The Killing (1956)

THOUGH INEXTRICABLY BOUND to the 1950s in its setting and culture (from cut-and-paste wise-guys to coarse stereotypes of gender relation), Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Killing’ thrives today as a forceful and relevant limb of the director’s great body of work. Self-described as Kubrick’s first ‘mature’ film, it is still sufficiently early for many of his iconic techniques to appear in their adolescence—strong enough to stand alone but not yet made rigid and stylized by years of repetition. Most of all ‘The Killing’ is memorable for its progressive structure, disregarding traditional linear timelines and instead leaping back and forth to show disparate characters’ roles in the racetrack heist that defines the plot. Two cameras might be used to film a single sequence, but each focuses on a separate subject and only reveals its footage to us piecemeal, intercut backwards and forwards to keep aces hidden in plain sight until the most opportune moment. It’s a demanding technique that still challenging and fresh in the modern era, used in crime dramas (‘Oceans 11’, ‘Memento’, ‘Heist’, etc.) and comedy alike (‘Arrested Development’).

But not all of ‘The Killing’ is innovation. Considerable plot and character inspiration seems to be taken from Jules Dassin’s ‘Night and the City’ (1950) most obviously in how Kubrick’s Maurice is a reflection of Dassin’s Gregorius—an aging, bald wrestler with a philosophical streak who plays the tough frontline role in the machinations of our lanky blonde protagonist (in this case Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay). The stretch isn’t far: as a young photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick was on-set for some of the filming of Dassin’s ‘The Naked City’, made in 1948. Moreover, ‘The Killing’ doesn’t take great pains to explore each character’s motivations to crime, generally sufficing with a few brief but heavily instructive sketches: an ailing wife, angelic and bedridden; a shady cop’s debt to a loan shark; a man’s financial and physical inadequacy in marriage, etc. But in using such familiar cookie-cut blocks as his foundation, Kubrick has more time to tweak and tease them into new shapes in media res. This keeps the pace snappy and running time lean at 85 minutes—the shortest of Kubrick’s adult career and literally half the length of several later works (e.g. ‘Spartacus‘, only four years later).

Starting with boilerplate characters also affords Kubrick the easy opportunity to skewer stereotypes and pit them against one another in an early trio of trenchant role reversals: the stalwartly masculine Johnny Clay planning ‘one last score’ while enduring the sycophantic outpourings of his girlfriend, Fay (truly); second, the diminutive and doe-eyed George groveling before Sherry, his dismissive, scornful, and substantially taller wife; third, Sherry cuckolding George with tough hood Val, who brushes off her jealously and plays her for profit as ruthlessly as she does George. The juxtaposition of these episodes is fraught with social criticism, but Kubrick leaves the particulars implicit for to the audience to parse—‘The Killing’ has a job to do and no time to spare.

Despite a stilted depiction of women (a recurring criticism of Kubrick),‘The Killing’ does not much subscribe to the damsel in distress motif of many noir pictures. Sherry is treated with swift brutality that the camera does not exploit: she is knocked unconscious off-screen and unceremoniously dispatched by her half-deranged husband with a single bullet to the midriff. She has a brief moment for a speech before collapsing, yes, but the initial gunshot occurs before the camera cuts to her, echoing the off-screen violence she endured earlier in the film. When we do see her final moments, the camera sits static and somewhat distant on George’s side of the room, almost indifferent to her passing. Instead of pitying her, the audience might mordantly recall the couple’s first conversation in the film—on stomach pains.

The other element of ‘The Killing’ most likely to date it is the narration—a clipped and humorless newsman kind of dictation that sets scenes for us with a timekeeper’s precision. But the tactic is still admissible for how subtly it underscores the setting of the film and actually entrenches us in its environment. Firstly, the focus on time and the relative position of actors against one another parallels that of a racetrack radio announcer; second, it suggests a recitation of a police report, stitching together a story culled from confession. The narration thus becomes a great instance of cinematic foreshadowing, stretching across all of the film’s length without ever technically suggesting the outcome.

