News and Commentary – The Films of Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick would have turned ninety on July 26, and in noting the occasion, our crack staff reported the anomaly that despite the fact that he is one of our favorite filmmakers (and one for whom that powerful illusion of personal affinity is particularly pronounced), Kubrick is, to date, relatively underrepresented on these pages. So the time seemed right to give Stan-the-Man a proper Mid Century Cinema “films of” treatment, complete with our user’s guide to every feature.

Kubrick was a New York City boy, and made his early reputation as a wunderkind photographer, hired at the age of seventeen by Look magazine. An obsessive cinephile, he haunted screenings at the Museum of Modern Art; one legend holds that he saw every film in MOMA’s collection—twice. Many of them were clunkers, but the future director would muse that seeing so many bad efforts “gave me the courage to try making a movie.” So inspired, he quit Look in 1950 to pursue that career (his other source of income derived from hustling chess in Washington Square Park). He started out with a few documentary shorts, followed by a self-financed first feature, Fear and Desire (which he later disowned as a juvenile effort). Advancing in leaps and bounds, his next film was the micro-budgeted Killer’s Kiss, followed by The Killing, which brought the young director national attention:Time magazine famously raved with that film Kubrick “has shown more imagination with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town.”

There is a large (and rather rapidly growing) Kubrick literature—exceptional starting points include the treatments by Alexander Walter and the great French film critic Michel Ciment; we also recommend the invaluable Stanley Kubrick Archives (not to be confused with the director’s actual archives, which appear to be quite something). These contributions extend the conversation well beyond the thumbnail sketches that follow here, which only scratch the surface of what Mr. K has to offer.

Fear and Desire, a minimalist war film featuring a very young Paul Mazursky, isn’t much. Several scenes (including a raid on a cabin) are very well executed, and there is an unflinching look at departures from the laws of war rare for the era (Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet from 1951 is another exception). But the writing is weak, and despite a few glimmers of promise, nothing in the production screams “future genius at work.” The Kino Blu Ray includes one of Kubrick’s early documentaries.

Killer’s Kiss, minor and imperfect (the story is thin and the players do not exude charisma) was nevertheless a major step forward, featuring very strong visuals, thoughtful constructions, and marvelous New York City exteriors and locations (such a pleasure to see old Penn Station and the Singer Tower, both now long gone). A solid boxing-and-gangsters noir with several quality scenes and a handful of virtuosic shots, the brilliant mannequin scene has more than a little to say about the latent anxiety regarding female sexuality lingering just below the surface many a great film noir.

The Killing. Wow. If anyone said they saw this coming, they were lying. A caper film, with a fragmented, almost Citizen Kane-like overlapping flashback structure, The Killing, co-written with Jim Thompson, stars the great Sterling Hayden leading a strong cast that includes Elijah Cook Jr. It is a full-blown masterpiece – the first of many – and introduces Kubrick’s slide-across-the-room tracking shots. Repeated viewings reveal small, smart pieces of business that link the film’s many moving parts. And that last line – “what’s the difference?” – It just doesn’t get any better than that. Orson Welles was among those who noticed: he thought The Killing as even better than John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, the standard-setting caper film from 1950 that also starred an ill-fated Sterling Hayden. “Among those whom I would call ‘younger generation,’” Welles later told one interviewer, “Kubrick appears to me to be a giant.”

Paths of Glory, based on a true and shameful episode in French military history, was banned in France and not screened there until 1975 (it was also unwelcome in Franco’s Spain—not the sort of company you want to keep). Starring Kirk Douglas, the film disproves Truffaut’s dictum that “every film about war ends up being pro-war,” due to the inherent excitement of the action and the instinct of the audience to rally around the defining purpose of the military campaign. But in Paths of Glory, no goals are achieved, and the bad guys are not the enemy just across no-man’s land (unseen and withheld from view), but French Generals, played by George McCready and a perfectly cast, fresh-from-cheerfully-testifying-before-HUAC Adolph Menjou. Paths of Glory locates the source of inhumanity not in the tragedy of great power politics, but in a decadent, stratified class system.

In the wake of Paths, and after a false start on Marlon Brando’s One Eyed Jacks (the actor would direct that film after clashing with Kubrick), Kirk Douglas called in a favor (and a contract obligation), asking Kubrick to take over the troubled production of Spartacus. There is not much to say about this one (although we have discussed it here), as Kubrick was little more than a director-for-hire. But the Brando flirtation and unhappy experience of Spartacus were important in reinforcing Kubrick’s need to have total control over his films. Or as he subsequently wrote to Columbia, turning down that studio’s attractive contract offer, “I must have complete total final annihilating artistic control over the picture.”

Lolita, Kubrick’s take on the Nabakov novel, which, of course, could not be made today, is distinguished by its outstanding performances by James Mason and Peter Sellers. This is not a criticism of Shelly Winters, or Sue Lyon (in the title role)—but Sellers, who often played multiple characters in films, here dazzles as he plays one character appearing in different guises; and James Mason is, well, Mr. James Mason. Osward Morris (who shot The Spy Who Came in From the Cold), was the director of photography. If not a film to be treasured, it is certainly one to be seen.

Dr. Strangelove is possibly Kubrick’s greatest film. More than a half century later, this comedy about nuclear brinksmanship can still be used to teach college students most of what they need to know about deterrence theory (I know because I have). We have written about this one previously, and it is one of those Kubrick films that stands up to the closest scrutiny. Here Sellers plays three roles magnificently, but better still is Sterling Hayden’s can’t-be-improved-on performance (George C. Scott is also exceptional). There is a lot going on here—too much for quick summary, but the next time you watch it, contemplate that Kubrick was greatly influenced by Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which argued that repressed sexual impulses would find outlets elsewhere (and this likely explains why everybody in the movie is eating all the time, the chewing gum to prophylactic ratio in the survival kits of the B-52 crew, the consequences of General Ripper’s abstinence, the rhythm of the cutting over the course of the picture, and the anticipated nature of relations between men and women who will populate the post-apocalyptic coal mines, where the norms of civilized behavior will “regrettably” have to be abandoned).

