Fear and Desire

By bumping this curious first feature to 4K Ultra-HD, Kino Lorber has finished with the 4K conversions of their licensed Stanley Kubrick movies, the others being  Killer’s Kiss,  The Killing and  Paths of Glory. The company has come up with good special features for each of those titles.

The new 4K of Kubrick’s Fear and Desire offers even more. The new item on board is Kubrick’s original uncut release, an entire reel longer than his eventual abridged version. It was sourced from a print located at the Library of Congress. The director was too detail-oriented not to file a print with the Library to insure copyright … this longer version appears to be what was screened at the Venice Film Festival in August of 1952.

Kino’s first Blu-ray of Fear and Desire  was released 14 years ago. They’ve sweetened the pot with extras, including more Kubrick short films. Both versions of Fear and Desire are here, each in a new 4K restoration.

Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire was all but forgotten when critic Andrew Sarris listed it in his 1968 book American Cinema. It had received a very small release in 1953; it is said that Kubrick pulled it shortly thereafter. The director later regarded it as a beginner’s mistake and wouldn’t let it be screened. That only made the title more attractive to scholars already fascinated by the three short subjects Kubrick directed during his careful segue from magazine photographer to film director.

In the 1990s we were told that The Eastman House in Rochester had one print of the picture that could be seen only by selected applicants under controlled conditions, a setup that conjures visions of William Alland scouring a  forbidding research archive. Back in 1999 I was slipped a bootleg VHS of Fear and Desire, a miserable 6th generation copy. It was such a find that I invited friends over. It resulted in an early DVD Savant article,  The Hidden Stanley Kubrick Feature.

Yesterday’s ‘Gotta See It’ film mysteries, when finally revealed, are invariably taken for granted. With Kubrick’s passing, the roadblock barring distribution of Fear and Desire dissolved. It eventually screened on TCM and was given an enthusiastic disc release. Now it’s back … and is nine minutes longer.

Even Geniuses have to start somewhere.

The students of Kubrick that dote on everything he touched will find Fear and Desire to be the work of an artist still sorting out the problems of feature film production. For the only time in his film career, Kubrick has difficulty navigating the gap between profundity and pretension. A good half of Kubrick’s dozen or so feature films are concerned with warfare; his aim here seems to have been to create a sober, poetic, semi-abstract meditation on war. Kubrick would make his career turning grand calculated risks into innovative, sometimes revolutionary entertainments. This first film is his only effort that lacks a viable commercial hook. A distributor wouldn’t see it as a prospective winner in mainstream theaters or on the art film circuit.

Kubrick’s moody, pace-challenged ‘lost patrol’ drama is tilted in the direction of an episode of The Twilight Zone. A narrator tells us that the war in progress is not any particular war, and that “the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being.”  We suspect that the vague-limbo setting is mainly because Kubrick can’t afford costumes, hardware or proper weapons to represent any specific conflict.

Four obviously American soldiers find themselves behind enemy lines. Lt. Corby (Kenneth Harp) wants to get to safety by riding a raft down a river. The experienced Sgt. Mac (Frank Silvera) wants to hit the enemy on their way out. He takes the fore when the foursome charges an outpost shack, killing two enemy soldiers and stealing their food. The unbalanced Pvt. Sidney (Paul Mazursky) is put in charge of guarding a pretty local girl (Virginia Leith). Letting his libido get out of control, Sidney slobbers all over the girl before loosening her bonds…  Sgt. Mac spots a general at another enemy outpost, and persuades the others to strike one more time before jumping on that raft. But the attack doesn’t go as smoothly as hoped.

Why was Kubrick not proud of Fear and Desire?  It’s clearly the work of an artist climbing a learning curve. The cinematography is beautiful and most of the acting good, if not all the dubbing. Gerald Fried’s soundtrack music is excellent. But the film is slowly paced and lacks a sense of humor. The title itself is pretentious, especially when the ‘desire’ part of the equation is Paul Mazursky’s shaky one-act performance as a neurotic Sad Sack. The real content of the movie is standard combat activity, some of which is not very good.

The vague ‘timeless’ theme expressed in the narration remains underdeveloped. Kubrick’s enemy general and his aide are played by the same actors as two of our lost patrol members. It’s likely that the roles were doubled because Kubrick couldn’t afford a bigger cast. Character speeches tend to lapse into philosophical ruminations, as if influenced by the portentous narrator. The average audience can’t digest Beat dialogue that belongs on stage in a coffee shop:

We spend our lives running our fingers down the lists in directories, looking for our real names, our permanent addresses. No man is an island?

