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From 'Spartacus' to '2001: A Space Odyssey'
By Mary Shaffer Our visions of the beginning and end of mankind were permanently and indelibly shaped by Stanley Kubrick films. Kubrick has taken us from the dawn of mankind in "2001: A Space Odyssey," through the violence and chaos on the streets and in the minds of man and society in "A Clockwork Orange" and to the nuclear holocaust ending "Dr. Strangelove." Probably no other filmmaker ever made three consecutive movies that were so visually and philosophically influential, stunning, shocking and controversial. County film fans will get a chance to see almost every film Kubrick has made in a weekly series starting tonight at the Palm Theater in San Luis Obispo. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1928, Kubrick's career has had three periods and is currently on hold, waiting to see if a long-awaited new movie on artificial intelligence reaches the screen. The reclusive perfectionist has delivered just 13 feature films in a 43 year career and his last three were critical and commercial failures that pale compared to the breathtaking visions, style and subjects of his early and middle works. Kubrick's films -- almost all based on novels and short stories -- focus on the shortcomings in human nature, on man's search for meaning in life and on violence and technology and their relationships with individuals and society. "Man in the 20th century has been cast adrift in a rudderless boat on an uncharted sea," he has said. "The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meaning." He started defining that meaning at age 17 as a photographer for "Look" magazine, but was quickly attracted to the cinema. Kubrick admits, "I didn't know anything about making films, but I believed I couldn't make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing. Bad films gave me the courage to try." From 1950 to 1955, Kubrick learned his new craft by independently making two documentary shorts ("Day of the Fight" and "Flying Padre") and two low-budget features ("Fear and Desire" and "Killer's Kiss") that eventually brought him to the attention of Hollywood. Kubrick quickly caught everyone's attention in 1956 with his first studio-backed film, "The Killing," a thriller starring Sterling Hayden as an ex-con planning "the perfect crime." "Paths of Glory," the first of Kubrick's three anti-war films, followed in 1957. It stars Kirk Douglas as an officer trying to save three innocent soldiers from being sacrificed to the insanity of war and the stupidity of ambitious military leaders. Despite his lack of experience, the studios gave Kubrick total artistic control and he immediately gave them a distinctive style and voice. His next film may have been his strangest. Kubrick was convinced to take over directing Douglas in "Spartacus," a heroic story with almost nothing in common with Kubrick's bleak vision. Then the most expensive film ever made in America, Kubrick elevated the 1961 costume drama to an epic and memorable struggle against oppression, but he left the film with such frustration with Hollywood that he moved to England and remains there. Kubrick followed with "Lolita," his 1962 screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel, finding a cynical cinematic style to match the sardonic humor of a story about a middle-aged man obsessed by a voluptuous teen-age girl. With "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," Kubrick elevated black comedy to new extremes. This hilarious 1964 Cold War nightmare begins with Hayden as a demented general who launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and ends with cowboy-pilot Slim Pickens riding a phallic-shaped bomb to oblivion. In between, Peter Sellers delivers an amazing performance in three roles -- an British officer trying to stop Hayden, the title role of German atomic scientist Stranglove, and the U.S. president in the war room negotiating with his drunken Russian counterpart while listening to George C. Scott as a general who can't contain his enthusiasm for the destructive powers of his weaponry. Kubrick reached even more astonishing levels in "2001," his nearly non-verbal 1968 epic which pushed the edges of special effects into untouched realms of cinematic expression. The 141-minute film features less than 30 minutes of dialogue and absolutely refuses to provide pat answers for the questions it raises about the origins and fate of mankind. The greatest science fiction ever made, "2001" has four distinct parts opening with what happens when exterrestrials introduce man's primate ancestors to the creative and destructive consequences of becoming intelligent and human. From that dawn of man, "2001" rides one of filmdom's most spectacular transitions to leap on board a space craft heading for a colony on the Moon. The Moon links the story to the past and future and sends two astronauts and the all-too-human HAL 9000 computer journeying to Jupiter. The journey doesn't really end. It passes through a lightshow and ends with Man reborn, a metaphysical evolution. With "A Clockwork Orange" in 1971, Kubrick returned to Earth but showed a violent vision of our immediate future that now plays more like an accurate premonition than the surrealistic nightmare it was originally intended to be. The film stars Malcolm McDowell as a sadistic thug and gang leader who finds society waging psychological warfare that is as depraved as the lowest beast on the street. Kubrick's last three films -- "Barry Lyndon" (1975), "The Shining" (1980) and "Full Metal Jacket" (1987) -- lack the scope of his early works, although they contain more than enough to entertain and intrigue most film fans. Despite that and even if Kubrick never produces another film, his place in film history is already assured.
Mary Shaffer works at Cal Poly. Jerry Bunin is a Telegram-Tribune reporter. In the six years before they met, each saw "2001" a half dozen times and concluded that "the truth is out there." Series Schedule
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