We continue our look at the films of Stanley Kubrick.
Back in June, we began taking a look at the film works of one of the most dedicated directors to ever work behind a camera. His name was Stanley Kubrick and we now continue our look at the man's life work and his continued growth as a filmmaker.
Lolita
(1962) 8/10
What could be referred to as his first unfettered
masterpiece where he retained full and final cut, Stanley Kubrick's adaptation
of Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita is an ironic black comedy about a middle
aged man named Humbert Humbert (James Mason) who grows infatuated and obssessed
with a teenage girl named Lolita (Sue Lyon).
He goes so far as to marrying the girl's neurotic and sexually
frustrated mother Charlotte (Shelly Winters) to remain close to Lolita. As the marriage grows sour, Charlotte
discovers via secret diary Humbert's passion for her daughter and disdain for
herself. Committing suicide upon the
news, Humbert and Lolita begin an affair and journey across the nation, posing
as father and daughter as they shack up from hotel to hotel. Throughout the loosely romantic sojourn,
their relationship is assailed by the constant interruptions of Claire Quilty
(Peter Sellers, in his first multiple-role effort for Kubrick), an egotistical
playwright with equal infatuation with Lolita.
Adorning several disguises including the ridiculous and cartoonish
German Dr. Zempf, he gradually manages to woo Lolita away from Humbert before
she too bails and winds up marrying an everyman. Humbert vows revenge upon Quilty for stealing
his love away from him, and the two jilted elders find one another in a deadly
standoff.
Despite the
impositions Kubrick had to overcome, Lolita was Kubrick's first picture
free of conceding to studio wishes, which would have opted for a more
optimistic ending. This was the first
time Kubrick's narration bore a truly subversive quality, one which would reach
it's transgressive height with Alex in Clockwork Orange. We listen to the elegantly mannered Humbert
Humbert with an impish smirk of appreciation as we share in his musings about
Lolita's beauty in contrast to his wife Charlotte's repulsiveness. Second to Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life,
which starred James Mason as a teacher who becomes addicted to his medication,
Humbert Humbert is Mason's finest hour as a middle aged man smitten by youthful
sexuality. Few actors had the capacity
or fearlessness to take on such a difficult and controversial role (although
years later Jeremy Irons played the iconic role in Adrian Lyne's 1997
remake). Shelley Winters as Charlotte is
delightfully obnoxious and almost desperate in her sexual hunger. Peter Sellers' multi-role casting as the
mercurial Clare Quilty can't help but foreshadow his work in Dr. Strangelove. And finally, Sue Lyon gives a charmingly
funny performance as the beautiful nymphet at the center of everyone's
attention.
Almost impossibly
daring for it's day, Lolita was controversial from both it's literary
inception to it's cinematic adaptation.
Fighting against a strict censorship board, Kubrick was forced to
de-eroticize many of the more risque elements detailing the sexual relationship
between Humbert and Lolita in favor of implication and suggestion. One of it's most daring sequences involves
Humbert and his current wife Charlotte in bed, with Humbert gazing intently at
a photograph of Lolita as he engages Charlotte.
Although Kubrick managed to get around many of the censorship
stipulations, he later lamented making the film in the cultural climate of the
time. The film was given an X rating,
which at the time barred anyone under the age of 16 from viewing the film. Still, in spite of the cards stacked against
'Lolita', as a film it's a brilliant tragicomedy of the allure of youthful
sexual obssession as well as the consequences resulting from obsessive's
realization of Lolita's unattainability.
Much like Kubrick's final film Eyes Wide Shut, Lolita is
less about illicit sexual content as it is about infatuation and dirty thoughts. While Lolita laughs with it's hopeless
protagonists advances, the film also sees Humbert's mindset as crippling.
Dr.
Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) 9/10
Around the time of the
Cuban Missile Crisis and world fears of nuclear holocaust emerged this scathing
sociopolitical satire about mad General who accidentally triggers World War
III. Imagine the most terrifying subject
matter told as a goofball, almost slapstick, comedy, replete with self-aware
multiple roleplaying by the great comic actor Peter Sellers, and you have a
rough idea of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Originally intended as a straight faced thriller, Kubrick reimagined the
scenario as an impish joke, creating a timeless masterwork of comedy, satire,
and intellectual cinema.
On an ordinary day, a
psychotic General named Jack T. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) orders an impromptu
nuclear strike on Russia, cutting off all contact from himself hidden deep
within his military base as the military and political powers that be scramble
to solve the crisis. Captain Mandrake
(one of three roles Peter Sellers would play), locked within the base by
General Ripper, is the only one who stands in the way of arbitrary annihilation
of the human race. The film cross-cuts
between the jet fighters pursuing their targets in Russia, General Ripper and
Captain Mandrake under fire, and largely, a massive war room with a circular
table and a large computer board displaying the world and the location of the
jet planes. It's within the iconic war
room set a majority of Dr. Strangelove will take place, with everything
from serious minded formalities to slipping on banana peels, per se, all the
while regarding it's players with the precise, careful distance Kubrick would
become known for.
Opposite the peacenik
US president (Seller's second role) is General Buck Turgidson (George C.
Scott), an obnoxious blowhard caught between solving the problem and upholding
the pride of the military. Enter Dr.
Strangelove (Seller's third and most famous role), a German ex-Nazi scientist
who now serves as the president's scientific advisor. Wheelchair bound with a thick accent and a
bionic arm with a mind of it's own, it's the precis of the film's attitude
towards it's subject matter, simultaneously hilarious and horrifying. Running throughout the film is a vague sense
of war either as a sexual act or war and sex going hand in hand, reinforced by
suggestive phallic images including an opening sequence of jet refueling set to
romantic music. There's also the names
themselves, such as Buck Turgidson, and Strangelove himself. Turgidson's bikini-clad babe who takes it
upon herself to mediate important military calls and phone the war room out of
boredom.
Subversive and
satirical, Dr. Strangelove was an instant success and solidified
Kubrick's reputation as a brilliant provocateur and master class artist. The film was nominated for Four Academy
Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. While some preferred a straightfoward
treatise of the story to Kubrick's incendiary jaunt, it's that very underhanded
way of approaching the prospect of obliterating all of mankind that gives the
film it's power and timelessness.
There's a moment near the beginning of the film where Buck Turgidson
remarks the president should be more concerned about the fate of humanity than
'your image in the history books'. As
history will prove, time and time again, it's innate for mankind to eradicate
itself, often arbitrarily and in hindsight with a sense of lunatic
buffoonery.
2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968) 10/10
Early
into the making of what would become his greatest cinematic achievement (and my
personal favorite film of all time), Kubrick began research into what
extraterrestrial life might actually look like.
Dozens of designs were sketched of tall, lanky aliens (some of which may
have been repurposed in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third
Kind). Eventually, Kubrick would
jettison all the sketches and opted instead for a tall, rectangular black
object with a chorus of shrieking, otherworldly voices. When asked why there aren't any aliens or
space monsters of any kind found within the film, Kubrick replied 'we cannot
show the face of God'.
Ultimately, 2001: A
Space Odyssey isn't so much a science fiction epic as it is about man's
connection with God. The film is told in
three acts: 'The Dawn of Man', which chronicles the primate's evolution from
animal to thinking creature and eventual mankind; 'Jupiter Mission: 18 Months
Later', which develops into a thriller pitting man against manmade machinery;
and finally, 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite', which takes the hero of the
film (and us) into infinity (afterlife or extraterrestrial landscape?). Because it divides the story of man from his
evolutionary roots to his ability to create civilization before finally dying,
it paints a picture of the ordinary human experience as one transcending space
and time. We all need to be taught how
to walk and fend for ourselves before staking our own territory in the world
before death brings us into a new consciousness and possible rebirth into the
world of the living.
