Word: kubrick
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...KUBRICK ONCE made a better film which dealt with violent crime and threw some cynical side-long darts at society-at-large via that arena. This was The Killing, his third production and first real success. A thieves-falling-out caper movie, its characters were so overheated that the action verged on black comedy, but they were recognizable enough to retain sympathy when necessary: Kubrick here walked a much tighter rope than the one he toes in Clockwork, Sterling Hayden played a savvy gunny, Elisha Cook the pathetic hen-pecked cashier who cracks--and kills the rest of Hayden...
...film was more involving than Clock work; more understated, thus more intellectually palatable; and it was better-made. Kubrick used Lucien Ballard's hard-edged black-and-white photography in the rangy prose style of most good American narrative films. Since the caper gives events a trap-like structure, without closing out the growth of characterization, Ballard's lights make the settings eloquent without making them overbearing. When Cook is shot by his wife, he falls where his apartment's worn carpet catches streetlight. A parakeet screeches over the punk's fallen body, and the scene and the sound...
...KILLING was not an important movie, but it was a good genre piece. Encouragingly, Kubrick's career showed growth in areas where this crime flick was weakest. Paths of Glory, his next, was one of the best American films of the fifties. Though it's somehow acquired a treacly pacifist reputation, it's actually World War I attrition portrayed by a man who could back wars--were they not all fought so stupidly. Kubrick took a single incident, a suicide mission commanded from afar by an ambitious martinet, and revealed 1917 savagery in microcosm: fixed infantry moving against armed fortifications...
Paths tested Kubrick's seriousness and showed off his developing cinematic abilities. Swirling tracking-shots caught military decorum and ballroom grace, and Kubrick's own hand-held fieldwork surpasses, in its sense of messy, forced kineticism, anything in All Quiet On the Western Front...
...Kubrick's next two works, though failures, were hopeful ones. Sparticus was, as Stanley Kauffmann said, a first-rate circus, giving the director a chance to have fun with blockbuster sets and length. Lolita lacked a painfully necessary erotic core, but it had, in Peter Sellers, a brilliant Quilty. It was with Dr. Strangelove that Kubrick again fulfilled his talent--what he accomplished, not only in story structure and images but with parodic dialogue and commentary as well, needs little more appreciation than it has already, justly, received...