Kubrick’s movie career began as he concluded five years of staff employment at Look magazine, where he had performed hundreds of photography assignments. Although his first cinematic efforts were brief and unassuming documentaries, he finished the decade with what many consider one of the greatest anti-war films of all time under his belt.
With only minimal speculation, one can parallel Kubrick’s life-long enthusiasm for chess and a subject energizing much of his work: the complexity and ultimate futility of human machinations. This overview will abstain from rididly applying such a comparison, while observing its importance in Kubrick’s mid- and late-decade films.
Documentaries: Kubrick’s Apprentice Phase
In 1951, a friend convinced Kubrick to try making short movies for The March of Time, a newsreel distributor. The initial result was a 16-minute film called Day of the Fight. It features a match between two middleweight boxers, Walter Cartier and Bobby James, with Cartier emerging as the winner.
A year later Kubrick made Flying Padre, the story of a Catholic priest in rural New Mexico who reaches his parishioners via Piper Cub airplane. Next he directed The Seafarers, a union recruitment film most notable as Kubrick’s first color production. All of these projects amounted to little more than exercises for the nascent filmmaker, who soon ventured into fictional storytelling.
Fear and Desire: Kubrick and Narrative Challenges
Eager to shed the limitations of newsreels, Kubrick raised enough funds to make a modest feature and asked the poet Howard O. Sackler to write a screenplay. Their partnership spawned a 1953 film entitled Fear and Desire, the story of four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in a mysterious conflict. Although little more than an hour long, it received a brief theatrical showcasing.
Kubrick’s dissatisfaction with the project has been documented countless times, and its technical qualities are no doubt superior to its literary and dramatic ones. Nevertheless, the power of Kubrick’s later examinations of war makes one glad for the foibles of Fear and Desire. They reveal the ambition of an undeveloped artist putting his best foot forward.
Killer’s Kiss: Kubrick’s First Full-Length Feature
In 1955, Kubrick took his first stab at a crime thriller. Revisiting motifs from his first documentary, he spun a pulpy tale about a small-time boxer (Jamie Smith) , his battle against a crooked dance-hall owner (Frank Silvera), and its cause: a romantic entanglement with one of the villain’s employees (IreneKane). For an equally pulpy title, Kubrick chose Killer's Kiss.
While not necessarily a step backward from Fear and Desire, the film is largely a style piece and represents a deliberate move away from thematic ambition, favoring broad storytelling. Some critics consider it too external, with character development virtually ignored. Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, viewing the picture as a dry run for Kubrick’s next, truly accomplished, film is not unreasonable.
The Killing: Kubrick’s Film Noir Triumph
With The Killing, produced in 1956, Stanley Kubrick established his artistic voice. The narrative, firmly rooted in noir conventions, draws power not only from the darkness of its characterizations but also from the director’s pitilessly inventive eye. Kubrick, the former photographer, draws the audience into an underworld that is as aesthetically salient as it is foreboding.
It is also in The Killing that Kubrick’s chess mindset grows in relevance. Each player in the film’s collaborative crime scheme winds up a pawn in an arena of brilliant dreams and shadowy motives. One of the most notable images is the final one. Realizing he is beaten, the robbery’s mastermind (Sterling Hayden) faces down a pair of silhouetted cops who appear as pawn-like figures themselves, closing in cautiously to “topple” their prize.
Paths of Glory: War as a Power Game
His reputation spurred by the strength of The Killing, Kubrick and his new producer, James B. Harris, were able to arrange financing for the adaptation of a Humphrey Cobb novel set during World War I. Both book and film concern an ill-conceived battlefield advance that produces nothing for its arrogant French planners except hundreds of dead infantry and the need for scapegoats. At the heart of the movie is Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) who struggles to defend three men singled out for punishment.
Paths of Glory elevates the lessons Kubrick absorbed from making documentaries and genre pictures to the near-sublime. By now (1957) his work boasted a fully-developed cinematic vocabulary that included slow, sustained tracking shots, raw hand-held footage, and psychologically vivid compositions. From the palatial environs of the French officers to the filthy trenches, where Dax proves he belongs despite a tempting promotion, Paths of Glory explores a gridded cosmos of blood and brocade, mud and marble. On such a corrupted chessboard, every player is doomed.
Paths of Glory: Epilogue and Future
The director’s social pessimism aside, any discussion of his last film from the 1950s should point out the bittersweet moment at its conclusion. Dax watches as his men first jeer at, then take pity on, a young German refugee who has been paraded in front of them like an auctioned slave girl. The scene offers a tenderness which, although transformative, never appears again in a Kubrick film.
After Paths of Glory, Kubrick’s cold and deeply authentic view of human weakness switched into high gear. His next film (bypassing 1960’s Spartacus, which he essentially disowned) contains no room whatsoever for reassuring sentiments, and this pattern continues more or less unabated until the last entry in his fruitful and uncompromising career.
For further reading:
The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, by Norman Kagan. 1972, renewed 1995. Continuum, New York. ISBN: 0826404227.
Stanley Kubrick Directs, by Alexander Walker. 1972. Harcourt Brace Co. ISBN: 0156848929.
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