Stanley Kubrick 1928-1999

1: John Coulthart

Welles: Among those whom I would call ‘younger generation’ Kubrick appears to me to be a giant.
Interviewer: But, for example, The Killing was more or less a copy of The Ashphalt Jungle?
Welles: Yes, but The Killing was better. The problem of imitation leaves me indifferent, above all if the imitator succeeds in surpassing the model... What I see in him is a talent not possessed by the great directors of the generation immediately preceding his... Perhaps this is because his temperament comes closer to mine.
Orson Welles, from a 1965 interview.

One of the more notable things about the obituaries following Stanley Kubrick’s death in March this year [1999] was the lack of consensus with regard to his achievements. All were agreed that the man had made great films, but which films those might be varied widely, the choices spanning his entire career:
Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Paths of Glory, even The Killing was mentioned. A lack of accord would seem inevitable, given such a varied career. Critic David Thomson has always chosen The Shining, citing its fairy tale qualities and a perceived autobiographical subtext about artistic crisis (‘Why does Jack Nicholson look and dress like Kubrick?’ he asks). In France the often vilified Barry Lyndon and A Clockwork Orange (L’Orange Mecanique) still receive cult veneration.

After the death of Orson Welles in 1985, Kubrick became (arguably, of course) the greatest living filmmaker, the dubious status of ‘living legend’ having been achieved a decade earlier. (In Sight & Sound’s 1992 Critics Top 10 2001 crept into tenth place, the only film listed by a living director.) The international acclaim, his presence on English soil and refusal to barter with hacks was, no doubt, one cause of the extraordinary level of carping in the March notices. Another would be due to a common syndrome, that of intelligence and popular culture being seen as mutually exclusive. Where cinema is concerned, we live in times which, as Robin Wood once said, ‘regards Heaven’s Gate as ‘a disaster’ and Return of the Jedi as ‘a triumph’’. Orson Welles himself is rarely mentioned without reference to sherry commercials and, in other quarters, James Joyce is routinely described as ‘unreadable’ (this, from people who buy Nick Hornby books). In an atmosphere of elevated mediocrity, Kubrick’s powerful intellect and artistry, combined with an understandable reluctance to talk to people who think Ossessione is a brand of perfume, formed unavoidable provocations. The media landscape has changed enormously since the days when Kubrick would still appear at the premier of Lolita; it’s hard to imagine John Ford or Sam Peckinpah tolerating an interrogation from Jamie Theakston or Magenta DeVine. The voracious appetites of style mags and entertainment TV demand a constant drip-feed of interviews, talk show appearances and promo tours (backed by massive PR budgets). Anyone who doesn’t play the game is regarded as insane or as some kind of traitor. To be a name director working with ‘stars’ verges on the suicidal. Those two great elusive Thomases, Pynchon and Harris, both also taking years between works, escape censure by being mere writers. No one cares about Pynchon (he’s in Joyce’s ‘unreadable’ camp) while Harris has film gossip and a miscast Anthony Hopkins to take the heat away from him.

Nearly all the post mortem articles managed to repeat the standard litany of Kubrick complaints which have dogged him like the sherry ads dogged Welles. One of the worst, repeated in a recent biography, was that he was the bane of actors. If so, then Sterling Hayden, Timothy Carey, Joe Turkel, Peter Sellers, Leonard Rossiter, Margaret Tyzack, Patrick Magee, Godfrey Quigley and Steven Berkoff et al, were gluttons for punishment, having come back for more when asked. Philip Stone, presumably bidding for a BFI endurance award, appeared in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and The Shining. Leon Vitali, who played the elder Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, had such a terrible time of it he left acting completely to join Kubrick’s permanent production staff. It seems significant that most complaints about Kubrick from the acting side came from those with prodigious egos: Kirk Douglas (who described him as ‘a talented shit’), Malcom McDowell (‘inhuman’) and, on One Eyed Jacks, that paragon of flexibility Marlon Brando. No one who was as difficult as is so often claimed would have had talents such as Ken Adam and John Alcott returning constantly to work on his films, nor inspired such loyalty in those around him [see Anthony Frewin’s remarks in the current issue].

