. Yet their deeds belie their presentation. And so it’s an object lesson in never being taken in by mere manners or affectation, and looking beyond the surface.

And this informs the cynical portrayal of clubs in the film. We see at least three clubs. The first is a short meeting between Barry Lyndon and government minister Lord Hallam, whom Lyndon is obsequiously lobbying for a peerage.

Over cards, Barry Lyndon seeks Lord Hallam’'s advice on who might be able to help him secure a peerage.

This is clearly meant to be a gambling club. Barry Lyndon and Lord Hallam are discreetly playing cards over glasses of sherry at a green-baized table. A larger card game is visible in the background, drawing spectators. The portraiture is a little too elaborate for the decor of the period - a theme I will return to.

The Earl of Wendover strides into his club’s coffee room (dining room), and is promptly recognised by the waiter.

We next see a club after Lyndon has been ostracised from polite society: the Earl of Wendover strides into his club for a meal; and when he spots Barry Lyndon dining alone in a corner, he tries to ignore him.

The choice of tapestries for decorating a club is without parallel for the period; the propensity of tapestries to retain odours like pipe smoke made them unsuitable for this kind of setting. (The real-life explanation was that the scene was shot in the tapestry-laden Saloon of Longleat House, Wiltshire.)

The Earl of Wendover carefully studies the menu, regarding the waiter’s recommendation with mistrust. Barry Lyndon, sat at the table behind, wonders whether he has been intentionally snubbed.

The waiter’s observation, “The roast beef’s very good, milord” is met with a sceptical grunt from the Earl of Wendover. Clubs of the era would commonly have a joint of meat left by the fire for days on end, until it was finished. This was not haute cuisine.

When Lyndon wanders over to Wendover’s table, he first invites Wendover to his table, and then tried inviting him to his home. The Earl flashes a forced smile, and courteously makes a series of transparently untrue excuses. Though marked by extreme politeness, the whole scene has insincerity running through it.

But the main Clubland scene comes near the end: when Barry Lyndon’s estranged step-son, Lord Bullingdon, goes into their club to challenge a drunken and melancholy Lyndon to a duel. You can see the scene by clicking on the embedded video below.

The scene reflects the film’s general approach: beautiful surroundings, manners and costumes being undermined by baser considerations.

The scene is set in the morning (“"Good morning, milord”), and everyone is immculately attired. Yet those characters who are conscious look bedraggled, unkempt and vacant, and are clearly meant to have been up all night at the gambling tables - possibly even for days at a time. The first four members we pass in the Club are all visibly unconscious. Nine men are sat around a tense card game at a big, round table, followed by two men playing cards at a smaller table, then two more unconscious members. At Barry Lyndon’s own table, four men are asleep in broad daylight, whilst the remaining two persist in playing cards. There are discarded port bottles and half-empty glasses on the tables and floor, and a flipped-over chair, hinting at the previous night’s excess. A solitary cleaner scrubs the paved floor by the entrance, the only woman in the scene. The livereyed footman sitting at the front desk is the only person depicted in the Club who makes any intelligible speech.

Lord Bullingdon’s duelling challenge, though flawless in its formal content, is highly misleading. He is certainly disingenuous in his “demanding satisfaction, however much time intervenes…” - the hesitant pause betraying his full knowledge that the incident he is using as an excuse happened a very long time ago. He is also careful to address Barry Lyndon by his birth name, “Mister Redmond Barry”, as a studied insult, to demonstrate his refusal to accept his step-father’s present style and title as a member of his family.

The music throughout the scene is a reorchestration of Handel’s Sarabande, which acts as the film’s leitmotif for fate. Yet it is supplemented by another sound here: that of footsteps, stomping first on flagstones, and then on bare wooden floorboards, raising the tension.

Most of the historical details of the unnamed club are spot-on. The servant at the high front desk serves the function that would later (in the 19th century) be called a porter, and his instant recognition of Lord Bullingdon suggests that he knows the members by sight - something confirmed by his being able to say whether or not Barry Lyndon is on the premises. There is a club noticeboard, with its distinctive green baize background and committee papers, which is passed in the vestibule. An abandoned harp in the corner of the back room hints at musical entertainment the night before. The rooms are well-stocked with candles (for overnight illumination of card games) and alcohol.

The mighty club noticeboard, passed by Lord Bullingdon.

