Kubrick in Context

ONE GOOD THING the director cults of the past decade have achieved is recognition that behind a film camera is a man to be held responsible. Film, of course, is a collaborative medium, and a popular one, and its most interesting aspects usually range over nations and eras and industry trends rather than the small detail of a well-shot sequence. But once you assign responsibility to a director, label him an artist, propagandist, or hack, you can deal with issues mixed with flesh and blood, making for more than a lively read: a critic tries to guide the intelligent subject, or scourge the dolt. One of the best traditions James Agee set was bringing whole biographies to bear on points that matter.

Alas, today's press background in general tends more towards gargle than vitriol. Peter Bogdanovich, film buff extraordinaire and doubtless nice guy, fashions a Sherwood Anderson-cum-Texas dialect-cum-hokum pastiche, The Last Picture Show, and gets praised by Life for bringing life back to movies. Stanley Kubrick--more impressive pictorially, bearded and brooding--reeks of intellect for as stodgy a publication as Saturday Review.

This is both newsworthy and reprehensible. For years, it was impossible for film staffers to get such (relative) creative luminaries as John Huston and Orson Welles on any general mag's cover. Now, with cash-trickle, a bevy of blurbs, and disappointing product, technicians get the publicity. And inordinate faith in mass culture receives another well-deserved kick in the head.

Bogdanovich will surely fade. A good man for acting, and not without a certain low-profile taste, he will continue to make movies which, as he put it, "show a specific emotion on the screen," and camp-followers soon will tire of his one-note chords.

STANLEY KUBRICK is a more lamentable and interesting case. Throughout his career, he has circumvented the show-biz celebrity that a Bogdanovich begs for. From his early experimental failures through his experimental success--2001--he has clung to his artistic ideals, making relevant and innovative films, while commanding big-studio budgets. No other American director has matched his consistency. John Ford palmed off three sentimental pot-boilers for every gritty piece of goods he managed; for long stretches Huston went for cash alone, and then stopped caring at all; soreheads Welles and Peckinpah get fired often. Kubrick, however, was too headstrong to succumb to yesmen and too foxy for the cashiers.

With three heavy money-rakers under his belt, he has boldly re-emerged into media athletics--to the extent that a Warner Brothers exec has resigned due to Kubrick's authoritarian control of his latest picture's release. Unfortunately, A Clockwork Orange makes the director's now-famous integrity seem like that of the repentant Chasids, who chased back to God by bricking themselves into a 4x5 hovel with nothing but a palette, a Bible, and the sky above them. Bigger-hearted men carve out their own living communities and bring back McCabe and Mrs. Miller, or, better still, a Wild Bunch. Hardier minds document the ravages of society up-front, eschewing allegory, in an Hour of the Furnaces. Kubrick, always an ironist, maximum exploiter of minor tools and passions, stays in a London studio--and cuts himself off from whatever roots his art grew from.

Almost every frame in A Clockwork Orange is dead, pre-planned to the last actor's detail, and predictably sensationalist. Kubrick's gelled his fluids in a concept-ridden icebox: his effects misfire because they are backed neither by rigorously developed intellectual argument nor compassion. From the moment that the orange and blue credit backgrounds start to work on us, followed by that long dolly which grows from Malcolm McDowell's leer to encompass the entire terribly-clever Korova Milk bar set, we are begged to participate in a mere thrill show. A proud Kubrick tells his interviewers how people may come to identify with McDowell as they do with Crookback in Richard III. But both Shakespeare and the original Burgess novel obviously present greater challenges: complex worlds beyond the single demented viewpoint of alternatives lost to antisocial action.

KUBRICK ONCE made a better film which dealt with violent crime and threw some cynical side-long darts at society-at-large via that arena. This was The Killing, his third production and first real success. A thieves-falling-out caper movie, its characters were so overheated that the action verged on black comedy, but they were recognizable enough to retain sympathy when necessary: Kubrick here walked a much tighter rope than the one he toes in Clockwork, Sterling Hayden played a savvy gunny, Elisha Cook the pathetic hen-pecked cashier who cracks--and kills the rest of Hayden's crew. A grotesquely muscled bit-player voiced the director's point-of-view (in an incoherent Russian accent): the crook is an attractive figure when the values of traditional heroes are in question, but his actual motives are mundane, and he's apt to be a bit dumb. In addition to story, Kubrick caught the hypocritical impersonality of 50's surfaces--in an airport where Hayden is finally caught, or a bar where a cop gets a share of the take.

