 Starring: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim PickensDirector: Stanley Kubrick Year Of Release: 1964 Plot: U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper has gone nuts and decided the communists are planning to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans, and so has sent his planes to go and destroy Russian with nuclear bombs. However can President Merkin Muffley, British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake and former Nazi genius Dr. Strangelove help prevent disaster. |
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Stanley Kubrick has an odd place in the movie firmament. Hes sort of commercial, but sort of arty. Some find his movies electric while others just bore to tears. Hes loved by some, hated by others, and lived a life that from the outside seemed so enigmatic that when endless rumours about what he might be doing surfaced, no one knew what might be true. While many directors get branded unique, in Kubricks case its true theres never been anyone like him. So whether youre a lover or a loather, what is it thats elevated Kubrick to being seen as one of the greatest visionary directors cinema has ever seen?
Normally getting bad grades in school isnt a good thing, but being a bit of a rubbish student could well have been what gave the world 2001 and The Shining. It ensured that when Stanley Kubrick graduated from high school in 1945, the influx of newly returned soldiers filling up universities meant that there was no room for him. The result was that both at school and afterwards, it was imagery that became his passion.
It was Kubricks father who first fostered Stanley Kubricks interest in photography by giving him a Graflex camera when he was 13, and not too long afterward the youngster was voted official photographer for a year at New Yorks William Howard Taft High School. He had a natural flair and before hed graduated had succeeded in selling shots to the national Look magazine. Although after leaving school he tried his hand at drumming and supplemented his income by playing chess for quarters in Washington Square Park (chess was another lifelong passion), it was photography that consumed him. He worked as a freelance photographer for Look and also took on a photography apprenticeship in order to immerse himself in the art. Kubrick also found time to marry Toba Metz and, until their divorce, live a vaguely bohemian existence with her in Greenwich Village.
Although hed never been much of a movie buff, he began attending screenings at the Museum Of Modern Art, which introduced to him to various different film styles and far more artistic movies than the ones he was used to from Hollywood. Not long afterwards a friend persuaded him to bring his photographers eye to making short documentaries for the March Of Time newsreels. His first effort was the independently financed Day Of The Fight, a 16-minute feature based on a photo feature hed done for Look. It follows a day in the life of middleweight boxer Walter Cartier as he prepares for a bout with Bobby James. While Kubrick only made a $100 profit on the film, it changed his life forever. He immediately gave up his freelance Look gig and plunged into making shorts, such as one about a Mexican priest whose parish is so big he has to fly from one village to the next (Flying Padre), and another called The Seafarers, which was his first colour movie.
By selling these to RKO and getting his uncle to stump up some cash, he managed to fund his first fictional piece, Fear And Desire. With only himself and his wife as crew, Kubrick worked on the movie until 1953, although his marriage dissolved before it was finished and he and Toba divorced. In later life Kubrick derided Fear And Desire, comparing it to a child drawing on a fridge. He may have had a point, as it is a rather pretentious and somewhat art-school piece, in which soldiers fighting in a fictitious war eventually see the faces of their enemy, only to discover its themselves! Kubrick disliked it so much that he attempted to make sure it was never seen again after its first release and for many years it was believed to be completely lost. However Kodak had a policy of making an extra copy of everything they printed and it was later discovered in their archives. Even so, the Kubrick Foundation is still fiercely protective of it, and while bootlegs exist, officially the surviving print is never allowed to leave George Eastman House in Rochester, New York and can only be screened for individuals, not groups (the Library Of Congress now holds the original camera negative, which was discovered in Puerto Rico in the late 1980s).
