Movies: Stanley Kubrick's gloomy genius

Enigmatic director suffered for his art, and so did all who worked with him
Paul Whitington
Published 12/10/2014 | 02:30

Divisive cinema: Kubricks 1962 film Lolita, the story of a middle-aged college professor who becomes sexually
obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, proved controversial.
A season of Stanley Kubrick's movies is currently running at Dublin's Light House cinema. His big budget epic
Spartacus plays this afternoon at 3pm, the lesser known war drama Paths of Glory is screened tomorrow at
3.30pm, and The Shining, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Open and 2001: A
Space Odyssey will all be shown later in the month. Full details can be found at www.lighthousecinema.ie.
Fifteen years after his death, Kubrick still fascinates film-goers and critics, and the Light House festival
demonstrates his unique and enduring appeal. He's one of the very few filmmakers to have operated in a kind
of no-man's land between commercial cinema and the arthouse, and his movies combined lofty themes and
intentions with considerable box office clout.
As a result, he's impossible to categorise, and people still argue over just how good he really was. Last year,
Canadian director David Cronenberg dismissed Kubrick as a "commercially-minded" filmmaker whose movies
were a lot less "intimate and personal" than Cronenberg's own. And The Shining was "not a great film" because
Kubrick "didn't understand the genre".
The Shining was based on a book by Stephen King, who famously despised Kubrick's film and never tires of
giving out about it. Others have questioned Kubrick's lofty status, and criticised his obsessiveness,
misanthropy and supposed misogyny. And his reputation rests on just 13 completed feature films made during
a career that spanned almost 50 years. So was Stanley Kubrick really all that good, or was his talent over-

hyped?
David Cronenberg's dismissal of him as overly commercial seems ridiculous when you take a look at how
Kubrick worked. He spent years planning and designing projects, some of which never saw the light of day,
was meticulous to the point of madness on his film sets, and is supposed to have used just 1pc of the footage
he shot on The Shining.
While a hack commercial director moves from script to script with a weary shrug, Kubrick seems to have
deliberately sought out stories that exemplified his unflinchingly bleak view of human nature. And his films
contain a thorough line of distinctive themes and motifs: sounds like the work of an artist to me.
How great an artist he was is, I suppose, a matter of opinion, but sometimes people search for his greatness in
the wrong places. 2001, for instance, is full of splendid effects and technical accomplishments, but for me is
not as good or unified a feature film as Paths of Glory, while Spartacus is bland studio fare compared to
Kubrick's gruelling Vietnam-era anti-war film, Full Metal Jacket.
Like Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick was that most unfortunate of anomalies, a cinematic artist working in
Hollywood, but one could argue that Kubrick found a more successful way of making the system work for him.
He was born in the Bronx in 1928 to parents of European Jewish extraction. He was bright but rebellious at
school, and his father, Jack Kubrick enrolled his son in a chess academy to encourage his concentration, and
also bought him a Graflex camera for his 12th birthday. Kubrick would remain fascinated by chess for the rest
of his life, and by his mid-teens was roving Manhattan taking still photos.
In 1946, he began working as a photographer for Look magazine, and spent more than five years doing
portraits and photo essays, which taught him a great deal about light, film and composition. So did other
people's movies, which he'd been watching obsessively since his early teens.
In the early 1950s, he began experimenting with short films and documentaries, and in 1953, used family and
friends to cobble together enough money to make his first feature film, a thriller called Fear and Desire. It
was an odd dbut, a grim but unfocussed account of a group of soldiers who get trapped behind enemy lines.
Kubrick hated it, but the critic James Agee saw a raw talent at work, and Stanley learnt a huge amount from
it, and from an equally unsuccessful second film, the 1955 thriller Killer's Kiss. And he'd honed his talents to a
remarkable degree by the time he joined forces with producer James B Harris to make The Killing (1956).
Harris could, to some extent, be credited with having discovered Kubrick, whom he met while playing chess
on New York's Washington Square. Harris later described Kubrick as "the most intelligent, most creative person
I have ever come in contact with", and in 1955, the pair formed a production company that would last until
the early 60s.
The Killing was their first film together, and while it made a loss, it was lauded by the critics, who praised its
fluid, pared-back style. Sterling Hayden starred as a veteran con who plans one last heist at a racetrack, and
in Kubrick's hands, this hackneyed storyline was turned into something urgent, and memorable.
His next film, and my favourite Kubrick film, was a tense First World War drama based on a true story. Paths
of Glory starred Kirk Douglas as a French infantry commander who reluctantly leads his men on a suicidal
assault on a heavily defended hilltop. And when the mission fails, he defends three men accused of
cowardice. It was tense, gripping and beautifully made, and ranks alongside Renoir's Regle du Jeu as one of
the finest anti-war films.
Paths of Glory put Stanley Kubrick on the map, and his methods impressed Kirk Douglas so much that he hired