The film was more involving than Clock work; more understated, thus more intellectually palatable; and it was better-made. Kubrick used Lucien Ballard's hard-edged black-and-white photography in the rangy prose style of most good American narrative films. Since the caper gives events a trap-like structure, without closing out the growth of characterization, Ballard's lights make the settings eloquent without making them overbearing. When Cook is shot by his wife, he falls where his apartment's worn carpet catches streetlight. A parakeet screeches over the punk's fallen body, and the scene and the sound and Cook's tortured look express the squelching of a small man's daydreams.

THE KILLING was not an important movie, but it was a good genre piece. Encouragingly, Kubrick's career showed growth in areas where this crime flick was weakest. Paths of Glory, his next, was one of the best American films of the fifties. Though it's somehow acquired a treacly pacifist reputation, it's actually World War I attrition portrayed by a man who could back wars--were they not all fought so stupidly. Kubrick took a single incident, a suicide mission commanded from afar by an ambitious martinet, and revealed 1917 savagery in microcosm: fixed infantry moving against armed fortifications, prey to flairs and automatic weapons; military structures staffed by lawyers at the trenches and deadwood aristocrats at the drafting-table; calls to duty and service which can't quell the fears of men in torpor. Kubrick stuck so truly and unobtrusively to his debunking overview that the irony of his "brotherhood of man" finish goes overlooked. True, a fraulein warbling a love-song reduces French soldiers to tears. But we know that their captain only gives them a moment, that the decimated ranks will soon be further stricken.

Paths tested Kubrick's seriousness and showed off his developing cinematic abilities. Swirling tracking-shots caught military decorum and ballroom grace, and Kubrick's own hand-held fieldwork surpasses, in its sense of messy, forced kineticism, anything in All Quiet On the Western Front.

Kubrick's next two works, though failures, were hopeful ones. Sparticus was, as Stanley Kauffmann said, a first-rate circus, giving the director a chance to have fun with blockbuster sets and length. Lolita lacked a painfully necessary erotic core, but it had, in Peter Sellers, a brilliant Quilty. It was with Dr. Strangelove that Kubrick again fulfilled his talent--what he accomplished, not only in story structure and images but with parodic dialogue and commentary as well, needs little more appreciation than it has already, justly, received.

2001 WAS both a great achievement and, perhaps, a creatively suicidal move for Kubrick. Five years of technological horse-play is enough for many engineers, let alone film directors. Kubrick picked perhaps the only subject which could sustain such extended self-conscious artistry; for once the medium was the message, and by following the shifts of shapes and the repetition of frames and camera movements, you experienced the space flight growth of non-Newtonian physics and non-Euclidean geometry. Despite Kubrick's avowed Platonism, his contention that man is moving away from a biological condition, the guts of the film remained subversively satiric. These astronauts weren't heroes, but celestial teamsters.

But A Clockwork Orange makes it seem that Kubrick did get lost in the stars and has become a spaced-out religionist. Aside from his ludicrously simplistic emphasis on free will, the Bronx enfant terrible has lost his purely filmic bearings. The film shows the limits of crudeness. When it takes an actor three minutes to roll off a provocative phrase like "the old in-out in-out", witty language is killed. When there are no developed antagonisms, and the camera supports the actions of a single group, gang warfare is threatless and meaningless. And, perhaps intimidated by the director's rep, the actors, except for McDowell, deliver the most functional satiric sketches.

Kubrick's early successes were heightened journalism, always initially dependent on particular bits of recreated social reality. Now, perhaps believing that the Big Statement is the only one worth making, and that he's well qualified to make it, Kubrick's gone, after the flukey 2001, from high melodrama to melodramatic allegory. I had better feelings for his prior worst film Killer's Kiss: it had an amusingly-typed boxer hero, and interesting views of Brooklyn, of all places. Sadly, you can't work your way back to unpretentiousness. Kubrick's changed into a pseudo-intellectual's movie mogul, proclaiming the world's philistine guilts without noting his own moral limits.