Soon you’ll be nestled all snug in your bed, and perhaps visions of sugarplums will dance in your head. Being a Screengrab reader, however, it’s more likely that you’re entertaining visions of the snazzy new Stanley Kubrick Directors Series DVD box set waiting under the tree. But if Santa decides you’ve been more naughty than nice and leaves you a copy of the Uwe Boll Collection instead, there’s no need to lose that holiday spirit. As our gift to you, we’ve put together a very different Kubrick collection consisting of the prickly auteur’s early shorts and rarely-seen first feature. It may be lacking in Malcolm McDowell commentaries and spiffy digital remastering, but we assure you it is the finest YouTube has to offer.
DAY OF THE FIGHT (1951) Kubrick’s first film, financed independently and sold to RKO Pictures for a cool hundred bucks, traces a day in the life of middleweight boxer Walter Cartier – from sunrise, when he wakes up in bed next to his identical twin brother (!) to the evening bout’s final blows. The director’s misanthropic tendencies emerge through the hard-boiled narration, which describes “the primitive, vicarious, visceral thrill of seeing one animal overcome another.”
FLYING PADRE (1951) The Rev. Fred Stadtmuller is a Catholic priest in New Mexico whose parish covers so much ground, he is forced to fly a puddle-jumper between the isolated communities in order to tend to his flock. Not as impressive as The Flying Nun, perhaps, but it is a shame this never became an ongoing TV series. He could have solved mysteries!
THE SEAFARERS (1953) Kubrick’s first color film is a documentary commissioned by the Seafarers International Union, so it’s not terribly surprising that it paints a portrait of swabbies as noble, hard-working salts of long-standing tradition, well-served by their big modern union halls “staffed by experts but under the supervision of men who know what it is to top a boom, to batten down a hatch, to weigh an anchor.” The most Kubrickian touch is a smooth tracking shot of the heaping bins of heart-clogging food in the galley.
FEAR AND DESIRE (1953) This one is for the die-hards. It’s the feature Kubrick tried to suppress by buying up as many existing prints as he could track down. At least one print survived, though just barely – viewing the version posted on YouTube is like watching the movie from the bottom of a swimming pool. Like Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket, it’s a war movie. “Not a war that has been fought or ever will be – but any war.” Sound just a little pretentious? We admit, this one defeated us, but judge for yourself.