Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick (born July 26, 1928, Bronx, New York, U.S.—died March 7, 1999, Childwickbury Manor, near St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England) was an American motion-picture director and writer whose films are characterized by his dramatic visual style, meticulous attention to detail, and a detached, often ironic or pessimistic perspective. An expatriate, Kubrick was nearly as well known for his reclusive lifestyle in the English countryside as for his painstaking approach to researching, writing, photographing, and editing his infrequent but always much-debated films.

Early life and films

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Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, the son of a physician whose interest in chess and photography he began to share at an early age. Bright but bored, Kubrick was a poor student; however, he immersed himself in the role of his high school’s photographer. At age 16 he sold an expressive photo (showing a dejected newspaper vendor surrounded by headlines announcing U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death) to Look magazine. Kubrick aborted his studies at the City College of New York shortly after he had started them so that he could join the staff of Look at age 17, and he then traveled the country as a photojournalist for more than four years. He also became a habitué of the retrospective film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was especially influenced by the work of Orson Welles and Sergey Eisenstein. In 1950 he shot a short documentary about the run-up to a boxing match, which was released by RKO as Day of the Fight (1951). Kubrick left Look, began auditing classes at Columbia University, became a voracious reader, and turned to full-time filmmaking.

After directing a pair of documentaries, he persuaded his father and uncle to help finance the production of his first fiction feature, an ultralow-budget war film, Fear and Desire (1953). Kubrick then scraped together the financing for another low-budget effort, a boxing-related film noir romance, Killer’s Kiss (1955). At this point he joined forces with producer James B. Harris to form Harris-Kubrick Productions. Encouraged by the respectable reviews for Killer’s Kiss, United Artists provided Kubrick with enough money to hire a cast of quality B-film supporting actors—including Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Vince Edwards, and Elisha Cook, Jr.—for his next film. The result was The Killing (1956), a taut caper film about the robbing of a racetrack. It is regarded as an important late-period film noir, largely because of its creative use of flashbacks and its nonlinear narrative.

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Continuing his progression up the Hollywood ladder, Kubrick was given a healthy budget ($850,000) by United Artists to shoot the antiwar drama Paths of Glory (1957) in West Germany. Set during World War I, it focused on the suicidal attack by French troops on a German position and the repercussions in its aftermath. Because of its damning portrayal of the French officer corps, the film was not shown in France until 1975. Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou, and Ralph Meeker gave commanding performances. Paths of Glory also featured a fine screenplay by Calder Willingham, cult novelist Jim Thompson, and Kubrick, who nearly always did the lion’s share of the writing on his films’ scripts regardless of his collaborators. Throughout his career, Kubrick took a hands-on approach to the details of all aspects of his films, not least production design, editing, and cinematography. Indeed, he was personally responsible for the bravura handheld tracking shots in Paths of Glory. Unfortunately, Kubrick had waived his salary for profit participation in the film, which, despite its excellence, did not fare well at the box office.

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Kubrick worked on developing One-Eyed Jacks (1961) for several months with Marlon Brando, but the creative differences between the two finally became too great, and Kubrick left the project, which was ultimately directed by Brando himself. Kubrick then accepted Douglas’s offer to take over the direction of Spartacus (1960) from Anthony Mann, who had just been fired. Spartacus, the epic recounting of a slave rebellion in the Roman Empire, was more than three hours long—considered overlong by some critics—but most agreed that it was significantly better than the standard “sword-and-sandal” adventure film. It benefited from Dalton Trumbo’s adaptation of a novel by Howard Fast and a distinguished cast that included Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, and Charles Laughton. Spartacus was arguably Kubrick’s most-accessible film, but it was also his most-anonymous film and the one over which he had the least control.

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Stanley Kubrick

Breakthrough to success

Kubrick then moved his family to England, where he took advantage of the so-called Eady plan, which provided considerable tax incentives for foreign film producers who used at least 80 percent British labor. His first project there was Lolita (1962), a film version of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial examination of love and lechery. Nabokov was credited as a coscenarist, but Kubrick wrote the bulk of the screenplay for that darkest of dark comedies, which most critics believed never fully solved the problem of transposing Nabokov’s difficult novel to the screen. Many agreed, however, that James Mason was superb as Humbert Humbert, the professor who becomes obsessed with a 13-year-old girl (Sue Lyon), and Peter Sellers and Shelley Winters also submitted striking performances. Despite stirring up plenty of controversy of its own with its subject matter (particularly with the Catholic Legion of Decency), Lolita was a box-office hit.

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Notwithstanding the success of Lolita, Kubrick’s big breakthrough came with the inimitable Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). This wickedly nihilistic comedy about the Cold War arms race was written by Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George (on whose novel Red Alert it was based). In the planning stages, Kubrick sought to treat the material seriously, but he kept finding himself gravitating toward farce and eventually gave in to that impulse while still managing to powerfully convey the horrible prospect of nuclear annihilation. He made the most of wonderfully inventive performances by George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and especially Sellers, who plays three very different but equally memorable characters. Dr. Strangelove earned Kubrick his first Academy Award nomination for best direction and also garnered nominations for best picture, best actor (Sellers), and best screenplay.

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Kubrick spent the next four years making 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a metaphysical science-fiction epic based on a haunting short story by Arthur C. Clarke, who worked with him on the screenplay. The film is divided into three parts, with only the middle section resembling a traditional narrative. In that section two astronauts on a spaceship bound for Jupiter (Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea) are forced to match wits with HAL 9000, the ship’s all-seeing, conscious onboard computer, when it malfunctions. Prehistoric apes are the focus of the first section, and the last section contains a sequence of wildly impressionistic images as the spaceship is sucked into a dimension in which time and space are disrupted. Beyond its meditation on humanity’s relationship with machines and artificial intelligence, the themes and meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey are elusive. Kubrick himself said that he hoped that the film’s significance would transcend language and reason. Few critics failed to note his stunning use of classical music, most notably Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Kubrick’s powerful application of music to amplify atmosphere, character, and story was a signature of his filmmaking. The film also set a new standard for movie special effects and has been praised for the surprising number of futuristic technologies it depicted that have subsequently—at least in part—come into existence.

Audiences and critics were polarized by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Noted critic Pauline Kael famously derided it, but many other critics hailed the film as a masterpiece, and it has consistently appeared on lists of the greatest films of all time. Kubrick received Oscar nominations for his direction and writing and won an Oscar for special effects. In its day the film was a countercultural phenomenon and a box-office smash that gave Kubrick the latitude to make any movie he desired with a degree of creative freedom and control experienced by few filmmakers.