Thursday, September 3

Killer's Kiss (1955) is not Kubrick's first feature, but it is the first he acknowledged, if grudgingly. It's a thin story, about a washed-up young boxer, a sad dance hall girl and the hood who sends his thugs to break up their romance for good. But Kubrick's eye for imagery—he designed the film around striking locations he scouted in his neighborhood, among them a mannequin factory—and atmosphere creates dynamic and memorable scenes. The boxing scene, shot in extreme close-up to enhance the intensity of the ordeal, owes much to Kubrick's debut short film Day of the Fight (1951). The portrait of young boxer Walter Cartier and his manager and twin brother, Vincent, was inspired by a photo essay Kubrick shot for Look, and he took his handheld camera into the ring for the fight scenes.

The Killing (1956), a clever heist thriller built around a meticulously plotted racetrack robbery, shows how quickly Kubrick was mastering the art of cinematic storytelling. Kubrick and his new producing partner, James B. Harris, loved the non-linear structure of the novel "Clean Break" and built their screenplay around it, delivering a cracking "perfect crime" thriller with a savage twist. Kubrick called it "my first truly professional work." The film stars Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., James Edwards and Timothy Carey.

Flying Padre (1951), another documentary short adapted from one of his Look photo essays, profiles a parish priest who flies his own private plane to minister his congregation in rural New Mexico. It was Kubrick’s first film to screen in theaters.

Paths of Glory (1957), based on a bleak anti-war novel about a real-life incident from World War I, was a hard sell to the studios until Kirk Douglas came on board with his own production company, Bryna. Shooting in Germany, Kubrick turned the countryside into the barren, battle-scarred "no man's land" of the Western Front of France. A German palace stood in for the lavish French chateau commandeered by the commanding officers while the enlisted men endured constant shelling in the trenches. In 2000, Stuart Klawans wrote in The New York Times: "There's been only one first-rate film made about the First World War since Grand Illusion: Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory…"

The evening ends with Kubrick's debut feature Fear and Desire (1952), an existential war movie shot on a tiny budget by a young filmmaker still teaching himself the rudiments of storytelling. Kubrick focused on the imagery, creating a sense of dislocation and isolation that leads to paranoia, obsession and madness for four soldiers lost behind enemy lines. It took two years to get the film released, and the reviews were generally poor. Kubrick later tracked down and destroyed all the prints he could find, effectively making the film unavailable until years after his death, when the Library of Congress restored a rare, preserved print.

Completely Kubrick on TCM