8 Movies | July 22 & 29
Because he lived in England for roughly the last 40 years of his life and made most of his later films there, Stanley Kubrick is often thought of as a British director. He was born in the Bronx in 1928. As an introverted teenager he showed an aptitude for photography, and when his poor grades and attendance record kept him from attending college, he became an apprentice and later full-time staff photographer for Look magazine. His interest in – friends said obsession with – cinema was fueled by screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, particularly work by his earliest influences, such as Max Ophüls and Elia Kazan.
His first films in the early 1950s were short documentaries considered remarkably accomplished for a neophyte; they were picked up for distribution by RKO. He quickly followed with a very low-budget war film, Fear and Desire (1953), featuring future director Paul Mazursky. It was a commercial failure but brought him praise from the few critics who had seen it.
In the succeeding years, Kubrick would overcome the obstacles of funding, distribution and his own hyper-perfectionism to emerge as a master of the medium and a unique visual stylist. His staunch independence and nearly fanatical meticulousness earned him a reputation as a demanding, difficult taskmaster, never completely satisfied, often highly critical of his small body of work (13 features). Because this two-part TCM focus is programmed in almost complete chronological order, audiences can trace his artistic development over the course of 40+ years.
Kubrick’s second feature, Killer’s Kiss (1955), is one of two early ventures he made into film noir (the other being the superior The Killing, 1956), and the tagline attached to it by distributor United Artists is as over-the-top lurid as any Mickey Spillane potboiler: “Her soft mouth was the road to sin-smeared violence.” The soft mouth in question belongs to a world-weary “taxi dancer” (the stand-in occupation for prostitute under the old Production Code). The violence comes from her boss at the dance hall (i.e., her pimp), and the poor sap being led down that road is her neighbor and rescuer, a middleweight fighter reaching the end of his career. It’s all frightfully familiar, but Kubrick compensates for the shortcomings of his often-clumsy screenplay with some effective location filming of New York’s seamier side, including a bizarre fight with pike pole and ax in a mannequin warehouse. Although generally disowned by its director, particularly for the happy ending forced by UA, the ultra-low-budget picture helped establish him as an emerging film artist and gained him better funding for his next feature. A fictional recounting of the movie’s production, Strangers Kiss (1983), featured Peter Coyote as a character known only as “Stanley, the director.”
No Hollywood studio was interested in Paths of Glory (1957) until Kirk Douglas expressed his wish to play the lead. United Artists agreed to back the project, an anti-war drama about corruption in the French military during World War I, with a budget relatively small for the time and the scope of the story but still vastly larger than any Kubrick had worked with to that point. The picture was banned in Switzerland, Spain and all U.S. military establishments, and François Truffaut, in his 1958 review, said “it will never be released in France, not as long as there are soldiers around.” (It wasn’t shown there until 1975.) Truffaut praised the “splendid camera work” and “fluid long shots” reminiscent of Kubrick’s early influence Max Ophüls, but also noted the film’s weakness, “a certain lack of psychological credibility.” This criticism, that Kubrick sacrificed the human aspects of his stories to the visual design and impact, would be levelled against his work for the rest of his career. Nevertheless, the film garnered rave reviews and awards and is still considered a major cinematic work.
Lolita (1962) was Kubrick’s first film to be made in England, his adopted country for the rest of his life. Using money he earned on Paths of Glory, he bought the rights to Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial and acclaimed novel, which was considered unfilmable. (In case you haven’t heard, the story follows a European intellectual’s obsession with a “nymphet,” i.e., underage girl, and his capture and eventual loss of her on a lengthy American road trip.) After his negative experience as director for hire on Spartacus (1960), Kubrick took complete control over this production, jettisoning most of Nabokov’s screenplay and encouraging Peter Sellers to improvise wildly and expand his role as the wretched scholar’s nemesis. Some critics and lovers of the source novel found that detrimental to the story, but as Gene Youngblood pointed out in his Criterion Collection essay, the strategy transformed Lolita “from a tale of sexual perversion into a black comedy thriller…For the censors a killer was more acceptable than a pervert.” The merits of both the novel and the film have been blunted by contemporary reactions to the subject matter, but most critics agree it remains an intriguing and underappreciated milestone in Kubrick’s artistic development.
