"The Great Stanley K." (Terry Southern)…and Vincent Van Gogh…no, Kirk Douglas…and the Great Chameleon…
Since I was fourteen and, on a tiny TV screen, glimpsed the extraordinary images of the Discovery's mission to Jupiter…and beyond the infinite…I have been a devotee of Stanley Kubrick. Born 1928, began making movies in 1951, died 1998 with thirteen feature-length films to his name. Even the flawed ones had moments of beauty, and all were clearly the work of a visionary.
John Baxter, his best biographer (in my opinion), called Kubrick a man who chose the life of the eye and mind over the life of the soul and spirit. This is an oversimplification. Kubrick indeed had an eye to match any artist in the Met AND MoMa, and his characters and plots were often cool, logical, and very dark as opposed to emotive, sentimental (like Spielberg), stirring (like Lean), and nostalgic (like Scorsese). But his detachment, as it were, enabled him to tell stories which looked at human nature as objectively as possible, and filled those stories with a richness of meaning almost no other director could approach. And, especially in his final work, there was always an element of humanity and spirit, even in his most inhuman sagas…Kubrick may think we're usually on roads to disaster and Hell, but does not fully deny the possibility of Heaven.
On June 15th, after seeing Full Metal Jacket, I can now proudly say I have seen the entire canon, every film once, 2001 and Spartacus multiple times.
Here are some very brief thoughts…contains spoilers…
Fear and Desire—I actually didn't see his first film, an allegory set in the Korean War. But it is harder to find than a Seattle Pilots jersey, and Kubrick himself dismissed it as a pretentious beginner's folly. So no great loss.
Killer's Kiss—Caught this during a memorial retrospective on Turner Classic Movies. A low-budget film noir about a boxer trying to save his newfound love from a vicious promoter/underworld figure. Kubrick made a list of sequences he thought would be exciting to film, then filled in the gaps with Howard O. Sackler. It's not very interesting, and there's a completely pointless impressionistic sequence with Kubrick's ballet-dancer second wife, but there are scenes—the murder of the boxer's faithful trainer on a deserted street, the climactic fight in a mannequin factory—which stand out even from Huston and Tourneur's best noir work.
The Killing—A heist movie with Jim Thompson dialogue where the Kubrick legend truly begins. The documentary realism. The unwillingness to follow convention, in this case by telling the story from a constantly shifting point of view where time is turned backwards and forwards to follow every action before and during the robbery. The formal logic by which everyone behaves, their actions always making sense at least to themselves. The distrust of love and romance, as the perfect crime collapses in its aftermath thanks to nice wimp George letting his greedy, unfaithful wife Sherry in on the secret. The ambivalent sexuality, seen in ex-con ringleader Johnny being loved by both his faithful childhood sweetheart Cathy and his devoted sidekick, aged bookkeeper Marvin—but only getting his kicks from working out an intricate maneuver. And of course, an ending which you could never call "happy." (My mom grew up watching Vince Edwards play Ben Casey, M.D., and it's kind of funny to see him as Sherry's treacherous lover.)
Paths of Glory—The first tale of war which adds the final great element of Kubrick's style, as the logic controlling The Killing is taken to an obsessive extreme. Characters move like pieces on a chessboard with rigid precision. Action is symmetrical. The images are composed to the tiniest degree of perfection. The story is deceptively simple (French World War I generals cover up their disastrous battlefield decisions by court-martialing three soldiers to reassign the blame) but thematically profound (you watch with shudders that we, as human beings, are capable of such deception, cynicism, and murder in pursuit of the "best" end). And the discourse is remarkable, following its own rules and, as my friend and greater devotee Eric Burns pointed out, making use of parroting—repetition of sentences to drive their points home. Unfortunately, the film is so choppy that no scenes flow into each other (the ending, though important, still feels tacked on), and the acting ranges from Kirk Douglas's grandiloquence to Timothy Carey's non-acting…Adolphe Menjou as the man pulling all the strings does it best.
Spartacus—Of all the great road-show Technicolor commercial spectacles made during the final two decades of the studio system, this may be the best, and it's certainly the greatest old-school historical epic. Did any director have a better coming-out party? It still astounds me that after four low-budget movies, Kubrick, who was ONLY THIRTY, stepped in for Anthony Mann and took such complete charge of a juggernaut production. Many complain that it's not really a Kubrick film for that reason, but Mann only shot the opening scenes in the Libyan salt mines…and I see Kubrick in every frame, in the contrasts between shadows and light (the former actually fits the heroes, the latter the villains in Rome), in the clockwork movements of the action sequences, and most of all in the quiet intensity whenever Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton are on the screen. They are playing a game with their own ideas of victory in mind, with plans and strategies galore, and thus are destined to defeat Kirk Douglas because he has no plan, no strategy, no intrigue, just an unshakable ideal in the best of humanity. Maybe the hopefulness of the tragedy isn't up Kubrick's line, and maybe Dalton Trumbo made Douglas and Jean Simmons the most happy, loving couple in any Kubrick film…but Kubrick could have fought these changes, just as he fought to control the cinematography and won. He didn't. For him, Douglas and Simmons's love and the eventual triumph of Spartacus's vision fit. The result is a film which gets better with every viewing. (Peter Ustinov became the only actor to win an Oscar for a Kubrick movie as the put-upon head of the gladiator school…it's a darkly funny performance.)
Lolita—Kubrick's last great misstep. Nabokov was NOT MEANT for the big screen, but still, even a watered-down version of Humbert Humbert's tragedy could have been something special. Kubrick ends up with his most conventional-feeling film ever, with the least interesting aesthetic choices he ever made…it feels like a Douglas Sirk or Jerry Wald production. And if it was meant to be a satire on Hollywood conventionalism, the joke wears thin over two hours and forty minutes…his only unnecessary long running time. Worse, that a man who would end up delving deep into the sexual psyche only took some perfunctory Nabokovian explorations of Humbert and Lolita's relationship is a grave disappointment, and Sue Lyon is whiny, not arousing. The one bright spot is Peter Sellers, stealing the film with his chameleonic portrayal of that most amoral playwright Clare Quilty. (James Mason would have been a KILLER Humbert if the film had followed the novel more.)
Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—Besides romance, conventional comedy was Kubrick's weak point. But he admired Charlie Chaplin, and Dr. Strangelove fits in with the surreal worldview of Chaplin's movies, where bumbling fools end up winning over entrenched power systems. The tragic joke here is that while Chaplin's tramp was on the side of the angels, the ham-fisted General Turgidson and Major King Kong override the rational and push the world to complete destruction. Robert McKee wrote that the secret of comedy is its anger, and this is a very angry movie for all the humor present. And yet we still laugh today, for the film is genuinely funny (the conversations in the War Room most of all…"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here!") and so, so true in depicting our capacity for self-destruction. Peter Sellers is again fantastic (I don't think any actor ever worked better with Kubrick, possibly excepting Malcolm McDowell and Ryan O'Neal), and George C. Scott is just as perfectly cast…but it is Ken Adam's production design and the closing "We'll Meet Again" montage which you'll remember the most.
The last six movies to follow Thursday or Friday…
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