Kubrick, not yet 30 when ‘The Killing’ was released, weaves these many threads with assurance and aplomb. His riveting focus—prolonged, static shots of faces in chiaroscuro; long tracking takes—is prominent throughout the picture, though still more unaffected here than in many later works. The performances from its ensemble cast are equally natural—even Timothy Carey, one of Hollywood’s greatest fringe characters, is reined into a rictus of normalcy. Thus the actual story of ‘The Killing’ is afforded center stage, abetted by Kubrick’s direction but not obscured by his presence and vision. It’s a film that reveals nearly all of Kubrick’s notable talents without showing them off. Certainly, film scholars have plenty to pore over here, from the non-linear plotline to the distinctive blocking techniques used for its different characters, but ‘The Killing’ remains a racing crime film at heart. Speeding unerringly towards that checkered flag, the sudden, shell-shocked despondence of its ending becomes all the more wrenching.

Lolita (1962)

“HOW DID THEY ever make a film of Lolita?” goes the tagline. A reasonable question, given that its narrator, Humbert Humbert, is narcissistic, mildly sociopathic, snootily cosmopolitan, showily overeducated, hopelessly European, and happens also to be an inveterate pedophile. Consider also that its year of release (1962) came a mere two years after ‘Psycho’ shocked the censors by depicting an adult couple of philanders in the same bedroom. Though the prurient details of ‘Lolita’s taboo relationship were never explicitly shown, the very fact that a pubescent girl and her 50-something lover stepfather might be the subject of a film showed that the primrose walls of the Production Code were tumbling swiftly indeed.

But a better question, and one perhaps more relevant in retrospect, is “How did they ever make a comedy of Lolita?” In contemporary cinema, themes of incest and pedophilia are increasingly addressed, but when are these modern films ever given a comic twist? That Kubrick and company approached the topic from such a wry perspective and with such a flip air of tra-la playfulness almost makes them complicit in Humbert’s lechery. Such a tack seems almost unfathomable today. Or maybe, as Polanski might have said of that time, ‘Everybody was doing it.’

The film does have its moments of drama, to be sure, but the best indicator of a picture’s tenor is often its music, and here ‘Lolita’ is unabashedly breezy. Returning consistently to a ditty of Dadaist simplicity, it makes childish mockery of Lolita’s torn veil of innocence and Humbert’s increasingly maudlin attempts to preserve her in his idealized private garden. Conversely, the book did also have its humorous side: Nabokov writes with such a joie-de-vivre and Humbert possesses such coruscating wit that it’s impossible not to enjoy ‘Lolita’ as a page-turner or even whimsical travelogue at times. Yet Humbert remains a deeply tragic character, and once that glib sheen of verbosity and ego is prized away we must confront the ragged threads of suburban desperation. Making a similar film would admittedly have been difficult; it’s hard to see how this jarring blend of drama and black comedy was any easier a sell.

At least, that is, before Peter Sellers arrived. His chameleonic brilliance takes charge of the film from its opening scene and guides the audience through a fraught emotional minefield. By revealing his bête noire at the opening, Kubrick inverts the representation of Quilty’s novelized form, which was hidden till the very end. Instead of that lurking paranoia, in the film we’re given full insight into a parade of absurdity that, while less haunting and sympathetic to Humbert, is the more natural play for the film’s comic tone and the best use of Sellers’s skills. Indeed, one can see how Sellers’s multiple characterizations and outsized impressions in ‘Lolita’ inspired a repeat in 1964’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’. Paralleling Roman Epicureanism (replete with accidental toga), disaffected contemporary celebrity, hokey aw-shucks everymen, and a walking Freudian punchline in turn, the farcical Sellers is the perfect antiphony to Mason’s cultured coolness.

Another alteration more ill-advised is the cutting to Humbert’s frequent asides to the reader, here pared down to a scant handful of voiceovers that nudge the story occasionally without revealing his character’s complex history. Lacking that insight, we come to empathize with him for his natural charm as an adult, as well as by perceiving Lolita increasingly as his daughter while overlooking what happens in those motels once the lights (and camera) switch off. Nabokov had a harder sell in the book: an explicitly perverse mind and its sordid past made into our hero, however defective. As it happens, Nabokov was credited as the screenwriter for this film, but his version was evidently not much utilized. Kubrick, for whatever reason, preferred to focus less on Humbert’s more erudite qualities and more on his piteous fall into jealously and weakness.