The only slight creative licence is with regards to the Club’s portraiture. As with many of the film’s interiors, the Club is laced with sumptuous and elegant oil paintings, denoting the wealth found in the building. Yet many clubs of the period - even those with elaborate decorative plasterwork and lighting - eschewed displaying oil portraits at the time. It should be noted that of the Georgian clubs, a number maintained bare walls by tradition, for a great many years, insisting that it more effectively showed off the expensive architecture of their clubhouse. The Travellers Club did not begin displaying paintings on the wall until the 1930s. The Subscription Room of Brooks’s remained without any paintings until the 1970s (at which point it was successfully argued that Joshua Reynolds’ two large group portraits of the Society of Dilettanti, which now hang there, were painted in the same year that the room was completed). The Athenaeum still keeps its Coffee Room (dining room) clear of any paintings, as a long-term tradition.

As William Henry Pyne’s The Great Subscription Room, Brooks's Club, St. James's Street (1808) showed, the decor was limited to just one gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece; everything else was decorative plasterwork built into the club rooms. This is confirmed in Carl Georg Adolph Hasenpflug’s The Great Subscription Room at Brooks's in Opposition (1825). The contrast with the cluttered wall portraiture seen in Barry Lyndon is noticeable.

There is nothing to suggest the location of the Club shown in this scene. The view from the front suggests greenery; but given how rural large parts of London were at the time, this would not have been inconsistent with a contemporary London club. (A view from St. James’s Street, facing west, would have looked onto open fields.) That said, the film is extremely vague about the location of Barry Lyndon’s rural estate, beyond it being somewhere within the British Isles, so that the aristocratic gambling club he frequents (and of which his step-son is clearly also a member) could easily be a provincial club. Such clubs were found from Merseyside to Norfolk.

Earlier in the film, a cheque to Almack’s had been signed. Could this be a clue as to the identity of the Club? There had been three establishments of that name - two were clubs that evolved into Boodle’s and Brooks’s - but by the 1788/1789 setting of these scenes, only the third establishment was still trading under the name of Almack’s, and that was not technically a club, but a set of club-like ‘Subscription Rooms’ run by Lady Patronesses. Since the only visible woman in the Club is washing the floor rather than controlling admission, it is doubtful that this scene is set in a Subscription Room.

The influence of William Hogarth is strong throughout this scene. I’m far from being the first person to have noticed that Barry Lyndon’s pose, sprawled in his chair, seems straight out of Hogarth’s ‘Tête à Tête’ (1743), from his Marriage A-la-Mode series.

The scene also has strong echoes of two plates from Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress series (1732-4) - a work with which the film has clear thematic parallels.

Firstly, the composition echoes plate III of The Rake’s Progress, variously entitled ‘The Tavern Scene’ or ‘The Orgy’. While the film’s scene has none of the dynamism of the plate - the women from the night before have clearly vacated the room in the hours since - the implication is that many of the men in the scene have remained in their place for hours, either sleeping off the night’s excesses or obsessively engrossed in card play.

Secondly, the composition also reflects plate VI of The Rake’s Progress, ‘The Gambling House’, which was explicitly set in an 18th century London club - specifically, White’s (which had already been identified with a lightning flash pointing to its exterior in plate IV, ‘The Arrest’).

Kubrick’s portrayal of Georgian clubs is as cynical as the rest of Barry Lyndon: they occupy sumptuous premises, elaborately decorated with fine arts, and frequented by titled noblemen who are attentively waited upon by liveried staff, and are kept clean at great effort. They are the height of social fashion. Yet they are a moral and intellectual vacuum. What culture may be on display in the artwork is easily overlooked by the members, who are preoccupied with simpler pleasures. Conversation is either self-serving, or non-existent. It is a damning portrait, with obvious parallels to the more profit-motivated proprietorial clubs through the ages, particularly those themed around gambling and excess.

ADDENDUM: I should also add that there is some mystery as to the location in which the final club scene was filmed. Many of the period locations used in Barry Lyndon are exhaustively chronicled, and some (like the glimpses of Blenheim Palace) are instantly recognisable. Yet this scene remains a mystery. Note that for the first minute and a half, it consists of a single tracking shot, without any edits, which follows Lord Bullingdon from the front hall by the main entrance, down a side vestibule, and into a large, long, well-lit gallery room at the back of the building. This clearly demonstrates that it was all filmed on one location, rather than being some result of trick photography. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be Powerscourt House in County Wicklow. The building was extensively used for interiors in Barry Lyndon, but suffered a devastating fire in November 1974, a few months after filming moved on, which gutted the interiors. Certainly, the shape of the front door and windows of the entry hall bear a strong resemblance to the front exterior of the house today, and the gallery room at the rear could tally with the windows at the back; though that is far from definitive. If any readers could shed further light on this, it would be most welcome.