Although Kubrick may have hated it and the film got mixed reviews, it was certainly a successful calling card, allowing him to make the noir-ish thriller Killers Kiss (incidentally Fear And Desire and Killers Kiss are the only Kubrick fictional pieces based on original screenplays, and not on novels or other stories). This was a much more successful effort, and by the time The Killing was released in 1956, about an ex-con planning a scheme to rob a racetrack (and which is probably Kubricks least known masterpiece), Hollywood was banging at his door. In 1957, Kirk Douglas hired him to helm the WWI drama Paths Of Glory. While a decidedly more commercial venture than many of his earlier movies, it still shows Kubricks unique eye, including his love of fluid tracking shots (the use of which can be seen throughout his oeuvre and was influenced by the work of Max Ophuls, who hed been introduced to at the Museum of Modern Art).
However it was his next film that was the first and last time Kubrick can genuinely be said to have gone Hollywood, and even that wasnt strictly his fault. Kirk Douglas had gone on from Paths Of Glory to star in and produce an epic take on the legend of rebellious Roman slave Spartacus, directed by Anthony Mann. However once filming began, the director and the actor/producer had a major falling out and Mann was fired. Douglas then called in Kubrick, who agreed to direct it, although it wasnt a particularly happy experience. For a start Kubrick had no control over the script, which he believed to be overly moralising. He also immediately clashed with the cinematographer. As Kubrick had started out as a photographer he had his own strong ideas about how things should be shot, and basically told director of photography Russell Metty to butt out.
The irony is that while Kubrick didnt even get an Oscar nomination, Metty, as the credited cinematographer, won one for something hed only had minor input into. Kubrick is also alleged to have clashed with Kirk Douglas over an attempt to take credit for the script. Kirk had deliberately hired one of the blacklisted Hollywood 10 to write the script, which would technically have meant Dalton Trumbo couldnt be credited under his own name, but after Kubrick allegedly said he wanted to have the writing credit (despite his reservations over the script), Douglas was so appalled he fought to have Trumbos name put on the picture, effectively ending the blacklist.
While the film has since become a classic, the main lesson Kubrick seemed to have taken from it was never to make a movie unless you had complete control over every part of it, which was something he absolutely insisted on for the rest of his career.
After his second marriage (to Ruth Sobotka) broke down and negotiations to direct Brando in One Eyed Jacks didnt pan out, he made another decision that would affect the rest of his career, and that was to move to England. Rather like Woody Allens recent European adventure, Kubrick found that in Britain he could more easily make the movies he wanted to, without studios, investors, stars and producers breathing down his neck constantly. First off he put Lolita into production, which touched off a storm of protest from the moment a film version was mooted.
Many considered Vladimir Nabokovs book about an older man obsessed with a young nymphet to be obscene, and couldnt imagine how it could be acceptable as a movie (the original tagline for the film was simply, How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?). While Kubrick made a couple of concessions, such as moving Lolitas age from 12 to 14, and ensuring the actress playing her was, ahem, well developed, the movie still retained much of the edginess the book was known for. It was also the first public outing for one of his personal obsessions, the underside of human sexuality. Hints at homosexuality had been removed from Spartacus, but Lolita laid his interest in sexual taboos bare, and they cropped up in much of the rest of his work, not least Eyes Wide Shut.
Equally shocking at the time was Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. In the early 60s, the world still lived in fear of nuclear attack. The Cuban Missile Crisis had occurred less than a year before filming began and many simply didnt feel it was a subject to make a comedy about. World events also ended up delaying the movies release, with JFKs assassination in November 1963 meaning the studio didnt feel the tone of the film was right and so pushed back its planned December premiere. Bizarrely though, after the success of Lolita, the backers didnt make any provisos about the subject matter, and merely insisted that Peter Sellers play at least four roles, as the multiple characters hed played in Lolita had been one of the films main selling points. Perhaps even more strangely, it wasnt originally designed to be a comedy at all. Based on the book Red Alert by Peter George, it was initially going to be a tense thriller, but when Kubrick saw the absurdity of some of the scenes hed written, he brought in Terry Southern to turn it into a satire.
Tune in tomorrow, when well cheat a little bit and take you forward for one day only in the Movie-A-Day list to Eyes Wide Shut, so we can continue our journey through the life and importance of the legendary Stanley Kubrick.
TIM ISAAC
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