The Kubrick Series #2: Fear and Desire

THE KUBRICK SERIES #2:

FEAR AND DESIRE

I don't know if it's just me but I take a certain bit of comfort in knowing that even the greatest and most brilliant filmmaker struggled with their first film. I guess it has to do with the idea that you don't have to hit it out of the park right away and make the most succesful and greatest film ever made with your first film (except if you're Orson Welles). Basically what I'm getting at: it's okay to fail! You're just gonna have to keep at it and hopefully you'll improve as a filmmaker and as a storyteller as you go along. And that's exactly what happened to Stanley Kubrick when he made his first film Fear and Desire!

From left to right: Frank Silvera, Steve Coit and Kenneth Harp.

Fear and Desire, also known as the black sheep of Kubrick's filmography and his career, was the very first feature lenght film directed by Stanley Kubrick, who was a mere 23 or 24 years old when he made it. It was his first attempt at making a feature film and...it kinda shows.

So let's start with the backstory to the film and how it came into being. In 1951, Kubrick quit his job as photographer at Look magazine to focus on making films. But as mentioned in the previous installment in this series, Kubrick didn't aspire to the simple mass entertainment produced by Hollywood, but rather the poetic art films made in Europe at the time. One major inspiration for Kubrick was the Italian Neorealist movement, and in particular the films of Roberto Rossellini, who directed Rome, Open City (1945). With this ambition in mind, Kubrick comissioned his high school friend and aspiring playwright Howard Sackler to write a script. The film would cost an estimated $10,000, and the majority of the money would come from friends and family. Then in the fall of 1951, with a cast of five and a crew of five (including Kubrick's then-wife Toba Metz), Kubrick shot Fear and Desire in the San Gabriel Mountains of California. Kubrick would take on the bigger duties himself, working as the director, producer, cinematographer and editor. The film was shot as a silent film, since Kubrick figured he could just as well dub the actors in post. But Kubrick underestimated the costs, and the eventual price tag for the film would climb to $33,000.

A production still from the making of the film (probably the last time Kubrick would look happy in relation to Fear and Desire).

So anyways, let's get on with the actual story of the film. As the opening narrator explains, the film is set during a fictional war in a fictional country, with four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines trying to make it back home. Along the way, each man is forced to confront their own individual fears and desires.

Kubrick would famously disown the film, dismissing it as amateurish and not really worth anyone's time. And to be perfectly honest, I can see why. In fact, if I could describe Fear and Desire in one word, it would be amateurish. Now that said, that doesn't mean it's meant as a criticism or that the film is completely without any value. But the film still has quite a few problems.

The biggest problem with the film lies in the script, which is filled with these pretentious and pompous voice-overs and lines of dialogue that clearly strive to be important rather than they actually are. It is not done any services by the acting which isn't too good. The only actor that's solid I would say is Frank Silvera, who's also the only actor who would go on to work with Kubrick again in Killer's Kiss (but that's for another time).

Lead actor Kenneth Harp, who's character has monologues such as "We spend our lives running our fingers down the lists in directories, looking for our real names, our permanent addresses. No man is an island?"

But apart from this criticism, the movie isn't that bad. Considering the budget of the film, there are quite a few impressive shots in the film that help display Kubrick's knowledge of photography and lighting. There are also a few interesting editing techniques (maybe inspired by Eisenstein), including the cutting back and forth between the vicious killing of a man, to the man's hand holding an orange getting crushed, which actually serves as an interesting metaphor for the killing.

Some of the most impressive shots in the film.

We will also see his two key thematic fascinations take root here: sexuality and violence, and often in Kubrick's films, the combination between the two. In one scene in particular, the squad finds a girl, whom they decide to tie to a tree to prevent her from giving away their position to the titular "enemy". The soldier asked to guard her, Private Sidney (played by future director Paul Mazursky), starts to loose his mind (out of nowhere, I should say) and begins to almost force himself on her and projecting his fantasies onto her. Eventually he tries to tie her up, presumably to rape her, but she tries to escape. Sidney kills her, which doesn't exactly improve his mental state. One could read it as a criticism of the male psyche, that place their demands on women and when they don't meet our desires, the are punished for it, especially whent it comes to sex. So even though it's roughly done and in early form, you can still see Kubrick's lifelong fascination of sex and violence in this film as early as 1953.

Private Sidney loosing his mind.

When the film finally premiered in early 1953, it actually received fairly good reviews and wasn't percieved as a massive failure, as far as the critical reception went. But the film was not succesful at the box office and only played in the types of theatres that played European art films. And pretty soon, Kubrick would go on to dismiss it and according to legend, he tried to buy up every print of it to prevent it from being seen, which has lead many to believe that Killer's Kiss was his debut, when in fact it was Fear and Desire.

The distributor of the film, Joseph Burstyn, tried to sell the film as a form of sex thriller. He had done the same thing with Rome, Open City and Luis Bunuel's El Bruto.

So Fear and Desire is certainly not a film without merit, but it's definitely Kubrick's worst film. But I would still recommend it to cinephiles, especially if you're young and starting out, to keep it as a reminder that it's okay to fail and that even the best of us stumbles and makes mistakes.

To be continued with: Killer's Kiss (1955)