The film is largely
silent with exception to long passages of musical montage, celebrating man's
technological innovation as well as our mutual dependence on it. Sound itself is unique in space, with the
only sound in space being dead silence.
Contrary to the loud rumbles of ships flying through space or explosions
in space, we hear nothing in spite of seeing everything. As for the cast populating the film, Kubrick
intentionally keeps his characterizations flat with exception to HAL, the most
human character in the film that happens to be a machine. That mankind with his formalities is far less
personal and intimate in purveying emotion than his manmade machine is
telling. When HAL becomes truly self
aware and turns on his human crew, much like the opening 'Dawn of Man' act, man
is forced to kill in order to survive.
While some complain
about an inability to comprehend Kubrick's cool interpretation of Arthur C.
Clarke's revolutionary science fiction novel, answers to all the questions it
poses is not Kubrick's aim. Kubrick
himself described as 'having the ability to describe stars and galaxies with
the same poignancy one has when talking about children'. Like children coming into the world, when
looking at our hands and feet used to walk this planet, one can't help but
wonder just why we are here and what is our purpose in life? Is there a God? Is there intelligent life out in the
universe? Whatever you believe or
disbelieve in, 2001: A Space Odyssey conveys the spectrum of human
experience as one beyond words.
A
Clockwork Orange (1971) 10/10
If 2001: A Space
Odyssey aimed for the Heavens, Kubrick's dystopian nightmare A Clockwork
Orange promptly yanks us right back into Hell. For all of the prior film's cleanliness and a
sense of hope, A Clockwork Orange deliberately undoes everything set up
by 2001 while referencing it throughout all the same. Either a sequel of sorts or taking place
around the same period of time, A Clockwork Orange explodes onscreen
with Alex, an evil young hoodlum roaming the derelict streets of old England
with his band of droogs, fellow wicked gang members prowling for the next
vagrant to attack, woman to rape and man to rob. Increasingly malevolent and amoral, Alex is
eventually caught by police after committing his first murder and is sentenced
to prison. Incarcerated, Alex learns of
a revolutionary treatment which could spell his freedom. After a few choice words and actions, Alex is
selected to undergo the Ludivico treatment, a kind of brainwashing technique
involving being forced to watch violent films while drugs injected into his
system cause him to grow physically ill at the sight of violence as well as
sex. Alex is pronounced cured and free
to go, but crippled within, he is unable to defend himself against retaliation
as he crosses paths with one former victim of his after another.
Decidedly anarchic and
made in a fashion almost antithetical to 2001, Clockwork Orange
forms a kind of yin-yang contrast to the 1968 science fiction epic. Where 2001 was a big budget, G rated
effort, Clockwork Orange is a low budget, X rated (at the time)
effort. Throughout the movie, references
are dropped about 2001 such as when the bum Alex and his droogs attack
refers to 'men on the moon, and men spinning around the Earth' instead of
paying attention to 'law and order'. The
old writer who is assaulted during the infamous home-invasion sequence is
typing on a red IBM typewriter (opposite HAL).
Alex happens upon a copy of the soundtrack to 2001 at the record
store, which itself resembles the stargate sequence concluding 2001 with
it's psychedelic colors and lighting perfectly poised symmetrically on both
sides of the frame. Alex wandering about
his home in his undies as he comes upon his parents' stereo speakers on the
wall, positioned in the same spots and shapes of the brief shot of the ships
guiding Dave Bowman during the Stargate scene.
And of course, there's the final scene of Alex looking at the camera,
regarding the audience with an impish grin (is Alex the Star Child?!). It's as though Kubrick is closing all the
doors he opened in 2001 with Clockwork Orange.
