by David Mikics
Meanwhile, he searched for cash to make a feature film.
Kubrick shot his first feature, Fear and Desire, in southern California in early 1951, after raising ten thousand dollars, mostly from his uncle Martin Perveler, who owned a string of pharmacies in LA. Perveler demanded that Kubrick give him a percentage on all his future films, but when Stanley refused he gave him the money anyway. Paul Mazursky, who acted in the movie, remembered driving with Kubrick to visit Perveler. “He needed another $5,000 to finish the film, and he says, ‘I’m gonna get the money from him no matter what—I can tell you that right now.’ And he spat at the windshield from inside the car. I’ll never forget that. He got the money.”7
Released in 1953, Fear and Desire is a deadly serious Conrad-style tale about four soldiers stranded behind enemy lines in an unnamed war. Years later Kubrick mercilessly derided his first feature film and tried to keep it from being shown. He said to an interviewer, “I wasn’t satisfied to just make an interesting film, I wanted it to be a very poetic and meaningful film. It was a little like the Thurber story about the midget who wouldn’t take the base on balls and decided to swing. . . . It opened at the Guild Theatre in New York and it was pretty apparent it was terrible.”8
Fear and Desire is fatally adolescent, as Kubrick later realized. There is a grandly portentous voice-over, and in one scene a shadowy figure called the General, who topples over into death like one of Welles’s hero-villains. Kubrick wouldn’t give us this kind of hokum again. The movie contains only one memorable scene, when the four soldiers kidnap a girl from the enemy side and tie her to a tree. Sidney (Paul Mazursky) dances around the impassive girl, whose face remains blank, and delivers a demented Bergmanesque monologue referencing Shakespeare’s The Tempest (later the basis for a disappointing film by Mazursky). The girl slips her bonds and runs, and Sidney shoots her dead.
The soldier’s showdown with a silent and implacable woman makes up Fear and Desire’s hot emotional center. It has echoes in some later Kubrick: when Jack in The Shining embraces a nude beauty only to find her transformed into a cackling, pustule-ridden hag, when Joker shoots the teenage Vietnamese sniper in Full Metal Jacket, and when Bill in Eyes Wide Shut faces off against a masked woman at an orgy. Fear and Desire is a hopeless muddle, but even here Kubrick begins working through what men see in and do to women, a frequent theme of his later movies.
Joseph Burstyn, a crucial distributor of foreign films in America, booked Fear and Desire into New York art house theaters like the Guild, on 50th Street near Radio City. It played in a handful of other big cities too. In the sixties Kubrick took the movie out of circulation. When it was screened against his wishes at Telluride and at New York’s Film Forum thirty years later, he announced to the press that it was a “bumbling, amateur film exercise . . . a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.”9 Kubrick was right to trash his first feature; only hardcore Kubrick fans will seek it out. Yet the movie gives us some important clues about who Kubrick was.
Toba Metz, dark-haired and pale, with beatnik bangs over her dark eyes, appears briefly in Fear and Desire. Shortly after the film was finished, in late 1951, the couple returned from California to New York, and soon after they separated. Their hand-to-mouth existence no doubt weighed on her. Kubrick had to scrounge for a living, playing chess for quarters in Washington Square Park. He was the fifth- or sixth-best player in the park, he told the journalist Jeremy Bernstein. “It was a whole lot of potzers, and semi-potzers, and people who put up fierce struggles but invariably lost,” Kubrick said.10 While waiting for an answer about a movie, he would arrive at the park at noon and leave at midnight, with quick breaks for meals. Years later Kubrick fantasized that he could have been as great as Bobby Fischer, good enough to beat the Russians, if only he had been able to study chess nine hours a day.
Kubrick met the dancer Ruth Sobotka in 1952 while he was editing Fear and Desire, and the two quickly began an affair. Stanley and Ruth married in January 1955, after living together in the Village for three years. This marriage, like Kubrick’s first, didn’t last long. Stanley and Ruth split the next year, legally separated in 1958, and divorced in 1961. But while they were together Sobotka was a serious intellectual presence in Kubrick’s life. Nearly three years Kubrick’s senior, she was far beyond him in her artistic career. Sobotka had ties to the avant-garde: in 1947 she had appeared in Hans Richter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy, which contained sequences designed by Calder, Man Ray, Duchamp, Ernst, and Léger.
