Perhaps best known for A Clockwork Orange of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick has some fabulous earlier work to explore. We take a closer look.
Eyes Wide Shut, the final film by Stanley Kubrick, turned 25 years old this summer. It was a decades-long labour of love for Kubrick and a picture he sadly didn’t live long enough to see audiences’ responses to, having passed away just a few months earlier aged 70.
Whether Kubrick would have made another film had he not died at a relatively young age is open to question. His gaps between movies increased over time; seven years from The Shining to Full Metal Jacket turned into twelve between that and Eyes Wide Shut. Would Kubrick have one day realised his passion to tell the story of Napoleon, the project that got away?
Perhaps. He could well have retired on the back of a fascinating, rather bedazzling exploration of marriage and sex which, in many respects, encapsulates the obsessions in Kubrick’s career he had explored since the very beginning. He was always an auteur driven by a confluence of sex and violence, of war and the spectre of anarchy.
Understandably, we look at his masterpieces, be they 2001: A Space Odyssey or A Clockwork Orange, to discern the coded meaning behind Kubrick’s distinctive cinema, but in doing so we often leave behind the films that preceded them. Many of these were far less impactful, less creative, less visually arresting, but each of them key in the road to Eyes Wide Shut via the myriad, remarkable stops in-between.
Let’s examine where Kubrick began:
Fear and Desire (1952)
After graduating from a successful, youthful career as a photographer for Look magazine in the late 1940s, and later segueing into several short documentary films, Kubrick as a 24 year-old squeezed together the financing for Fear And Desire, his first feature, written by his friend Howard Sackler.
Kubrick from the very beginning of his career instills many thematic ideas he would play with for decades within a film he later wrote off as a ‘student film’. Fear And Desire is set during a non-specific war in which four soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines, each with varying different personalities – by the book, a brute, a weak man corrupted by sin, and so forth.
As they seek a way out of enemy territory, they succumb to darker impulses, leading to the murder of a native girl (Virginia Leith) who one of the men, Sidney (played by a pre-fame Paul Mazursky), tries to rape and subsequently goes mad as the group work to assassinate a nearby enemy General. Kubrick is fascinated by men trapped in extreme circumstances who give into the lesser angels of their own nature.
Frank Silvera (the only professional actor in the cast at the time) as Mac embodies this male darkness that carries through much of Kubrick’s work, suggesting killing a general is the one meaningful thing he would do in his life. Though a satisfying sense of painful nihilism suffuses Fear And Desire, it is undeniably cheap, raw and unformed, boasting only visual and photographic touches that suggest the talent Kubrick would later bloom into.
As he told critic Alexander Walker in 1971, “The ideas we wanted to put across were good, but we didn’t have the experience to embody them dramatically.”
Killer’s Kiss (1955)
“While Fear And Desire had been a serious effort, ineptly done, Killer’s Kiss proved, I think, to be a frivolous effort done with conceivably more expertise though still down in the student level of filmmaking,” so claimed Kubrick in 1971, continuing to look back on his early works.
He is perhaps a trifle harsh. Killer’s Kiss is demonstrably a step up for the young Kubrick after Fear And Desire, again a film self-financed (for this time around $75,000) and ultimately edited and even mixed by Kubrick in order to get the film made once the money ran out. It propels the director into an area he would toil in this and his next picture: film noir.
Not that the term was yet popularised, only forming part of popular lexicon in the 1960s, but Killer’s Kiss sees Kubrick tell the story of boxer Davy Gordon (Jamie Smith), in flashback with he as the narrator, recounting his passion for gangster’s moll Gloria (Irene Kane) and vicious hoodlum Rapallo (a returning Frank Silvera). What follows is a compact 65 minutes as Davy’s life begins to fall apart.
Read more: 2001: A Space Odyssey | Douglas Trumbull’s contribution to a sci-fi classic
Killer’s Kiss absolutely remains a minor work, unable to be stacked up against Kubrick’s later output (he really begins to find his footing with his next picture), but this commands an even greater sense of emerging skill with lighting, cinematography and camera work – take the kinetic way he shoots Davy in the ring, inspired by a previous boxing documentary he made called Day Of The Fight.