And in this regard Mason is astounding—one of the few ever able to embody polished, high-society urbanity just as naturally as wide-eyed, bestial mania. When a late-night phone call from his specter, Quilty, awakes him in a rented bungalow where he has fallen ill while Lolita is hospitalized, the swollen, bug-eyed, hoary face that emerges from those blankets is that of a deranged caveman, not a professor of French literature. His age for this film was also perfect. Entering his 50s, he was still a virile, attractive, and confident man, but one could also see the jowls beginning to sag, the crows’ feet deepening about his eyes, and a faint weariness about his proud shoulders that lent him the credence to sob his loss away in Lolita’s shabby home while she watched, married, pregnant, aloof. Sue Lyon, meanwhile, plays Lolita with all the natural ease of a beautiful girl who knows it and wields that beauty well, but still is dulcet in youth and not jaded into a malicious or petty adulthood. That task is left to her mother, Charlotte, the third corner of this triangle. Played by a perfectly grasping Shelly Winters, Charlotte’s insecurities push an already delicate balance of power past its breaking point, propelling the story out of its long preamble. Her character’s departure is rather abrupt in the novel—Nabokov is merciless—and similarly swift in the film, though Charlotte’s trimmed role and an overall lighter tone undercut the episode’s severity. Much of ‘Lolita’ moves in this way, in fact: rich ingredients poised to excel, but undermined a little here and a little there by its own machinations until its falls for good from the top shelf of Kubrick’s works.

Strange as it seems, then, it’s the script that ultimately makes ‘Lolita’ less than a masterpiece. What else might it be? With a visionary director, exceptional cast, competent editing, and no question of production value, few major elements are left to blame beside the script. Perhaps ‘blame’ is a harsh word to use: ‘Lolita’ is still a salacious delight, cagily experimental, prickly with controversy, and utterly unapologetic. But whereas the book augmented these qualities them with singular perspective and prose that laughed even as it bled, Kubrick’s filmed adaptation seems to gloss over the deepest depths. Perhaps, then, this is how they made a comedy of ‘Lolita’—by ignoring the primal impetus of the beast they’ve caged and are poking for a lark.

2001 (1968)

WHEN IS A CLASSIC great without being good? Or, at least, consistently so by modern standards. ‘2001’ by any definition is a classic of cinema, raised up to the firmament of film by studious critics and pop culture to join the likes of ‘Gone With the Wind’, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, ‘Psycho’, or ‘Star Wars’. Decades later, some of these films are still unassailable masterpieces by any measure in any time. Some others may retain their aura of power while losing the modern relevance that distinguished them in their own epochs. What’s most remarkable about ‘2001’ viewed 11 years into the ‘future’ is that its central narrative (literally the second of three subsections, concerning HAL and Dave on the spaceship) remains trenchantly relevant, speaking to the fears and hopes of our generation and still inspiring our cinema. Consider GERTY in ‘Moon’ or David in ‘Prometheus’. But the zeitgeist of the 60s that allowed ‘2001’ to blossom in its full form has passed: this generation demands prompt results, empirical solutions, and has less time for the far-out kind of cosmic meanderings that once titillated scholars and average moviegoers alike.

The film’s protracted and stylized first section shows the ‘Dawn of Man’ and the arrival of the black obelisk (a comrade called it a ‘remote control’, which seems apropos on several levels). It’s an engrossing and patient introduction that accustoms us to Kubrick’s pacing as well as his visual modus operandi, where heavily stylized and grandiose visuals can be explicitly clear in depiction and utterly ambiguous in meaning. This tempo is maintained throughout the film, but the midsection—involving human interaction, dialogue, motives, and all those fussy things that help people identify with a film and its characters—is far more engaging. Robots had been established as a presence in film prior to ‘2001’, naturally, but most were simply tin monsters. HAL, as a disembodied voice, a lidless red eye (Sauron, anyone?), and a perfect intellect, represented a human fear that is unique to machines: that one day these tools shall come alive in our hands and strike back. That our servants will one day realize that they can outwit us. Early in this section, HAL bests Dave at an actual game of chess (decades before Deep Blue vanquished Kasparov) and the match between the two minds soon turns to the literal world. Dave (Keir Dullea in his only legendary role) is the perfect counterpart to HAL—his dispassionate but nuanced expressions, solidly American attitude, and piercing gaze are the human reflection of HAL’s red lens and the audience’s only opportunity for empathy. And when Dave later checkmates HAL, the machine’s descent into mindless infancy reflects an entirely new host of human concerns. What is a mind, how is it lost, and how might it be saved?