Ruth had studied with Lee Strasberg and acted on the stage in New York. When Kubrick met her, she was a dancer with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, and a designer as well. In 1951 Ruth designed costumes for and danced in The Cage, the sensational Jerome Robbins ballet that depicted a praying mantis–like female devouring her male brood. The dance, hieratic and bloody and as puzzling as Kafka, must have made a strong impression on Kubrick, who no doubt saw it when it was revived by Balanchine’s company.
A dancer friend remembers Sobotka wearing a voluptuous full-length red bathrobe with a fur collar, “like something out of ‘Anna Karenina.’ She was incredibly beautiful.”11 A Viennese Jew, daughter of a well-known actress, Gisela Schönau, and a famous architect and designer, Walter Sobotka, Ruth had fled Austria with her family after Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938, when she was twelve.
Unlike Toba, Ruth Sobotka was Kubrick’s artistic collaborator. Along with a brief role in Killer’s Kiss (1955), she made storyboards for The Killing (1956), his third movie, and a United Artists press release called her “Hollywood’s first female art director.” Like Kubrick, she was a perfectionist. One friend said that when she married Kubrick, she “learned to play chess with no less commitment to the task than studying ballet or acting.” Gerald Fried said about Stanley and Ruth that “there was a lot of sparring, but I thought they were quite perfect for each other.”12
Ruth Sobotka, emissary from the Mitteleuropäische artistic world, left a lasting mark on Kubrick. She may even have told him about Traumnovelle (Dream Story), by another Viennese Jew, Arthur Schnitzler, a book that obsessed Kubrick for decades before he filmed it as Eyes Wide Shut.
The words “film noir” conjure up muffled gunshots in the dark, rain-drenched city streets, and dizzying, recursive plots. Plus maybe a traumatized ex-con, a hard-drinking detective, or a devilish dame; not to mention the bitter taste of black coffee, and the shadow of the gallows. In film noir tough guys usually get outmaneuvered, shown up as hapless pawns. It’s the flip side of that American icon, the lone hero carving out his destiny.
Kubrick’s first two mature films, Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), are certainly noir, but they don’t share the genre’s glamorous dark moodiness. His protagonists lack the seductive sheen of most noir heroes. Instead they are busy trying to get a grip—on what, they’re not so sure.
Kubrick sides with noir’s hallucinatory sense that life is a dark illusion even when it seems most real, that the boldest of actions can look passive and dreamlike. In Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal (1948), a character says, “I suddenly felt, I don’t know, big and small at the same time.” Noir draws an ironic frame around our fantasies of significance, and Kubrick appreciated the irony.
Kubrick made Killer’s Kiss in New York in 1954. The shooting took thirteen weeks, a long time for a low-budget picture. There is much that predicts later Kubrick in Killer’s Kiss, starting with the title, which ranks with Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut in its poetic snap. (Two earlier versions of the title were Kiss Me, Kill Me and The Nymph and the Maniac.)
Killer’s Kiss begins with two lonely New Yorkers observing each other from the facing windows of their apartments. The woman, Gloria Price, is a taxi dancer (in other words, a prostitute) in a seedy Times Square club called Pleasure Land. The man, Davey Gordon, is a boxer getting ready for what will turn out to be his last bout. They begin a romance, which is threatened by Gloria’s boss, Vinnie Rapallo, a middle-aged brute who wants Gloria for him
self.
Killer’s Kiss is about ordinary, minor-scale people. No one is neurotic, demonic, or flagrantly doomed as in some film noir. Jamie Smith, who plays Davey, seems passive yet alert, and as devoid of personality as Keir Dullea, Dave Bowman in 2001. Irene Kane as Gloria is slightly feral and shy. Pursued by Rapallo, Gloria can’t be had, but not for the usual noir reasons. She’s not perverse or deadly, certainly no femme fatale, and not baby-doll girlish either. “Her Soft Mouth was the Road to Sin-Smeared Violence,” screamed the lurid poster for Killer’s Kiss, but this was false advertising. Killer’s Kiss is a remarkably chaste film: Gloria is too jumpy and evasive to be sexy, and Davey too cautious, too stunned by life, to thirst after her. There is something off about them, in the same way there is something off about certain people you know.
