(My occasional little feature “Director’s dossier” is a survey of a film director’s work to give orientation to one or more films by him or her, sometimes in another blog entry. This entry on Kubrick is actually, for immediate purposes, a preliminary to a review of a Steven Spielberg film, hopefully to be posted soon. The comments below are meant to be general.)
Stanley Kubrick, if he were working today the same way he did when alive, would be called an indie director, or even a European-style director (not simply for working in England as he did in his later years), because of the type of work he did, particularly as it aimed toward an artistic refinement. He was noted by many as a perfectionist—or an ultra-perfectionist; director Sydney Pollack made a point about him similar to this; other directors, he implied, could be called a perfectionist who actually are more slovenly, relatively speaking, than Kubrick was. Actor Richard Anderson, who appeared as a prosecuting attorney in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (and later was a fixture on TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man) characterized Kubrick as a “movie scientist,” as to how he approached making films, at every level as a director.
Kubrick planned all details of his films very closely (generally growing in how he did this for each film, over time), and became notorious for requiring many takes of shots of actors, often without giving them much guidance; he called for repeated takes (“Again!”), leaving some actors exasperated as to what he wanted. Then, when he had all the takes filmed, he apparently “printed” everything, and chose the takes he wanted for shots to appear in the final cut of a film. (It’s to be remembered that he didn’t do this with every shot in a given film.)
He made 13 films—a small output for many noted directors by today’s standards; but many of his films are standards by which others are judged or made, and some (less loved) are notorious for becoming a benchmark of sorts, or for being a basis for (playful) allusions in more modern works, whether in movies or on TV.
1953-64: Mostly black-and-white films, as by a director of noirs
His first seven films could be said to be, in loosely general terms, like noir films (which, within 1953-64, would have been late for the “proper” era for that genre)—films as if by Orson Welles or Billy Wilder:
Fear and Desire (1953), amateurishly done and pretty much disowned by Kubrick;
Killer’s Kiss (1955), interesting for its cinematography (from a glimpse I saw of it);
The Killing (1956), a film about a racetrack heist, starring Sterling Hayden as the heist mastermind, and interesting for a modernistic way, in indoor shots, the camera seemed to travel through walls; the time structure of the story also had modernistic dislocations;
Paths of Glory (1957), his first arguably great film, starring Kirk Douglas in one of his best-ever performances as a World War I, French field commander who acts as defense counsel for three soldiers who have been arranged to be put on trial as scapegoats for an infantry company’s failure to take an objective in a suicide mission; if you’re at all interested in Kubrick’s work, read about this film, and see it if you haven’t;
Spartacus (1960), Kubrick’s first color film and his only effort made in Hollywood (his experience here, while yielding a film noted as among the best of the sword-and-sandal genre, led him never to work in Hollywood again); interestingly, the cinematographer named in this film’s credits was the famed Russell Metty, but Kubrick seems to have been the de facto cinematographer for most of this film;
Lolita (1962), an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, disappointing if compared to the novel, which I think really can’t be filmed (director Adrian Lyne also filmed a version in the 1990s). Censorship restrictions that Kubrick had to address left the film in such a state that he felt if he knew what restrictions were ahead, he wouldn’t have made the film. On its own terms, it offers an intriguing, peculiar story; James Mason is good as Humbert Humbert, and Shelley Winters is good as Dolores Haze, mother of Lolita;
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Kubrick’s renowned satire of nuclear war, cowritten by Terry Southern; it is especially on the idea of mutually assured destruction, a relatively new concept to the public in 1964; possibly his very best film.
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Dr. Strangelove was his seventh film; he had been working on films for a little over a decade, and believe it or not, for the next 30+ years, he would work on only as many films after this, six, as he had done before it.
1964-99: More richly produced (almost all color) films, and the anticlimactic phase of his career
The films listed so far, all in black-and-white, could have been made by a cool-eyed, cerebral director like Billy Wilder. Afterward, Kubrick would make all color films, and starting after his landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), he would tend to be regarded as a master director each of whose releases was awaited as if it were an oracle.
If you were to ask me which his best films were, I would say, not entirely comfortably, the consecutively made Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange (1971), the last a controversial look at teenage delinquency (seen in a dystopian world) and what could be done about it. These three films could be considered to have taken a very measured, judicious approach in their manner of depiction (in terms of realistic [visual] depiction, if with a rather pessimistic or at least skeptical attitude toward individual character or the nature of Man, as some might say); and as a group, they thematically dealt with three aspects of what probably, in the 1960s, was most concerning (or inspiring) to people, or most defined the new aspects of the age: nuclear war and the role of the military in modern life; space exploration, and what it did in terms of our understanding of ourselves; and juvenile delinquency and “what the world is coming to.”
No director working today, arguably, has quite this kind of position, either in terms of how the director works or in what the public looks for from him; but also, today, much of the filmgoing public doesn’t tend to look to film directors this way anyway. (Among accomplished and acclaimed directors of today, Steven Spielberg comes close, in being able to deviate from what he is widely known for and make a film on a serious subject, tailored to middle class tastes, and be taken seriously. But his tendency often to make entertaining or somehow optimistic films puts him in a different class than Kubrick; more on this issue in a later blog entry.)
Kubrick’s films subsequent to A Clockwork Orange were well crafted (and from A Clockwork Orange on, his films were distributed, and funded, by Warner Brothers, while he ran his own production company in England), but they have been controversial or been seen as “not his best” by some segment of viewers or other, until his death:
Barry Lyndon (1975), a sumptuous, very much visually-oriented rendition of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel;
The Shining (1980), a rather clinical version of Stephen King’s horror novel;
Full Metal Jacket (1987), a version of Gustav Hasford’s novel on the Vietnam War, The Short-Timers; and
Eyes Wide Shut (1999), an adaptation of the novel Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”) by the Jewish-Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler.