The most savagely satirical movie of its time, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) started out as a serious dramatic adaptation of Peter George’s thriller novel about nuclear annihilation, “Red Alert,” but shifted gears to become what Kubrick called “a nightmare comedy” as he realized the absurdities inherent in the situations depicted in the story. Bringing satirist Terry Southern (“The Magic Christian”) on board further assured the script would take on a blackly humorous tone. Once again, Peter Sellers was given the freedom to improvise on the three very different roles he played, including the title character. Based on his good notices for Lolita, the financing studio, Columbia Pictures, wanted him to play a fourth, the B-52 commander who rides the atomic bomb down to its target, but he and Kubrick decided that role wasn’t right for him. The film was Kubrick’s biggest moneymaker to date and a critical success. It is still considered one of his very best, surpassed only perhaps by…
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is widely regarded as one of the best and most influential films in cinema history. Steven Spielberg called it his generation’s “big bang,” and Ridley Scott declared that nothing can ever beat Kubrick’s masterwork. Weaving an enigmatic tale from the dawn of time to a calamitous future voyage to Jupiter, the visually and narratively innovative film elevated the sci-fi genre from fodder for Saturday matinee serials to both big-budget blockbuster entertainment and film art worthy of serious attention and analysis. Kubrick’s musing on life, time, the nature of human intelligence and our place in the universe has inspired endless discussion and speculation about the film’s philosophical aspects as well as its technical and artistic achievements.
The second night of programming begins with the stunningly beautiful period drama Barry Lyndon (1975), based on an 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray about the rise and fall of an opportunistic young Irish man from humble beginnings to wealthy aristocratic widow to ultimate ruin and disgrace. Although some critics raved about the film’s “stately elegance” and glimpse into the “emptiness of upper-class life,” others found it to have what was by then the standard Kubrick failing, calling it the motion picture equivalent of a lifeless coffee table book. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker that Kubrick “controlled it so meticulously that he’s drained the blood out of it.” Visually, however, it can’t be faulted, from the detailed and evocative art direction to the innovative cinematography, using ultra-fast lenses to capture images in natural light and, even more revolutionary and difficult to achieve, solely in candlelight. Including it in his list of the world’s great movies in 2009, Roger Ebert summed up what makes Barry Lyndon so characteristically Kubrick: “technically awesome, emotionally distant, remorseless in its doubt of human goodness.”
We take a step back from our chronological journey through the director’s career to screen A Clockwork Orange (1971). Kubrick’s adaptation is mostly faithful to Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel, a nightmarish vision of a near-future Britain in which extreme behavior modification is enforced to preserve law and order in a rapidly disintegrating society. The film was shot mostly on location around London, often using natural light, by cinematographer John Alcott, who had taken over from Geoffrey Unsworth halfway through 2001 and would go on to shoot Barry Lyndon and The Shining (1980) for Kubrick. The picture’s harsh violence and assaultive sex got it an X rating in the U.S. and widely mixed reviews, yet it still received numerous awards and accolades, including Best Film and Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle. After a couple of high-profile copycat crimes that directly referenced the picture and a spate of death threats Kubrick received, he withdrew the film from release in Britain in 1973. It was not shown there again until after his death in 1999.
Kubrick was never one to quickly crank out pictures, but as the years went on, he took longer and longer between projects, partially a by-product of his meticulous preparation and scrambling for funding and resources. It was seven years between The Shining and his anti-Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket (1987). It took another 12 years for him to release his final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), promoted as an erotic thriller. There is more eroticism in the simple scene of James Mason painting Sue Lyons’ toenails in Lolita than in the rather toothless (and ludicrously costumed) “orgy” scene here, and not much in the way of mystery. What Kubrick was going for instead was a dreamlike journey into the intricacies of fidelity, intimacy, personal responsibility and truth. He and Frederic Raphael (Far from the Madding Crowd, 1967) adapted a 1926 Viennese novella, which may explain why some reviewers and audiences found the settings and relationships out of step with contemporary sensibilities. The project had been percolating in Kubrick’s mind since 1968, and according to some sources, at one point he considered making it a comedy with Steve Martin or Woody Allen. Bowing to pressure to use a major star, he cast Tom Cruise as a successful doctor thrown into a philosophical and moral crisis when his wife (Nicole Kidman, then married to Cruise) confesses an erotic fantasy.
Principal photography took place over 15 months, including an unbroken shoot of 46 weeks, pushing cast and crew to the brink of their tolerance. He took an additional nine months in post-production, showing the stars and studio executives his cut in March 1999. Six days later, Stanley Kubrick suffered a heart attack in his sleep at the age of 70, leaving behind a small but impressive body of work that stands as some of the greatest and most impactful cinema art not only of the latter half of the 20th century but of all time.