2001: A Space Odyssey was an enormous commercial success, and has become an enduring cultural touchstone for many of its moments, in particular its audacious match cut from bone to space-ship—a transition that suggested little had changed about the nature of mankind over the millennia. (Though it is suggested that modern man had become more cautious and passive; consider again the two people on the space shuttle—the tentative ape-like flight attendant, and the sleeping passenger whose arm drifts limply and whose pen floats impotently.) But the link between human technological advancement and the potential for violence remains, and 2001 shares with Strangelove the Kubrickian concern for the ceding of human autonomy to machines. 2001 was also wildly ambitious—an effort to advance the cinematic form by telling a story that was only compressible as a film, most evident here but an aspiration of all of Kubrick’s movies, and one reason why they reward such careful attention.

Perhaps by way of penance, Kubrick followed 2001, which ended on an uncharacteristically optimistic note, with the dystopian A Clockwork Orange. Another bracingly original film, it divided critics with its portrayal of violence—like many such efforts the question is whether the picture seems to revel in the beauty and excitement of horrifying acts, unconsciously endorsing them. (In an incisive critique, Pauline Kale castigated the movie: “This picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way.”) We don’t share that perspective, but many did, and there are merits to both side of the debate, which became so heated (one misses the days of fighting over important films) that Kubrick engaged in correspondence over the issue in the pages of the New York Times. “Man isn’t a noble savage, he’s an ignoble savage,” Kubrick argued. “He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved”—and the purpose of Clockwork was to be clear-eyed about the danger of failing to recognize those pathologies, sentiments which unfortunately appear to have relevance in the present day. (Many have dismissed Kubrick as a chilly nihilist, but he was also the fellow who said, “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”)

Barry Lyndon moves at its own pace—and that pace is slow. But once again we are presented with a film of enormous ambition and singularity of vision. And Barry Lyndon is a visual feast; there are countless images on offer here that are suggestive of museum masterpieces. As always, Kubrick was trying to advance the form, even shutting down production to expand the possibilities of what could be captured on film. Billy Wilder was not impressed: “He worked like six months trying to find a way to photograph somebody by candlelight, not artificial light. And nobody really gives a shit whether it is by candlelight or not.” He dismissed the movie as “the only Kubrick picture I did not like.” Actually we were kind of blown away by the filming by candlelight and the jaw dropping production design, and the visual style meshes perfectly with the story. Not one of our favorites, but we did like it more than Wilder did.

The Shining features two stars: force-of-nature Jack Nicholson, and the recently-invented Steadicam (first deployed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler in Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory), which Kubrick had modified to achieve those ground’s-eye views tracking Danny on his hot-wheel. Nicholson’s performance certainly goes over the top – and then over the top of the top – but watch for his best work in the movie’s quieter moments. The Shining has a depth that transcends its horror-flick genre, which can be misdirecting. “I didn’t love The Shining the first time I saw it,” Stephen Spielberg recalled. “I have since seen The Shining twenty-five times, it is one of my favorite pictures.” Some scholars go so far as to argue that it is Kubrick’s never-made holocaust film. We think it’s a long trip to that particular store, but you’ve got to admit—that’s a lot of blood flowing out of those elevators.

Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick’s Vietnam War film, is somewhat handicapped by the overwhelming power and precision of its first third, which takes place on Paris Island boot camp. The close of that segment is so complete, and so overwhelming, that it takes a while to get reoriented for the balance of the movie, which takes place in country. And the middle, episodic third is also a relatively soft patch. But the final sequences (look for a sea of shiny full-metal-jackets littering the landscape) is again extraordinary, and as effective a metaphor for the entire war that has been put on film.

Kubrick ended his career – too soon – with a final masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut. Based on Traumnovelle (dream story), Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella, the film engages three enormous themes: the relationship between sex and death (a common element of many Kubrick films from Paths of Glory through Full Metal Jacket, and one which comes up continuously, in moments large and small, in Eyes Wide Shut); the vaguely defined boundaries between dreams, perception, storytelling and reality (and the moral implications suggested by each); and the timeless challenges of marriage and fidelity (recall that the crucial password is “Fidelio”; in the novella, it was the somewhat less charged “Denmark”). It is also a film, fittingly and finally one last time, that aspires to be understandable only as a film. Eyes Wide Shut spins a complex visual story told through the movie’s color scheme, as Janet Maslin observed in her perceptive review: “it overpoweringly deploys certain colors, most notably red and blue. The conjugal life is bathed in red, at first, and death and danger in blue – until the film begins switching and juxtaposing them incessantly to create underlying tension. The advent of purple, first on the dress of a young prostitute and later on the sheets where Alice sleeps, has its own innate drama.” We have not yet fully cracked this color code, but we are very much looking forward to our next opportunity.

Our user’s guide follows the vid-caps below. Note as always we follow a version of the Halliwell system: stars are not ratings, but designations of merit—thus a one star film is a recommended film. And in this case there is also the Spielberg admonition: “Kubrick films tend to grow on you, you have to see them more than once.” Wise advice, because every Kubrick film (with the exceptions of Fear and Desire and Spartacus), has something to say—you should listen closely.