him to direct his sprawling epic, Spartacus. Douglas was both producer and star of the film, and he and
Kubrick quickly fell out over the director's perfectionism. Douglas later said of him, "you don't have to be nice
to be talented".
Kubrick was never fond of the finished film. His frustrations on the set of Spartacus made him all the more
determined to control every single aspect of his filmmaking, and an unplanned move to Europe in the early
1960s would help him make this happen.
In 1962, Stanley Kubrick arrived in England to make a film based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. The film,
which starred James Mason and Peter Sellers, told the story of a middle-aged college professor who becomes
sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old. Unsurprisingly, Lolita proved controversial and divisive, but Kubrick
never returned to Hollywood, and would spend the rest of his life in England.
He moved into a grand country house near London with his fourth wife, Christiane Harlan, and settled down to
make the films for which he'd always be remembered. His 1964 movie Dr Strangelove was an extraordinarily
bold and original project, a film that dared to treat the prospect of nuclear war as a comedy.
Peter Sellers, taking on three simultaneous performances, played the American president, a British Royal Air
Force officer and a demented former Nazi scientist who play various roles in taking the US to the brink of war
with Russia.
It was very funny, and very dark, and underlined Kubrick's bleak view of human nature.
Some critics still consider 2001: A Space Odyssey as one of the greatest films ever made. It was certainly
ambitious, starting in the Stone Age and arcing through humanity's evolution to our conquest of outer space.
The special effects were incredible, and its style would prove hugely influential.
The success of 2001 allowed Kubrick to strike an extraordinary deal with Warner Brothers, who gave him total
control of every aspect of his films, which they would produce sight unseen. Over the next 30 years, he would
only make five more of them, but none were dull.
His 1971 drama, A Clockwork Orange, was based on Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel and considered so
transgressive in terms of violence that it got blamed for a series of copycat attacks and was withdrawn from
the public domain by Kubrick himself. It has its fans but is hard to watch.
In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick used highly sensitive lenses developed by NASA to allow him to light his meandering
18th-century drama almost entirely by candlelight.
The resulting film looked sumptuous, and painterly, but ran for over three hours and was extremely slow in
places.
The Shining still divides critics, it's entered the popular zeitgeist and is full of absolutely unforgettable images
and sequences. Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was released just months after his death in the
spring of 1999: a sexual odyssey starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, it was well short of his best.
But then, his best was so much better than almost anyone else's. And if Kubrick's obsessive investigations of
the barbarity that lies beneath the veneer of civilisation can be hard to take at times, his technical mastery
and wild visual flights of imagination mark him out as one of the 20th Century's true cinematic greats.
Stanley Kubrick's legendary obsession with perfection reached new heights on The Shining, his wild and crazy
adaptation of Stephen King's 1977 horror novel. King was flattered when he got a phone call out of the blue
from Kubrick about a possible adaptation, but would later describe the film as "a fancy car without an

engine". When Kubrick was working on the screenplay, King received phone calls at three in the morning
asking him if he believed in God. And things got even tougher once the actors came along.
Scatman Crothers had to slam a car door 70 times before Kubrick decided the shot looked right. And Jack
Nicholson became so tired of script changes that he learnt his lines at the last minute. Hardest hit of all was
poor Shelley Duvall. Kubrick constantly badgered her about her performance, and made her do the scene
where she comes up the stairs waving a baseball bat 127 times. No wonder she looks so demented in the final
cut.
Indo Review

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