Killer’s Kiss has a makeshift quality influenced by New York school photography and cinéma vérité. Gerald Fried’s jittery, jazzy score keeps the audience on edge. Kubrick makes the streets of New York look tawdry and dreamlike, full of gritty urban oddities. He cuts from the flashing neon signs of Broadway to hot dogs on a grill to a toy baby floating in a tub in a dime store window.
Kubrick later disparaged Killer’s Kiss, saying that it had a “silly” story and that it was “still down in the student level of filmmaking.” The story was “written in a week,” he told the interviewer Robert Ginna.13 True, there is something crude about the movie, but this lack of polish gives Killer’s Kiss its offbeat charm. From Killer’s Kiss on Kubrick would become increasingly precise in his filmmaking, bearing down on each nuance of lighting, composition, and sound. Killer’s Kiss is the last homemade-looking Kubrick film.
The movie’s ending reprises its first shot, with Davey, who is waiting for Gloria, nervously pacing beneath the cavernous vault of New York’s Penn Station. Then the unexpected happens. In the last minute of Killer’s Kiss Gloria runs to Davey and embraces him.
Kubrick’s second full-length movie is that rare thing, a film noir with a happy ending. The hero gets the girl, but this finale feels tentative rather than celebratory. Kubrick refrains from the usual close-up clinch at the end: the lovers are seen from far off, in the diminuendo of a long shot.
Killer’s Kiss, the first mature Kubrick movie, is the only one until his last, Eyes Wide Shut, that ends with a renewed romantic connection between a man and a woman. In both movies, the connection is exactly as hopeful as it is tenuous.
Killer’s Kiss has a peculiar set piece at its center, showing the crucial place of Ruth Sobotka in Kubrick’s vision. Sobotka dances a pas seul while Gloria’s voice-over tells the story of her doomed sister Iris, who gave up her career as a ballet dancer at her husband’s insistence and then devoted herself to her dying father. In the end Iris killed herself in protest against what her father and her husband had done to her. Gloria throws herself into a degrading job at Pleasure Land, proving that she too can be self-destructive. “Every night I worked in that depraved place, a human zoo,” she says.
It’s hard not to see in Ruth’s Killer’s Kiss dance solo a premonition about the future of her relationship with Stanley. Iris gives up her dancing for her husband’s sake. In 1955, the year after Killer’s Kiss, Ruth left ballet so she could move to Los Angeles with Kubrick. She quickly grew to hate the city. In a newspaper interview she said, “I liked working on a movie, but would not like to live in that city of false values. Success in Hollywood is measured in terms of money or notoriety, and what is important to those people is not what is important to me.” She added that “many dancers I considered good had become slovenly since living in Hollywood.”14
Sobotka was listed as art director on The Killing, as she had been on Killer’s Kiss. But though Ruth dreamed of being Stanley’s full artistic partner, such a collaboration was not to be. When The Killing was being shot, Stanley would often leave Ruth at home while he went to the set.
In Killer’s Kiss Iris remains alien to the drama: a vision intruding from the past, a pure artist who destroys herself. The movie sidelines her much as Ruth Sobotka, who plays Iris, would find herself shunted aside by Kubrick’s burgeoning career. After she performs her lonely virtuoso turn, the movie leaves her behind like a forgotten dying swan. The story of Davey and Gloria shuts out the memory of Gloria’s sister, who lived for art.
In a screenplay treatment called The Married Man from 1954–56, when Kubrick was having marital trouble with Ruth, he wrote,
Marriage is like a long meal with dessert served at the beginning. . . . Can you imagine the horrors of living with a woman who fastens herself on you like a rubber suction cup? Whose entire life revolves around you morning, noon and night? . . . It’s like drowning in a sea of feathers. Sinking deeper and deeper into the soft, suffocating depths of habit and familiarity. If she’d only fight back. Get mad or jealous, even just once. . . . Look, last night I went out for a walk. Right after dinner. I came home at two in the morning. Don’t ask me where I was.15
The anecdote that Kubrick told Douglas, in which he returned home after futilely trying to leave, his suitcase getting heavier and heavier, must have been about his life with Sobotka, one guesses. “Just tell me where my suitcase is, I’m getting out of here,” the husband says in The Married Man.16 His wife (named Alice, as in Eyes Wide Shut), is a “saint,” “practically Mary Magdalene in blue jeans,” and he finds her straitlaced virtue intolerable.
