Stanley Kubrick has dismissed Fear And Desire, his 1953 feature debut, as a “lousy picture, roughly and poorly and ineffectively made”. Its hard to argue with the late great auteurs’ own assessment, at times the film feels amateurish in its execution particularly in the technical aspects of filmmaking, poorly dubbed dialogue and rough sound editing often detract from the narrative. However there are moments within the film which stand out as pure Kubrick both in their execution and the way they deal with certain themes that the director would later explore in his later, more well known, work.
Fear And Desire is an existential war story which, as a narrator informs us at the outset is ‘outside history, only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world’. As such there is no clear setting or cultural context for the film to operate in, leaving us with only the characters to navigate some unknown world. The narrative follows four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines as they struggle to survive. The characters themselves are archetypes, the standard soldiers we have seen in countless war films since — the by the book leader, the gruff second in command, the nervous young recruit. The fact that these men can often seem robotic or inhuman could be considered a major flaw in the film, not allowing the audience to connect to the protagonists. Alternatively this could be the exact point that Kubrick and his screenwriter Howard Sackler are trying to make. The dehumanising effect of war would later go on to become a key theme in Kubrick’s seminal Full Metal Jacket (1987) and it’s not hard to see the themes, and techniques the director uses to convey them, begin to take shape here. In a standout sequence the soldiers brutally slaughter a group of enemy combatants and proceed to calmly finish their dinner, the scene is expertly cut with extreme close ups of faces and hands, more than a little reminiscent of the shower scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Parallels can also be drawn between the characters of Pvt. Sidney (Paul Mazursky) and Pvt. ‘Pyle’ (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Full Metal Jacket, as the two men similarly descend into madness. However it is the former that remains the more chilling and effective as a combination of over acting from Mazursky and a somewhat rushed transition from innocence to outright lunacy takes place within the Fear And Desire‘s admittedly short running time (at just over an hour, it barely qualifies as a ‘feature’)
Unfortunately the filmmaking of Kubrick’s debut struggles to effectively put across a clear message. Whether this is due to Sackler’s at times overly simple, at times overly philosophical, script or the wooden performances is hard to tell but as Kubrick himself suggested “the ideas which we wanted to put across were good. But we didn’t have the experience to embody them dramatically”.
For die hard Kubrick fans and cinephiles, Fear And Desire will no doubt provide new material to study and analyse, for general audiences however it is a perplexing and often sterile exercise, a rough sketch from a director who would go on to become one of cinema’s greatest artists.
Fear and Desire is out on Blu Ray and DVD on 28th January
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