Because Hollywood combat movies routinely indulged in (more conventional) philosophical blather, these artificial speeches aren’t as deadly as they might be. But the consistently expressive visuals tell a different story. The screenplay may be awkward but the imagery is strong. Focusing on the face of a dead enemy, or the silhouette of a survivor wading in a river, Kubrick sketches a portrait of an Eternal Soldier, forever lost and abandoned.

Kubrick doesn’t use an overall visual stylization. He saves his unusual angles for brief moments of violence, views of dead bodies, etc. The bulk of the movie is standard Lost Patrol material, as in a more conventional Hollywood production. The soldiers argue as they walk in a dry forested area, reportedly the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles. Although said to be in constant jeopardy, the men stand in plain view and talk at a normal volume, without so much as looking over their shoulders. Nobody seems eager to high-tail it back to the safety of their own lines. The instead sit around, weighing their options and making small talk.

Kubrick’s sense of intimate combat comes off very well in the assault on the guard shack, a flurry of impressionistic shots, followed by a powerful sequence showing the unpleasant aftermath. But as is typical with ultra-low budget films, events requiring more production value tend to occur off-screen. The plane crash that stranded them is not depicted at all.  The big fight at the finish is unconvincing in a way that suggests that Kubrick ran out of time, money, resources… everything.  Combat action filmed in different locations just doesn’t cut together well. Combatants in the thick of action stand about much too casually. Audiences of 1953 would surely measure Kubrick’s film against contemporary combat thrillers, like the tense & thrilling  Battleground and  The Steel Helmet.

Yes, it’s possible that an art house crowd might appreciate seeing something different. Poetry and combat had worked before: Lewis Milestone’s  A Walk in the Sun walked that walk with distinction. 25 years later, Sidney Pollack’s  Castle Keep went the poetic route, and pleased at least some of its audience. Its message-making was backed up with big-budget pyrotechnics and an irreverent sense of humor.

Kubrick makes his characters distinctive, at least visually. Frank Silvera carries most of the drama, and is the only actor to overcome the stylized dialogues. Paul Mazursky, later to become the celebrated director of  Blume in Love and  An Unmarried Woman, is tasked with pushing his neurotic soldier Sidney over the edge. In an extended monologue, Sidney gets himself excited mauling a woman he’s tied to a tree, working up the illusion that she wants him and only needs to be set free. It’s the kind of scatterbrained irrational scene that actor John Turturro would later pull off for the Coen brothers. Mazursky would later be praised for directing inspired improvisations. For Kubrick he pushes the crazy switch as far as it will go — and can’t make the scene work.

Fear and Desire’s most interesting performer is its solitary female actress, Virginia Leith. The former model had a run of memorable performances but never received a breakout role. Leith made an impression as a spirited nonconformist shoehorned into typecast parts:  Black Widow,  Violent Saturday,  A Kiss Before Dying,  Toward the Unknown. I say spirited and nonconformist based on the cult status of her  last starring feature.  Her disembodied performance feels like a protest against an unrewarding career, yet elevates the picture into full-on cult status.

Alas, Virginia Leith’s ‘girl’ in Fear and Desire spends most of her on-screen time bound to a tree, understanding nothing that she hears. A review quote calls the character “a strange half-animal girl,” which makes little or no sense. We’re not sure how ‘the girl’ remains so composed throughout Paul Mazursky’s goofball whining, hugging and grimacing, but it doesn’t give Leith an opportunity to make an impression. The best performance in Fear and Desire remains that of the dependable Frank Silvera, who Kubrick would hire for his next, better-conceived feature.

Kubrick’s next film would return to his New York stomping grounds for a minimalist but effective boxer vs. hoodlum noir,  Killer’s Kiss. When ‘padding’ is needed to vary the pace in that picture, Kubrick gives us evocative street scenes in the style of his superb urban still photography. Kubrick was amazingly self-disciplined. Each film he made shows a big advance in moviemaking skill, dramatic judgment and career savvy. We can’t see where he ever made the same mistake twice. Fear and Desire brought home the lesson that Story Always Comes First.