Kubrick
Michael Herr
Picador £10, pp98
Buy it at BOL
The Complete Kubrick
David Hughes
Virgin £15.99, pp303
Stanley Kubrick, Director: a Visual Analysis
Alexander Walker, Sybil Taylor and Ulrich Ruchti
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25, pp376
Michael Curtiz directed more than 150 films in every genre, a fair number of them popular classics - The Sea Hawk, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce and, most famously, Casablanca. By all accounts, he was a demanding, aloof figure and anecdotes about his working process abound, but his personality and 50-year career have not excited great interest among cineastes or the public.
There's only one book about him, a slim, rather scholarly work. The demanding, aloof Stanley Kubrick, however, who made only 13 feature films in 50 years, none more enduringly popular than the best-known Curtiz movies (and several not as good), has attracted an astonishing amount of attention.
In the year before his death on 7 March last year at the age of 70, there were two large, unauthorised biographies. Since then there have been books by two of his literary collaborators and revised editions of the officially approved studies by the only film critics he took into his confidence - Michel Ciment in France and Alexander Walker in this country.
What makes Kubrick fascinating is the intensity of his art and his personality which led him to exact extraordinary demands on himself and those around him. In 1960, after bruising encounters with egocentric actor-producers - Marlon Brando fired him from One-Eyed Jacks, Kirk Douglas humiliated him on Spartacus - Kubrick settled in Britain, but remaining intensely American to the last.
He became a combination of Prospero, Howard Hughes and Harry Lime, an eccentric business genius with magical powers and a demonic charm. Living a mysterious, reclusive life, he had everybody else's phone number but never gave out his own.
His lifelong passions (and during the postwar years his principal sources of income) were photography and chess, the first a matter of capturing the precise, fleeting moment, the second a deadly game involving anticipating how to act at crucial times in the future.
Michael Herr, the author of Dispatches, was drawn into Kubrick's world in 1980, initially with the idea of writing a film on the Holocaust, or on Jung, or a version of Schnitzler's Dream Story. They ended up working together on Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick's penultimate picture, set in South Carolina and Vietnam, shot in East Anglia and London's Docklands.
Like most people who met Kubrick and became the recipients of his marathon phone calls, Herr fell under his spell. But like the witnesses in Citizen Kane and The Bad and the Beautiful, he got over being dazzled by the charisma, and in his brief memoir Kubrick he tries to understand this complex artist.
To Herr, Kubrick was both a social Darwinist and a liberal humanist, a combination of tight-fisted capitalist businessman and obsessive artist, a man who made 'art films with blockbuster pretensions'. Contrary to the usual view that Kubrick was a film-maker with no personal life, Herr claims 'it would be more correct to say that he had no professional life since everything he did... was utterly personal'. When you signed on with him (and he drew up tight contracts), you became involved in 'dragging massive blocks nights and weekends and holidays in order to build another one of Stanley's pyramids, and whether cheerful or resentful didn't matter that much to him, although he preferred cheerful'.
Herr's insightful book concludes with a detailed defence of Kubrick's posthumously released film Eyes Wide Shut, with which I largely agree, and an attack on its co-screenwriter Frederic Raphael's memoir of working with Kubrick - Eyes Wide Open - which I think ill-advised. Kubrick's friends and admirers too readily gang up on those who break ranks and Kubrick should have known when he hired Raphael that he wasn't taking on the sort of modest, cinematically inxperienced writer he liked working with.
I was thus amused, and surprised, to read in The Complete Kubrick that Stanley Donen, director of Singin' in the Rain and subject of a bizarre homage in A Clockwork Orange, was planning a film based on Eyes Wide Open starring Frederic Raphael as Kubrick and Tom Conti (Raphael's alter ego in The Glittering Prizes) as Raphael. As John Wayne says in The Searchers: 'That'll be the day.'
There is much stuff like this in David Hughes's The Complete Kubrick, a widely researched account of all the films (and the uncompleted projects), every line packed with accumulated facts, opinions and speculation on the sources, influences, making and impact of the films. The level of accuracy is high (the only obvious serious error is the claim that novelist Howard Fast, author of Spartacus, was one of the Hollywood 10) and the book is both fun to read and valuable for reference.
But turning from The Complete Kubrick to Alexander Walker's Stanley Kubrick, Director, a book on which Hughes extensively draws for quotations and insights, is like exchanging an anorak for a thinking cap. First published in 1971 as Stanley Kubrick Directs, Walker's book has been re-designed by Sybil Taylor and Ulrich Ruchti and is among the best studies ever made of a director.
Like Michael Ciment's excellent Kubrick (translated by Gilbert Adair in 1983, but out of print with no British edition of the revised French version in sight), it uses, at Kubrick's request, frame blow-ups rather than stills. These illustrations truly illuminate the text. People in production stills strike attitudes; frame blow-ups make points.To his affectionate, but not uncritical text, Walker has added a 'personal postscript' that ends with a moving account of Kubrick's funeral.
Both Ciment and Walker help us see what they think makes Kubrick's films special. They direct us to the results of his fastidiousness as they manifest themselves on screen - things that cannot be explained verbally. They have to be seen, experienced visually, to be understood.
Provocatively, Herr claims that a sensitivity to language preceded the image for Kubrick, hence his reverence for Nabokov and Burgess. Perhaps there's something Jewish here, the Old Testament awe for the word. Kubrick's Jewishness is a major subject of contention between Herr and Raphael.
