As so often, it was Martin Scorsese who said it best: “Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high?” For cinema lovers, there may be no director as likely to inspire a figurative crick in the neck as Stanley Kubrick, whose seminal satire “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb” comes to The Criterion Collection this week. Not the most prolific of filmmakers — in 50 years, he made just 13 feature films — he is, however, near-untouchable in the consistency of his output. Of those 13 features, at least half are unassailable masterpieces, and a further three or four come pretty damn close. This, of course, makes the task of ranking his movies even more of a folly than usual, but we will take any opportunity we can get to revisit this extraordinary body of work.
He gave famously few interviews (most of which are collected in the must-read “Stanley Kubrick: Interviews“), and as he put it with Wildean wit, “There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what’s even worse, of being quoted exactly.” And as a result, a kind of mythos has built up around him, his work, his private life, and even his death. That kind of conspiracy-theorizing, while tiresome, is an understandable reaction for those of us toiling around at ground level trying to comprehend how impossibly high he climbed. Here, in ascending order of altitude, are the 13 peaks Stanley Kubrick summited.
13. “Fear And Desire” (1953)
The story goes that in later years, Kubrick attempted to suppress the distribution of his debut, and you can see why: Although “Fear and Desire” would probably be a point of pride on a lesser filmmaker’s resume — especially for its fine, expressionistic photography and woozy sense of mood — it is blighted with didactic pretension, and preoccupied with heavily intoning its themes rather than building character or story. Set during an explicitly unspecified war, it follows a four-man airplane crew that has crashed behind enemy lines and the moral choices they each must make for survival. The performances are stilted, and the action inert, yet this “bumbling amateur film exercise” as Kubrick himself called it still has some extraordinary elements: Dreyer-esque close-ups; a fight scene rendered in evocative slivers (a dying man’s hand clutching a handful of stew); and most astonishingly, the sequence in which a local girl (Virginia Leith) is captured. She is tied to a tree and left in the care of seemingly the most benign of the foursome (played by future director Paul Mazursky in his first acting role), but he soon devolves into a crazed puppet of uncomprehending desire, first clowning for her, then wheedling and nuzzling at her, and finally shooting her in the back when she tries to escape. It’s hard to tell if the thrust of the film is more anti-war or anti-(male) mankind, but Kubrick’s excoriating and pessimistic view of humanity is on display from the start.
12. “Killer’s Kiss” (1955)
Nestling in an overlooked no-man’s-land between Kubrick’s debut feature and his first great film, “Killer’s Kiss” is a curio that nonetheless boasts some great attributes and, oddly, picked up Best Director for Kubrick at the then-fledgling Locarno Film Festival four years after its initial release. While it’s difficult to get beyond the sensation of the director’s near-palpable impatience with the rudiments of the threadbare story (written by Howard Sackler, based on Kubrick’s own outline), it’s genuinely exciting to watch him literally work out how to put a film togethe, before your very eyes. The nothing story of a boxer (Jamie Smith), a dance-hall girl (Irene Kane) and her gangster boss (Frank Silvera) (given those elements you could likely write the plot yourself), Kubrick uses it for testing amd experimenting — we get shots through fishbowls, odd angles, crisply drawn geography, grittily authentic exteriors, excellent fight scenes, and whole flashbacks narrated while a ballerina dances. And it leads to a borderline-surreal climactic fight in a mannequin warehouse, in which every thrown dummy head or arm sends up clouds of plaster dust. All this invention is such that you can almost overlook the ropey performances (not helped by the post-dubbing due to Kubrick’s frustration with the sync recording equipment available to him) and rote plotting, at least until the obviously studio-mandated happy ending that feels tacked on to a film clearly designed as a tragedy. But all the lessons he learned on “Killer’s Kiss” would bear fruit in Kubrick’s next go-round at the noir genre with the following year’s tremendous “The Killing,” and for that, if nothing else, this forgotten B-movie deserves our thanks.