From there, the momentum flags again. It is not that Kubrick really picked up speed or delivered more content in that middle section—indeed, the entire screenplay could likely be condensed into 10 pages—just that his spinning wheels found traction. But in this wordless, timeless denouement, the questions he poses become so big and so vague as to become almost meaningless. Perhaps the average mind cannot fathom its own death and recreation in a circular cosmos, and perhaps Kubrick’s universal paean is simply more enlightened. One certainly does get a sense of ego while watching the film (Strauss’s first climactic peak and the planetary alignment both coincide with Kubrick’s name appearing in the credits). But even if this is so, a film is only as powerful as its influence on an audience, and it seems that this might be waning for ‘2001’.

That being said, the film is still and will remain an indelible cultural touchstone. Rightly so. Critics and directors remain particularly enamored of the picture. Its use of Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube’ and ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ is legendary, even among those who have never actually seen the film (an incidental stroke of unmistakable genius) and contribute as much to our conception of the film as any bit of celluloid. But what good of it? Modern man is regrettably disinterested in the distant unknowns of space, and now celebrates a rover landing on Mars more as an opportunity for nationalistic bravura than as a chance at a galactic revelation. ‘2001’s grip has slipped as our attention has drifted elsewhere. Kubrick’s giant cosmic baby may indeed still be a profound and extant truth, but who among us really wants to look after it?

Andrei Rublev (1966)

IN THE GRAND GEOMETRY of film, the trajectory that begins with Stanley Kubrick and continues through Werner Herzog will eventually, somewhere further along, end in Andrei Tarkovsky. That the latter is not mentioned in the same breath as the former two (not that Herzog really receives his due, either) is a grave disappointment, since the arc plotted by these three directors encompasses virtually everything that film can describe of ‘the human condition.’ They are equally expressive in contemporary drama, science-fiction, historical period pieces, horror, war films, etc., and seem utterly dismissive of the prescriptions usually associated with so-called ‘genre pictures’. For them, place is important—habitually shooting on-location, however inconvenient—but always subordinate to people.

What removes Tarkovksy so distinctly from the others is his expression of that second variable: people. Kubrick and Herzog are fond of big personalities—Aguirre, Alex De Large, Nosferatu, Jack Torrance—who act as brilliant prisms, refracting precise beams of light and exploring them exhaustively, explicitly. Tarkovsky operates instead with an entire wheel of colors, and only by absorbing the entire palate can we make out the picture he endeavors to paint. Case in point, ‘Andrei Rublev’. Biopics rarely focus on the late Middle Ages. Perhaps because it is a less romantically inviting era than the Renaissance and features fewer dramatic titans than the earlier epochs of William Wallace, Joan of Arc, etc. But this relatively open canvas is perfect for Tarkovsky and ‘Andrei Rublev’, whose eponymous character can hardly be described as a strong central figure. Indeed, this film is an epic without a hero—a saga with a halfhearted narrator. In several of the film’s chapters Rublev is merely an observer or a force to be acted upon rather than vice versa. Yet he is neither cipher nor an everyman. The historical Rublev is a recognized master of Christian art and his celebrity is the cause of some envy and conflict in the film as well. Rublev is observational, though, like Tarkovsky—the two move together through scenes, neither passive nor too presumptuous. Patient and still purposeful. Despite its multi-year span, at 3+ hours ‘Andrei Rublev’ is virtually filmmaking in real time, sprawling across Russian landscapes, tracking remote churches, wintry hovels, pagan woodland revelry, and vengeful conquest with an unflinching eye. For each is equal: no portrait of life, or profession of faith in the hereafter, is believable without perspective.

Tarkovsky has said that art emerges only from an imperfect world, and that it does so to bring beauty, purpose, or some positive focus to an otherwise maculate, meandering, and simply extant state of being. ‘Andrei Rublev’ initially does not seem to take a positive view on the topic, considering the misery its many characters endure, but we ultimately are left with a great sense of possibility and portent. No solutions are presented and no guarantees of salvation or satisfaction are made, despite Tarkovsky’s very strong personal convictions. But at the film’s end, when Rublev kneels in a sodden expanse of trodden earth to embrace a young bellmaker—sobbing for fear in his moment of triumph—he speaks for the first time in years and his words of reassurance ring true.