Invariably these kind of ill-informed comments say more about the critic than about Kubrick or, more importantly, his films. A metropolitan media that measures artistic success by the quantities of cocaine snorted in a Dean Street bar has few terms of reference for dealing with someone who chooses to sit at home for most of their life. Hence the recurrent headlines: ‘Kubrick the recluse’, ‘Kubrick the secretive, paranoid control-freak’.

Focus on Kubrick’s eccentricities often ignored the accuracy of his artistic choices. What is still seen as perversity in making a Vietnam film in the ruins of Beckton gasworks is, when the equivalent scenes are compared with Gustav Hasford’s novel, a stroke of brilliance which improves on the original by taking it out of its over-familiar jungle locale and into an area of potent metaphor. The entire last quarter of Full Metal Jacket has an nightmare quality as the film spirals through multiple deaths into darkness (with a Rolling Stones’ coda of ‘Paint It Black’). The flaming ruins seem to reach to infinity; where a jungle setting would connect only with Vietnam, the rubbled streets are the theatre of all present and future warfare, corresponding to Berlin, Beirut, Sarajevo and wherever the apocalypse is scheduled to visit next. And what other director anywhere, having shown his matchless ability to choose the perfect classical selection, would have the audacity and consummate good taste to pick out ‘Surfin’ Bird’ by The Trashmen?

This ability to crystalise ideas and metaphors in unforgettable images (the bone to spacecraft transformation in 2001) set Kubrick apart from his contemporaries, and his concentration on ideas as well as story makes him seem increasingly unique. Even acknowledged admirers like Michael Mann and Ridley Scott are unwilling or unable to compete on this level. Fortunately we have a final film left to see (setting aside the troubling presence of Tom Cruise; Ryan O’Neal was also pretty wooden during his seventies heyday). Eyes Wide Shut seems to bring Kubrick’s career to a fitting close, based as it is on Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle. Schnitzler also wrote the play La Ronde which was filmed in 1950 by Max Ophüls, virtually the only director Kubrick ever referred to in interviews as a subject of admiration (by coincidence, Nicole Kidman was acting in The Blue Room, Howard Brenton’s version of La Ronde, shortly after completing her duties on the film). Eyes Wide Shut has already caused a stir in the US by having to be altered to secure an ‘R’ rating (as A Clockwork Orange was before it).

To be controversial to the last is the least one can expect of any artistic maverick. Kubrick, king of the Hollywood Mavericks, was always more than that.

Eyes Half Open

2: Gerald Houghton

Stanley Kubrick never worked with Robert De Niro, but the two would have been well suited. At least, the old De Niro, Method Man, researching roles into the ground. Not today’s slack-handed, money for old rope De Niro. Fanaticism surrounded both. Imagine them nervously circling until one or the other dropped dead. Stanley, as it happens. After all, if you can spend two years hammering Tom Cruise out of shape, imagine having an actor.

Of course, bloody-mindedness serves reputation. A Clockwork Orange was pulled from distribution by its maker - speculate amongst yourselves - but suffice to note it ran a year theatrically first. Whatever else Kubrick was, he wasn’t stupid. But it’s unavailability - backstreet video frisson - that keeps the film alive in the minds of successive generations. And just as well because experience reveals it as a clever, elegant but ultimately hollow brew; alcopop movie-making. While it remains unseen it retains authority.

But then it’s always that way with Stanley. You talk-up his insipid Lolita (not necessarily his fault, but he should’ve known better), or the relentlessly smart-arse sledge-hammer satire Dr Strangelove, the film which effectively did for Sidney Lumet’s smaller, more revealing Fail Safe. Sadly, any film that finds an aircraft hanger-sized space at its heart to indulge Peter Sellers’ gaseous ego is not to be trusted.

Or Full Metal Jacket, that game of two halves: the first a savage, nightmarish vision of an engourged US military machine, and - technically - quite brilliant; the second a stilted, piss-poor attempt to stuff a few palm trees into Docklands and play Platoon. We don’t care because Kubrick doesn’t. Or The Shining, again, a film that flies in its first hour - a dazzling, genuinely terrifying take on The Old Haunted House - only to collapse in on itself in a series of half-hearted set-pieces that would shame even Stephen King. It’s as though Kubrick watched half a dozen horror flicks and drew up a big checklist. One suspects that Stanley drew up a lot of big checklists.

