The Unseen War

I'm not a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick's, but I was intrigued to see his first full-length film, Fear And Desire (1953), when it was recently shown on TCM.  It's rarely shown because there aren't that many prints and Kubrick, who all but disavowed it, tried to keep it unseen.  I can understand--it's pretty bad.

Kubrick was only 24, a former photographer for Look, when he decided to shoot his own feature.  He raised somewhere in the five figures and took a small crew out to the San Gabriel Mountains to film this story about soldiers stuck behind enemy lines.  Probably no one could have made much of Howard Sackler's overwritten screenplay, where the soldiers speechify about the meaning of it all, and many actions are poorly motivated.  Certainly Kubrick himself didn't have the time or money or talent to pull it off.

We never get any sense of menace.  What it mostly feels like is a group of actors in soldier costumes stranded in the middle of a forest.  The film, especially for its day, is shot in an arty style, but perhaps some of those edits and close-ups are there to cover up the awkward staging of so many scenes.

I don't mean to be too hard on it.  I wasn't bored during the film's short running time.  There are even a few moments that show some visual imagination. (And it's interesting to see the young Paul Mazursky recite the plot of The Tempest, knowing he'd later make a movie based on it.) But let's not puff it up into more than it is--a piece of juvenilia that barely points to his mature work.