The Legacy of Stanley Kubrick.

• Author: SHARRETT, CHRISTOPHER
• Position: Brief Article

THE SUDDEN DEMISE this spring of master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was overshadowed by the death the following day of baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. It seemed that even Hollywood couldn't offer Kubrick his due. His eulogy at the 1999 Oscar ceremony was a bit slight, in part because Kubrick made relatively few pictures from which the show's producers could draw clips with which to reminisce. He emphasized quality over quantity, often letting a decade go by without making a film.

After making his bones with intriguing noir-style thrillers like "Killer's Kiss" (1955) and "The Killing" (1956), Kubrick was rapidly perceived as an industrious and inventive director who could take on--even salvage--major productions. The historical epic "Spartacus" (1960) doesn't look much like a Kubrick work, but it contains many earmarks of the director and is a significant breakthrough. The story of the first peoples' revolution, the slave revolt against the Roman Empire, Kubrick's vision of antiquity had little in common with the Technicolor images of those overstuffed Bible films of the 1950s and 1960s. The ancient world is portrayed as vicious, with a class struggle caused by a ruling authority that is shamefully amoral, ruthless, and pragmatic. The scene in the arena, where Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) is spared by a gladiator (Woody Strode) who would rather strike at a patrician onlooker than kill a fellow slave, is one of the most poignant moments of the postwar cinema and one of the screen's best meditations on violence as spectator sport. Kubrick brought blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo back from exile--with the help of Douglas--to give "Spartacus" its political edge and allegorical aspect that cut deep into Cold War America. As grand an effort as is evident in "Spartacus," it is a prelude to Kubrick's evolution as an artist.

"Lolita" (1962) contains Kubrick's caustic humor, but it is an oddly alienating work that lacks the eroticism one would expect given the subject matter of its source in Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Yet, the very aridity of "Lolita" offered a strong hint of the worldview Kubrick was in the process of developing. His next effort, the Cold War satire "Dr. Strangelove," (1964) put him over the top. The film's icy, documentary-style aspect served not only to give the movie its realistic edge that juxtaposed nicely with its broad satire, the style introduced the essential Kubrick setting. The alienating, hyperrealist offices, expressionist...