Often portrayed in the press as a control freak, a genius, a recluse and a
perfectionist who would personally check if cinemas were projecting his
films correctly, Stanley Kubrick’s reputation amongst film critics is
equally contrary. For many, he stands as one of twentieth-century cinema’s
unique visionaries and innovators, eschewing orthodox psychology to examine
the myriad ways in which human beings are stripped of both their humanity
and their will by forces larger than themselves. For others, he became an
overrated, misanthropic purveyor of coldly mechanical, self-important
technical exercises.
Kubrick’s father ignited the two defining passions in his life: photography
and chess. The young Kubrick turned his first amateur obsession into a job
when he became a photographer for Look magazine at the age of 17. While the
influence of this career is palpable in his filmmaking, his enthusiasm for
chess is less obvious, but equally important. Many colleagues have remarked
that every move Kubrick made as a director was given the full, fastidious
contemplation of a chess player, while a sense of control permeates every
frame of his work, as if nothing has been left to chance and his characters
are pawns in his hands. Fittingly, it was the money he made as a chess
champion that partly financed his first feature, Fear And Desire (1953),
which he also wrote, produced, photographed and edited.
His second film, Killer’s Kiss (1955), concerned another of his passions,
boxing. An abrasive film noir charting a doomed romance between a
down-on-his luck pugilist and a nightclub dancer, it strikingly evokes the
moody chiaroscuro of his earlier photographs. Heist movie The Killing (1956)
was his first minor classic and the first film in which he connected with
his inner chess player: his characters, who exhibit all the free will of
rooks and pawns, are skilfully manoeuvred through the vagaries of fate and
systematically taken out of the game one by one. Paths Of Glory (1957)
centres on a trial during World War I in which trumped-up charges of
cowardice are levelled at three soldiers whose fate is sealed by pragmatic
generals using them to instil discipline into the other men. The film is an
uncharacteristically rousing polemic from a director whose work often has a
chilly, haughty demeanour. Paths Of Glory’s star, Kirk Douglas, then
employed Kubrick to direct his next production, Spartacus (1960), after
sacking Anthony Mann. Although Spartacus is the least typical of the
director’s films, especially in its display of human sentiment, it is the
most impressive of the late-1950s and early-1960s Roman spectaculars.
Kubrick was a director for hire on Spartacus, employed by a leading man with
similar control issues, which inevitably led to epic battles for dominance.
It was a mistake Kubrick would never make again. To ensure complete artistic
freedom, he took the unprecedented step of moving from Hollywood to England
in 1961. Borehamwood duly stood in for Middle America in his adaptation of
Vladimir Nabakov’s controversial Lolita (1962), starring a splendidly
unctuous James Mason as a European émigré academic obsessed with a
lollipop-sucking nymphet. Unfortunately, the comedy of disquiet was
alarmingly unbalanced by Peter Sellers’ decision to play his character with
all the nuanced subtleties of a Looney Tunes cartoon. However, Kubrick’s
next project, Dr Strangelove: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love
The Bomb (1964), seemed tailored to suit Sellers’ broad comic approach, and
he was given full rein to showcase his mercurial talents by playing three
different characters. The superbly scabrous Strangelove originally ended
with a custard-pie fight in which the president is struck down, but was
hurriedly changed after John F. Kennedy’s assassination and replaced with
the far more resonant finale of an H-bomb being dropped from a plane to the
incongruous strains of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again”.
Even though Dr Strangelove is the notorious perfectionist’s most fully
conceived film, nothing prepared film-goers for the quantum leap that was
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Co-written by Kubrick and novelist Arthur C.
Clarke, the film is an ambitious, mysterious and portentous exploration of
human history and a post-human future. A vital element of the entire
sensual, kinetic experience is the stunning use of classical music: the
spaceship famously docks to the sprightly rhythms of The Blue Danube and the
Earth, the sun and the moon magically align to the solemn tempo of Also
Sprach Zarathustra. This iconoclastic appropriation of existing orchestral
music became an essential component of his idiom, whether it was the primal
scream of Penderecki’s strings in The Shining (1980), or Beethoven becoming
part of the ultra¬violence in A Clockwork Orange (1971).