It made an unexpected profit for United Artists, landing him a two picture deal with producer James B Harris that would truly begin to put this talent on the map.
The Killing (1956)
Film noir was approaching the end of its prominence during the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood by the mid-1950s, as the glamour of molls, hard-bitten detectives and exotic gangsters faded in the post-WWII era, as audiences sought more documentarian realism in their crime tales.
Enter The Killing, for which Killer’s Kiss to a degree felt like a dry run, albeit telling different tales within the noir remit. Kubrick manages to assemble a higher budget, around the $320,000 mark, partly funded by United Artists, affording him the opportunity to work with established actors for the first time, particularly Sterling Hayden in the leading man role of Johnny Clay (surely the archetypal noir crook name?).
The Killing, based on Lionel White’s pulp novel Clean Break (which Kubrick adored), sees Johnny set up the heist of two million dollars from a racetrack during a packed-out derby, assembling a motley crew around him with various tasks (including great character actors such as Elisha Cook Jr), as his plan to make the titular ‘killing’ comes together. Throw in Marie Windsor as a should-be-iconic two-timing blonde dame and you have an array of classic gangster-noir elements.
Though The Killing, in its own right, is a well constructed film, indeed the first movie Kubrick truly manages to pull off (even if it isn’t close to his best work), the influences of this film are even more apparent. Crime classics such as Pulp Fiction decades later arguably take a cue from Kubrick’s choice to, with the help of a narrator in true noir style, tell his story in non-linear fashion, which only adds to the impact of the story, especially as Johnny’s plan inevitably begins to fall apart.
It again made a profit for United Artists, allowing Kubrick an increasing amount of trust and freedom, this after executives tried to have him and Harris re-cut the film in linear fashion, which both men immediately hated. Kubrick stuck to his guns, as he would grow to do ever more distinctly, and a genuinely superb, slightly ahead-of-its-time crime film was born.
Paths Of Glory (1957)
Kubrick’s nascent career outside of the documentary sphere had begun with a theoretical, drama school approach to the concept of war in Fear And Desire, but in Paths Of Glory he’s given the trust, and crucially the studio backing, to make something far richer.
Indeed, this goes down as Kubrick’s first genuine masterwork, perhaps his least well-known. There is a strong argument that it also stands as the finest depiction of the Great War in cinema history, even almost 70 years on. Adapted from Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel, which Kubrick loved as a child, it’s a resolutely anti-war film at a point where cinema was full of nostalgic dramatic re-tellings of WWII’s key moments.
Kirk Douglas helped generate the financing himself for the adaptation, and he ends up giving a career-best performance as Colonel Dax, the French regiment leader who clashes with zealous General Mireau (a fierce George Macready) over a decision to execute for treason several random officers after the regiment refuse Mireau’s order to go over the top, even in the face of certain death.
Kubrick wants war to be depicted as hell, which he does with kinetic trench warfare sequences and a chain of command that is corrupt at best, psychotic at worst. Paths Of Glory paints the truth of war – its ugliness, its terror, its ultimate futility. He doesn’t shy away from suggesting WWI was a conflict of folly by elite officers seeking to burnish their own legacies, a truth that saw the film banned in France for almost two decades.
Arguably, Kubrick never stopped being obsessed by war, by man’s inhumanity to man, be it here or in Full Metal Jacket three decades later. Paths Of Glory might be his purest depiction of it, ultimately, and the film that cements him as one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation.
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A false start comes next in Spartacus, the only film Kubrick didn’t have complete creative control over from this point forward (having been drafted in after Anthony Mann was fired upon clashing with Kirk Douglas). It’s a film with a great deal to recommend it, but it’s also a strange halfway house between Kubrick’s unique, obsessive genius and a stock, staid Hollywood historical epic.
Beyond it lies greatness. Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and so on. More words have been written on those films than I dare to imagine. They all flow from this early river, however, of experimentation, self-discovery and Kubrick’s time existing at the tail end of Hollywood’s studio era.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here. Next year, he releases An Overlook of Madness, a book about Kubrick and the making of The Shining.