A Clockwork Orange
finds Kubrick at the height of his creative powers, cutting through one's
barriers and aversion to criminal behavior by having Alex talk to us via
voiceover narration. We partake in the
joy of Alex's wrongdoing, highlighted by the ironic use of exultant classical
music against a violent and ugly backdrop.
Alex brings us closer into the mind of an unbridled sociopath than we're
comfortable with, and worse still, Alex seems to suggest there's a little bit
of himself in every one of us. One of
the strongest sequences in the film involves a public demonstration of the
Ludivico technique, as Alex is beaten by a man who insults him, unable to fight
back, before being tempted by a full-frontal confrontation with a naked woman. As Alex looks up from underneath, his eyes
open with fear before regarding the sight with awe and eventual desire,
intercut with the woman's bare breasts filling the frame. The choice to eat the forbidden fruit is
right in front of us, and most disturbing of all, Alex's inner impulses (though
unable to act upon them post-treatment) are not dissimilar from that of our
own.
Barry
Lyndon (1975) 10/10
Continuing
his exploration of society equaling itself out when one particular member tries
to cheat his way to success is Stanley Kubrick's achingly beautiful period
piece, Barry Lyndon. Loosely
based on William Makepeace Thackeray's 1844 novel, the film transports us into
18th century England and follows the exploits, rise and subsequent
fall of an ordinary Irishman, Barry Lyndon (Ryan O'Neal). Lydon will do just
about anything to get where he needs to be, including switching sides from the
British to the Prussian army, competing (and often succeeding) at duels, card
cheating, and marrying into a wealthy family.
An omniscient narrator serves to snarkily undermine everything we see
Barry do, which also serves as something of a God's eye view with respect to
Barry. Where Clockwork Orange
took you right into the head of Alex, Barry Lyndon deliberately keeps
you at arm's length, even inviting us to impishly laugh at Barry's plight,
however tragic his eventual downfall becomes later.
Inarguably Kubrick's
most beautiful picture to date, with lush set design recreating a Britain of
the past and epic vistas of the Irish landscape, Kubrick sought to light scenes
with a technique not utilized again until Peter Greenaway's The
Draughtsman's Contract would come out: candlelight. Using lenses for NASA space travel,
painstakingly retrofitted to Kubrick's own cameras, Kubrick was able to create
some of the most painterly, evocative, and gorgeous images ever put on
film. If anything, it makes the ambience
of candlelight even prettier than it might actually look in person. Makeup, key to the period, is also essential,
with the pale-faced makeup and black beauty marks on people's faces alongside
their costumes and heavily adorned wigs transporting us back in time. This is one of the few reasons to buy an HDTV
and a Blu-ray player.
In terms of casting, Barry
Lyndon has the largest crossover of actors from Clockwork Orange,
with Patrick Magee (the victimized writer) as Barry's right hand card cheater,
and the prison pastor cast as Barry's uncle.
This would also mark the second collaboration between Kubrick and actor
Philip Stone (Alex's Dad from Clockwork Orange and Delbert Grady from The
Shining). Most importantly, Barry's
arch rival and voice of reason in the film, Lord Bullington, is played by Leon
Vitali, who at that moment would become Kubrick's longtime personal assistant
and manager of his estate. With Kubrick
long since past, it was Vitali who supervised all the digital transfers of
Kubrick's work to hi-definition video.
Vitali himself would act in Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut
as the red-hooded priest at the masquerade ball orgy sequence.
Despite the
overwhelming opulence on display and winning 4 Academy Awards, the 3 hour piece
didn't bode well with audiences expecting another Clockwork Orange ala Tom
Jones, and sadly the film was a box office failure and remains among his
least seen masterworks to date. That
said, it's an essential title to any home video library and is a bit like looking
at a coffee table book of ornate paintings from the past. Although a financial disappointment for
Kubrick, this wouldn't deter the strength of his output when he set his eyes on
a far more commercial venture, an adaptation of popular horror novelist Stephen
King's The Shining.
-Andrew Kotwicki
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