No, better we remember him for the ones that are seldom spoken of. The Killing, the movie that taught Quentin Tarantino everything he knows, is a wonderfully taught film noir. With a screenplay by novelist Jim Thompson (from a novel by Lionel White) it, rather like Tourneur’s astonishing Out Of The Past, all but rewrites the rules. It’s a dizzying movie, cut in a series of explicitly timed flashbacks and cast with the kind of worried, hewn faces that tell you more than mere story ever can: Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook, Jr., Vince Edwards, Colleen Gray, Timothy Carey. ‘It’s basically cruelty heaped on top of cruelty; nobody can get it right so nobody gets anything,’ wrote novelist Barry Gifford. ‘End of moral, end of story.’

Or Paths of Glory, so powerful an indictment of the World War I French military authorities that it was banned in that country for eighteen years. Again shot in black and white, it remains possibly Kubrick at his most self-consciously stylised, heavy with Georg Krause’s virtuoso camerawork and arguably the best performance Kirk Douglas ever gave. The outcome is inevitable and the film’s eye never less than clear. As Full Metal Jacket so painfully proves, rarely did Stanley Kubrick care very much about anyone but in Paths of Glory he cared almost too much.

Or that most reviled of his works, 1975’s Barry Lyndon, made on the back of the long-cherished but ultimately doomed Napoleon project (too autobiographical?) The film is notable for its singular lack of anything approaching drama or insight in its cardboard cut-out characters as it traces the picaresque but ultimately lifeless ‘adventures’ of Thackeray’s Irish hero-cum-rogue through 18th century Europe. Ryan O’Neal, in particular, would be more at home in Madame Tussaud’s than these sumptuous sets. And yet three hours pass in a trice. Barry Lyndon is a triumph of style over substance, finding the slimmest of threads upon which to hang one of the most lavish films of its period. That it won Oscars for its photography, adapted score, sets and costumes tells you everything. Except that Stanley was busying himself over this anachronism just at the time when Hollywood was enjoying its golden era: The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Chinatown. His steadfast refusal to leave Europe clearly worked against him, and Warners did no favours by indulging his every whim.

Of the big films, only 2001: A Space Odessey stands up. As a screen-reading of Arthur C. Clarke it’s remarkable - a film as bloodless, as utterly devoid of passion as only Clarke’s writing knows how. Which is not to say that, as a film, it’s not brimming with simply astounding moments, from the clinical interiors, to the balletic space sequences themselves. Even in the days of super-power CGI - despite them even - these remain some of the most beautiful and convincing effects even committed to celluloid. The end, though, is still post-hippie bollocks that only works visually - and then only on the biggest of big screens. Rumours persist that Kubrick himself had remastered the film for another go round, starting on New Year’s Eve 2000. But something similar was muttered five years ago about Orange. Stanley Kubrick rumours are worth about as much as New Labour pledges.

No, 2001 is little more than the longest, most expensive showreel in cinema history, and only its considerable legacy gives it legs - for a great Simpsons gag (can’t say fairer), and as inspiration for gay indie-auteur Todd Haynes’ suffocatingly brilliant [SAFE]. An earth-bound, essentially realist examination of late twentieth century paranoia (and look no further if you want that note-perfect, one-shot Millennium Movie experience), [SAFE] brilliantly parlays Kubrick’s stultifying atmospheres, finding within them the space for intellectual punch (something conspicuously missing from the original) and real emotional engagement (ditto). [SAFE] is a great film by one of the world’s current great film-makers; 2001 is a fascinating exercise by arguably its greatest technician.

In later years Kubrick seldom broke ground, although rumours (more rumours) persist that he was talking up doing interviews on the back of Eyes Wide Shut. As if. Unusually, he was photographed late last year [1998] in the West End leaving a performance of The Blue Room with Nicole Kidman. Other than that one of the very few times in the last decade Kubrick did anything outside of an iron-ringed movie set was in 1990, penning an introduction for the published screenplays of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s masterly Decalogue sequence. Men, let us remember, able to make and release the entire Three Colours trilogy (films worth more individually than Kubrick’s canon as a whole) in less time than Stanley took simply to get Eyes Wide Shut in the can. Men with ‘the very rare ability to dramatise their ideas rather than just talking about them.’ The one trick even the ‘great’ Stanley Kubrick never mastered.