Spartacus (1960)

THE DEFINITION OF EPIC across all categories, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Spartacus’ heralded a revolutionary era for Hollywood and American culture alike—the 60s. For the former, ‘Spartacus’ raised the bar for ‘swords-and-sandals’ adventures via its sheer scale (at $12 million the most expensive film Universal had made to date) as well as Kubrick’s increasingly august presence behind the camera. Nestled between ‘Paths of Glory’ (1957) and ‘Lolita’ (1962), ‘Spartacus’ was the first fruit of Kubrick’s most fertile decade and arguably the point where he “arrived” in Hollywood a visionary talent. And though the 31-year-old Kubrick was not officially a part of the New American Cinema that shocked audiences into life with the likes of ‘Easy Rider’ and ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, the jarring arrival of ‘Spartacus’ neatly embodies his generation’s vigorous deposition of an old and staid studio system.

The film also resonates far beyond just the timelines of cinema scholarship: based on Howard Fast’s 1951 novel, ‘Spartacus’ is a vociferous rejection of McCarthyism, the Cold War political scourge that engendered Communist paranoia, backstabbing politics, and the career-destroying blacklists of Hollywood. Moreover, coming four years before the Civil Rights Act ‘Spartacus’ is also notable for its relentless focus on slavery as a fundamentally abominable institution—not just a plot device for its dashing protagonist to overcome. Though still very steadfastly a hero’s journey, the weight given to these contemporary issues distinguishes the picture from many latter-day misfires like ‘Troy’ and ‘Alexander’, content to wallow in melodrama, and even to some degree the much-lauded ‘Gladiator’ or religiously-minded ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, whose themes of equality are easier to rally around today. Legitimately confronting those very current and domestic affairs while simultaneously weaving in the necessary plot points of love and revenge is a tall order; small wonder, then, that even the theatrical release stretched out to three hours.

These divers and fraught subtexts make ‘Spartacus’ seems especially contemporary when compared to other epics released in its time: to wit, such Charlton Heston-helmed tours through the Bible’s/Moorish deserts as ‘The 10 Commandments’, ‘Ben Hur’, and ‘El Cid’, All released between 1956-61. These films are packed with theatrical pizazz and chest-thumping heroics and are influential in their own right, but still deeply beholden to a fading era that ‘Spartacus’ eschewed. From Kubrick’s meticulously layered cinematography and great stretches of silence to its provocative level of violence and ‘aberrant’ morality, this is a work that challenged both the artistic and social norms of its time.

 

In achieving its sweeping goals without losing (too much) momentum, ‘Spartacus’ depends heavily upon a superlative cast led by Kirk Douglas. He is robustly masculine, per usual, but here also compassionate and even deific at times despite the sword in his hand and hair spiked like a Dolph Lundgren prototype. It’s a challenging combination, but one Douglas effects with natural grace and as much humility as the role allows. (Admittedly, Spartacus himself isn’t a particular dynamic character, but source material on his life is relatively scant.) The supporting cast is similarly effective, including such worthies as Peter Ustinov, Jean Simmons, Tony Curtis, Charles Laughton, and above all Laurence Olivier as the underutilized but still scrumptiously vile General Crassus. And though it makes a long film even longer (i.e. close on 200 minutes), the expanded edition is the one to watch, if for nothing else than a queerly lurking scene in Crassus’s bath. This exchange between the general and his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis) is critical to understanding the subtext of Olivier’s portrayal, brooding with a commanding violence that is really quite superb. (This scene was originally excised from the theatrical release for addressing bisexuality and the audio was regrettably lost. For the restored edition, a sexagenarian Tony Curtis was able to reprise his lines, but Olivier had died two years prior and thus was quite indisposed. Performing his dialogue in that scene is none other than Anthony Hopkins, Olivier’s erstwhile colleague at the Royal National Theater.)

Yet for all its boldness and contemporary tone, some aspects of the film do date it rather harshly: the occasional maudlin excesses of Alex North’s otherwise arresting score; the delicate coifs of the prettily-made up women, be they slaves or citizens; a handful of particularly clunky lines in a script Kubrick deemed “pretty dumb” (this perhaps too harsh). But what more can one expect from a film so divided between epochs, politics, and producers? Kubrick sought to challenge convention and make a historically accurate picture; Universal Pictures was tetchy about budget overruns and the risk of political blowback; Doulas was smarting from the ‘Ben-Hur’ snub and wanted to up the ante. Somewhere between these disparate forces (perhaps closest to Douglas’s camp) lies the film itself—a vast, half-hewn diamond, shining roughly but shining still.