11. “Lolita” (1962)
“How did they ever make a film out of Lolita?” the advertising campaign asked and it’s a salient question. With an approach that made Vladimir Nabokov‘s famously queasy story of pedophilia both chilling and comical, even the great Kubrick didn’t quite manage to fully deliver the goods. Still, while largely regarded as a lesser title for him – again probably only because other works are so towering – most filmmakers active in the 1960s would have been happy to have claim his version of “Lolita.” Minor Kubrick or no, it’s is both creepy and wry, and it somehow makes Peter Sellers scene-stealing turn as the deeply perverse TV writer Clare Quilty into a darkly charming coup. The sturdy and venerable James Mason is the strong adhesive that glues the picture together and Shelley Winters, in the film’s most thankless role, is a whiny amusement. Sadly, young Sue Lyon’s lack of presence really hurts the picture and perhaps most importantly the bookending – which Kubrick introduced to the story, with Nabokov’s blessing to address an issue he had with the novel, namely “the second half has a drop in narrative interest after [Humbert gets Lolita into bed]” – makes for an unsatisfying, ho-hum conclusion. But the film does represent a dazzling high-wire act considering the subject matter and the censorship environment of the day, and though Kubrick himself would later express regret that he had not dramatized the erotic aspect of the film enough, his “Lolita,” though compromised, remains a work only Kubrick could have made this well.
10. “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999)
It’s oddly fitting that Kubrick’s final film should be his most intimate, but of course, this being Kubrick, it is intimate on an epic scale, a relationship-in-crisis drama that encompasses immaculately imagined masqued balls, secret sex rings, and ritualized orgies, all summoned to tell the story of one fraying marriage. In what could seem like stunt casting, then-husband-and-wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play the central couple, but Kubrick goes far beyond appearances, and through his exacting process gets revelatory performances, especially from Kidman. Adapted by Frederic Raphael and Kubrick from Arthur Schnitzler’s “Träumnovelle,” it follows the cracks in Bill and Alice Harford’s marriage after he’s propositioned at a party, and she confesses to having had a sexual fantasy about another man. Bill encounters a secret sex cult and explores the seedier side of life outside monogamy before returning to the relative stability of home. It’s actually deeply moralistic, for a film whose reputation is one of salaciousness, but Kubrick employs sex as a lever to pry open a Pandora’s Box of issues around intimacy, marriage, fidelity, and trust rather than for titillation’s sake. Despite the film’s widespread re-evaluation (something that has happened with every once-poorly-received Kubrick title), we remain to this day relatively muted in our appreciation here, but there is no questioning the craft and the intelligence on display, nor the laudably fearless foregrounding of sex and sexuality (especially the “deviancy” that can inhabit even the most normal-seeming relationships) — something only rarely seen in American cinema.9. “The Killing” (1956)
Kubrick himself regarded “The Killing” as his first mature work, and the leap forward it represents in just one year since “Killer’s Kiss” is little short of breathtaking. A stone-cold classic noir, not out of place in the pantheon alongside “The Third Man” or “Double Indemnity,” what really marks it out from Kubrick’s earlier work (and what actually makes those other titles feel like the doodles they are) is the characterization: For once, you get the feeling that Kubrick actually cares about these broken people and their desperate, squalid lives. Revolving around a racetrack heist that oh-so-nearly comes together, until the faithless wife of one of the conspirators gets her lover to try and shake down the gang for the cash, it’s so hardboiled it’s practically concrete, with the deliciously quotable, cynical dialogue coming courtesy of pulp master Jim Thompson. And though Kubrick here tames his experiments in style to suit the story, it is nonetheless absolutely immaculately shot, with the racing scenes and fighting sequences having that air of authenticity he seemed to summon so easily no matter the setting. Starring a beautifully resigned Sterling Hayden and featuring a standout turn from Marie Windsor as Sherry, the femme fatale wife of the crooked teller George (Elisha Cook Jr.) (just watch how her whole demeanor changes from disdain to devotion depending on which of her two men she’s with), this is the first hint the world got that when Kubrick became as interested in his story as he was in the mechanics of telling it, he would turn in masterpiece after masterpiece.