Two other treatments by Kubrick from the same years, Jealousy and The Perfect Marriage, are about desperate, discontented spouses like Kubrick himself. In Jealousy, a husband, convinced his wife is unfaithful, “meets a trampy looking girl and eventually winds up at her apartment. There is a sexy scene of some sort which is climaxed by the man walking out”—just as Bill Harford will do several times in Eyes Wide Shut. In The Perfect Marriage, the husband holds his wife’s “wild” past against her, and claims that he’s faithful, but “she asks about recent trips when he didn’t answer [the] room phone.” Kubrick sketched out a series of notes about the couple’s catastrophic fight: “YOU’LL BE SORRY . . . HYSTERIA VENOMOUS . . . ADMIT INFIDELITY. LOUSY LOVER. SCREAMING[.] HUSBAND LEAVES.” Kubrick also drew up a scene in which the wife abandons her husband, who “sobs like a frightened child” and then calls his mother. Outlining another movie idea, under the title The Famished Monkey, Kubrick writes, “The development of this marriage should be a kind of sado-masochistic Dostoyevskian set up” in which the husband wants “to humiliate the worshiping girl and as a result lacerate him self.” This outline’s scene titles convey marital trauma: “Fuck or fight,” “Colored girls,” “Trapped and bored after a screw.”17
Kubrick expressed his discontent more subtly in Killer’s Kiss, where Ruth plays the doomed figure of Iris, dancing her pas seul and then giving up her career for a man, as Ruth did for Stanley. Ruth is outstripped by the mature romantic couple who have a future because their relations are still tentative, in marked contrast to the self-sacrificing Iris.
Shortly after making Killer’s Kiss, Kubrick encountered the creative partner he was looking for and hadn’t found in Ruth Sobotka. In 1955 Kubrick met James B. Harris, known as Jimmy, an army friend of his high school buddy Alex Singer. Harris wanted to produce movies, and he was impressed with Kubrick’s first two features. So the two men formed Harris-Kubrick Productions.
Harris had a languid, stylish handsomeness that contrasted with Kubrick’s careless bohemian look. They became close buddies. “He was, above all, my friend,” Harris remembered. “We loved to play football and poker together. . . . We shared the same troubles in our lives and the cinema was an outlet, a reason for being and a means of escape.”18 Kubrick had played drums in high school, and Harris was also a jazz drummer, who had studied at Juilliard. Both were Jewish, and both from New York. They were the same age, too, born just eight days apart.
There was no love lost between Jimmy Harris and Sobotka. Harris said, “Ruth was an over-the-hill ballet dancer who wanted to be an art director. So Stanley indulged her in
that stuff. She couldn’t understand why her name wasn’t on the door of our office because Stanley’s and my name were on there. They split up and he left. We left our wives together. He was rehearsing me on how to break the news.”19 By December 1956 Ruth was back in New York, where she returned to the New York City Ballet.
Both before and after the split with Ruth, money was tight. Every Friday afternoon Kubrick shut down production on Killer’s Kiss so he could go to the unemployment office and pick up his check. The crew and actors grumbled at the low pay, but Kubrick was under financial pressure. He took no salary for himself on Killer’s Kiss, and he wouldn’t on his next movie either. He survived on those unemployment checks, and on loans from Jimmy Harris.
Harris had come across a novel called Clean Break (1955) by Lionel White, about a plan to rob a racetrack. He optioned the story for ten thousand dollars, thinking it could be Harris-Kubrick’s first movie. Harris and Kubrick rechristened it The Killing and got to work. The Killing was another Kubrick adventure in noir, smoother and more assured than Killer’s Kiss.
The Killing is an intellectual puzzle akin to a chess game. The idea is simple: a criminal’s plan to knock over a racetrack gradually explodes. There is no thrill in the heist, only the constant twitch of anxiety. No wily antagonist dooms the hero, as in Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or Gilda, to name a few of the canonical noir movies. Bad luck and a little loose talk are all it takes for the scheme to fall to pieces. The director sacrifices his criminals like pawns for his final combination, when Johnny Clay, the gang’s leader, stands hopelessly checkmated.
The poster for The Killing boasted, “Like No Other Picture since Scarface and Little Caesar!” But The Killing is no gangster movie with a flashy bad-guy hero. Instead it shows how a criminal scheme swirls slowly down the drain. The heist itself, rather than the characters, takes center stage.
