Fear and Desire (1953)

For those curious to view this early effort from Kubrick, a beautiful print can now be streamed via Amazon Prime. I can understand why Kubrick wanted to destroy any prints of this -- it's an amateurish effort that doesn't begin to hint at the great films to come. Still, for film freaks, it's a curiosity that's hard to resist.By the way -- that exploitive pink poster image attached to this page is amazing in its lack of any accurate sense of the film!

FEAR AND DESIRE is a low budget war feature that feels very much like a B-movie; it has a limited cast, a workable script, and a general lack of scope and budget which means there are no big or realistic action sequences. Instead, this is a psychological character drama which looks at the effects of combat on the mind of the average soldier, and how it can drive an ordinary man to madness. This is only of interest for being the debut feature of the acclaimed Stanley Kubrick, whose work here is pedestrian to say the least; I found the whole picture heavy-handed and unremarkable.

Stanley Kubrick's first feature film was thought lost for many years, but fortunately a copy has been restored and now anyone can watch the first work by maybe the greatest director of all time. Sure, "Fear and Desire" is no masterpiece as Kubrick's late works, not even close, but it still manages to somehow show the brilliance that surrounds the director's works. Set in a metaphoric place as the narrator urges us to know (and yes, that's the main problem of the film: it's too explanatory, something Kubrick will grow extremely away from), representing any war and not one in particular, showing how the event of falling into the enemy lines affects four soldiers, leading one to madness, another to the search for glory and so on. Although very heavily expository, the writing is not as bad as many (including the director himself!) say: the concepts are smart, but surely too stuffed into an hour's film. What I really think should be praised is the powerful idea of using the same actors to perform both sides of the conflict, building up an unsettling sequence close to the end of the movie, which also stands to mean that both sides of a war fight for the same values turned upside down.Obviously, the true highlight of the film is the man behind the camera, with beautiful shots and careful cinematography. The kiddo was already off to a great start.

This is the only Kubrick non-documentary I had not seen so, in spite of having read many negative comments (even from Kubrick himself), I figured I needed to see it. I have a hard time finding anything good to say about it--the acting, story, and music are decidedly sub-par. Usually there is some hint of things to come in the early works of most geniuses. Think of Orson Welles when he made "Citizen Kane"--he was about the same age as Kubrick when Kubrick made "Fear and Desire." Welles did make the comment that he began at the top and worked his way down, quite the opposite from Kubrick. How Kubrick could come back from "Fear and Desire" to direct "Paths of Glory" only four years later is hard to fathom. It would be like Einstein not being able to handle simple algebra in 1900 and then coming up with special relativity in 1905.At just over an hour this has the look of an early, and forgettable, television drama. As director, producer, cinematographer, and editor this is pretty much a wholly owned Kubrick effort. No wonder he tried to suppress its release.