Next, Kubrick made the film that, in many ways, changed his life. His
adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange became a cause célèbre
with its unflinching and incessant scenes of violence. Kubrick’s films had
always evinced a pitiless anti-humanism, but this unforgiving misanthropy
found its most disturbing expression in a rape scene in which his probing
camera effectively became one of the assailants, as Malcolm MacDowell
warbles “Singin’ In The Rain” while cutting off Adrienne Corri’s clothes.
Kubrick’s fabled sense of control seemed to slip in the one scene that
absolutely necessitated calm detachment. The director initially weathered
the storm of complaints, but after receiving death threats and reading
reports of copycat violence, he removed the film from British cinemas. The
self-imposed ban was only rescinded after his death, in accordance with his
will.
Moving into less controversial territory, Kubrick filmed an adaptation of
William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Barry Lyndon (1975), a rake’s progress
through eighteenth-century society. The ravishingly languorous period drama
is justly celebrated for its interior scenes shot exclusively in the dim,
hazy glow of candlelight, for which Kubrick helped to invent a new kind of
photographic lens. This obsession with new technology was also evident,
possibly too evident, in The Shining, which had the first extensive use of
Steadicam in cinema history. The result was one of the most celebrated
sequences in the Kubrickian canon – a young boy pedalling his tricycle along
the labyrinthine corridors of the Overlook Hotel while the camera sinuously
follows behind.
Although he had a unique and enviable contract with Warner Bros which
essentially gave him full artistic licence and a full-time salary, Kubrick
didn’t make another film for seven years. Then came Full Metal Jacket
(1987), which followed a platoon of US Marines through military training and
into bloody conflict. The director had set himself the challenge of making a
Vietnam War film that was neither pro- nor anti-war, and that refused to
experience the battle from the soldier’s point of view. To some, Kubrick
succeeded in inventing a war movie that denied the viewer the powerful
narcotics of cheap emotion and vicarious thrills, and produced a
clear-headed, objective account of what war does to human beings. However,
compared to the total immersion models of The Deer Hunter (1978) and
Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket seemed too detached, schematic and
empty to the majority of critics. Kubrick’s overpowering sense of control
seeped through every frame, stagnating into a form of clinical minimalism.
Full Metal Jacket also suffered from Kubrick’s bloody-minded insistence on
filming in Britain: dismantled gasworks in East London were a poor
substitute for Vietnam.
By the early 1990s Kubrick was more than a director, he was a myth and a
chimera, a grandee and a hermit. However, when he employed Hollywood’s royal
couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, on Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the director
unwittingly became tabloid fodder. The fact that the film went over schedule
encouraged scurrilous reports about the explicit nature of the sex scenes
between Cruise and Kidman, and fuelled innuendo about the real reason why
Harvey Keitel left the project prematurely. It took fifteen painstaking
months to shoot, with the director sometimes insisting on more than fifty
takes for many scenes, even for an apparently simple shot of Cruise walking
through a door. Kubrick died only days after showing the completed film to
relieved executives, and his untimely death only added to the sense of
overheated anticipation.
When the film was finally released, there was a distinct feeling of
anticlimax, for Eyes Wide Shut turned out to be a rather pompous and
occasionally ludicrous melodrama. The domestic scenes between Cruise and
Kidman were extraordinarily acted and photographed, but Cruise’s descent
into sexual depravity was clearly the work of a director who didn’t get out
much and the sex orgy was unfortunately reminiscent of an ersatz Hammer
production, even down to the spooky mansion. A more fitting epitaph was
Steven Spielberg’s completion of a project that he had been working on
intermittently with Kubrick, the vastly underrated A.I. Artificial
Intelligence (2001), which balanced the sentimentality of Spielberg and the
anti-humanism of Kubrick to near-perfect Yin and Yang effect
