LITTLE ROCK — In 1957 when Paths of Glory, the ferociously anti-war film based on an actual incident - the execution for cowardice of innocent French soldiers during World War I - opened, the film’s star, Kirk Douglas, was widely perceived as its architect, much in the same manner as Brad Pitt is seen as the lead creative intelligence behind Moneyball.
In his contemporary review in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther credited Douglas “with having the courage to produce and appear in the screen dramatization of a novel that has been a hot potato in Hollywood for 22 years ... a story ... that reflects not alone on France’s honor but also on the whole concept of military authority.”
Almost as an afterthought, Crowther mentioned that the film was directed by Stanley Kubrick - whose “sullen camera bores directly into the minds of scheming men and into the hearts of patient, frightened soldiers who have to accept orders to die.”
At the time, Kubrick was just a 29-year-old former Look magazine photographer who had yet to make a commercially successful film. And though Kubrick and his producing partner, James Harris, had secured the rights to the Humphrey Cobb novel on which the film was based, they probably wouldn’t have secured financing without Douglas’ participation. (And Douglas, of course, gave Kubrick’s career a great boost when he brought him in to take over direction of Spartacus from Anthony Mann.)
I suspect I was not alone in considering Paths of Glory the real starting point of Kubrick’s career. I knew he had done three prior features, and that Kubrick himself considered his feature debut, Fear and Desire, an allegorical war story starring a very young Paul Mazursky that he partly financed by hustling chess in Central Park, “a bumbling amateur film exercise ... a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.” (Actually the few reviews weren’t bad, though after he became Kubrick he tried, not always successfully, to block public screenings of the film. It finally appeared on television, on TCM, in December 2011. And, since it’s out of copyright, I’ve posted it on my blood, dirt & angels blogsite.)
And after that, Kubrick made two poverty-row crime thrillers, Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956). I’d never thought too much about these films, though I’d heard them described as two of the more interesting late noirs to come out of Hollywood. I had always assumed they were just works for hire, part of Kubrick’s apprenticeship. I don’t know that I ever bothered to watch either film all the way through in a single sitting - I caught parts of them over the years - and I always assumed that whatever their merits they weren’t genuine Kubrickian artifacts, but rather compromised movies that he made to establish himself in Hollywood.
But now the Criterion Collection has released a newly restored DVD edition of The Killing ($29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-ray), which includes Killer’s Kiss (promo line: “Her soft mouth was the road to sin-smeared violence!”) as a bonus feature. Both make it clear that Kubrick was a major artist before he started working with Kirk Douglas.
Killer’s Kiss, a story of a fading boxer who rescues his taxi-dancer neighbor from her violent employer (I imagine Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn might know this film), is the more minor film, but it is distinguished by a fight sequence set in a mannequin factory that occurs near the end, and some beautiful and surreal New York imagery that evokes Weegee’s night images, particularly in its shots of the now demolished old Penn Station. Kubrick objected to the final upbeat note that United Artists insisted on, but he didn’t have the power to resist the Hollywood happy ending. It may have been the last time someone told him how to make a movie.
But The Killing, based on a pulp novel by Lionel White, is the real revelation here, the story of a racetrack heist that plays with time structure and point-of-view (anticipating, among other films, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction). It features a veritable all-star roster of B-movie players, including Sterling Hayden as the mastermind behind the heist, Elisha Cook Jr. as a racetrack teller in on the job, Marie Windsor as the teller’s avaricious wife, Ted de Corsia as a corrupt cop and cult favorite Timothy Carey as a sniper hired to create a diversion by bringing down a horse mid-race.
While the plot itself is fairly straightforward - the heist is successful but one of the plotters has planned a double-cross - Kubrick cut the film so that the heist would be seen from the perspective of several characters, a tactic that seemed to confuse audiences in the 1950s (and might seem avant-garde even today).
The previews of the film were reportedly disastrous and led Kubrick to try to recut the film in a more conventional manner before deciding to trust his instincts. While audiences were indifferent, several critics were impressed enough to list The Killing as one of the best films of the year.
It’s not all Kubrick, of course. Jim Thompson, the crime novelist (The Killer Inside Me) who supplied “additional dialogue” for the film (and worked with Kubrick in a similar capacity on Paths of Glory), claimed his contributions on both films were greater than Kubrick ever acknowledged, calling the director a “credit hog.”
But even then, Kubrick was so certain of what he wanted his movie to be that, while he had hired the great cinematographer Lucien Ballard for The Killing, the director insisted on setting up and lighting shots to the point that Ballard - who would later shoot The Wild Bunch for Sam Peckinpah - wouldn’t watch the film’s dailies.
It wasn’t his movie, after all. It was no one’s movie but Kubrick’s. I see that now.
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MovieStyle, Pages 31 on 02/03/2012