Stanley Kubrick: "Fear and Desire" (1953)

                      Cinematic debuts are not necessarily indicative of the success or quality of a director's successive work. They are the proverbial "foot in the door". Not great or ambitious enough to be considered classics, but talented enough to grab someone's attention and, hopefully, the springboard for more projects. There's a handful of debuts I can think of that show an exceptional amount of talent: Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express (more of a theatrical debut; his first feature-length film, if you want to be technical, was Duel), Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (an incredibly underrated film), the Coens' Blood Simple, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, P.T. Anderson's Hard Eight, Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (which is the one of the best movies ever made, in my estimation), David Lynch's Eraserhead, and, probably the most famous debut in movie history, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.
                    But what about Stanley Kubrick, one of the giants of modern movie-making. Was his debut feature any good? Well, no. But it seems a little unfair to judge this movie too harshly. It's more of a first attempt at a film (his first real film would be Killer's Kiss) and there are glimmers of great things to come, if that's any consolation.

                    The name of the film is a bad omen from the start. Fear and Desire is an weighty, overly portentous title with vague abstract concepts that the filmmakers were probably hoping would elucidate the film's limp themes. "Squalor and Death" would be just as valid a title.
                    The story can be told in a simple sentence: four soldiers from an unidentified country are lost behind enemy lines and must maneuver their way out. That's it. Along the way, they build a raft with the purpose of escaping down the river, they murder a few enemy soldiers, and capture a peasant girl. All told dryly within an hour's running time.
                   The first thing you might have noticed about my brief synopsis is the word unidentified. It is set during an unspecified war between two unspecified forces (though I have to think it's WWII-based, with the enemies having a somewhat steely German cast to them). Though this movie was shot in 1953 during the Korean War, it's ultimately unimportant. It's a minimalist war film pared down to its barest essentials. It's definitely bare of anything meaningful.
                   It was shot in the San Gabriel Mountains in California. It was shot in a forest as far as I can figure. The setting has no distinguishing features (besides a river and a few interior locations), which I suppose gives the film a purgatorial sameness that Kubrick was going for. But I couldn't help being amused because if you've seen RedLetterMedia's Best of the Worst series as much as I've had, you know that most bad shot-on-video movies are set in the woods. The woods are a cheap place to film, so it gives Kubrick's debut an unfortunate amateur student film sheen.
                  The characters are also indistinguishable, which ultimately makes the film a bit of a slog since we don't care about them (and they're not good actors). The characters are really just voice pieces (told in voice-over narration by different characters) for Howard Sackler's (future Pulitzer Prize winner) ham-fisted mediations on war. The only character that stood out was the character of Sydney (played hammily by none other than filmmaker Paul Mazursky, who would later direct films such as An Unmarried Woman and Moscow on the Hudson), who loses his mind and tries to rape the peasant girl that the soldiers kidnap. Kubrick seems more interested in him since he's the only one without a helmet and the camera often focuses on him looking dazed and disillusioned. Though the enemy generals are depicted with a degree of realism. They're not evil or menacing, but bored out of their minds, drinking.
                  The movie does have positives. For one, Kubrick already had a feel for sophisticated shot compositions and actor placement, an asset that Kubrick acquired in his five years as a staff photographer for Look. He also edited the film, which is competent but choppy at times. The only real impressive, artful scenes of the film are the interior scenes where the soldiers ambush the enemies. They're starkly lit and shot from menacing angles. There are shot of enemies' hands squeezing food as they die and beef stew strewn on the floor, evoking gore and viscera. The film also has a fairly decent film score by Gerald Fried (judging by the lushness of it, it sounds like the film's biggest expense).

                    Kubrick was so ashamed by the film that he tried to destroy any film negatives. I'm not sure why he would be so vindictive towards his first effort (especially later on when he already evolved as a filmmaker; ego? vanity?). David Fincher hated Alien 3 but he's not going out of his way to destroy its existence. It's not that bad. It's an understandably amateur film from someone new to the medium. For film scholars, it's an important film in the evolution of one of cinema's most important filmmakers. In a sense, it's kind of quaint, amusing experience watching a master filmmaker at his most flawed.