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Auteur! Auteur?
Kubrick at the Brattle; Malle at the HFA and the MFA
BY PETER KEOUGH
Related Links

Stanley Kubrick's authorized Web site.

Louis Malle's Web site

No wonder the Auteur Theory has fallen into disrepute: all the auteurs are dead. Such as Stanley Kubrick, who died two years shy of the millennium he made a household word. Why is he an auteur? Partly because his influence is inescapable. Look in the theaters today and you’ll find it in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Turn on the TV and you’ll find a scene from Spartacus advertising a soft drink. Like RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick finally has answered to a cola company.

Then there’s artistic control. Kubrick had it to the point of obsession. It practically paralyzed him. With his eighth film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, he freed himself from studio control and was able to indulge his 50-plus takes and utter hands-on production methods unmolested. That and his meticulous research of projects in pre-production made for an output of only 13 features in five decades. It’s a compact body of work, one that can be analyzed, perhaps, as a single work of art, the grand tapestry of one of the 20th century’s most important film artists.

It also makes putting together a retrospective easy. The Brattle Theatre celebrates the 50th anniversary of the start of Kubrick’s career with its series "The Complete Kubrick." That start is marked from what’s actually his second feature; we’re not getting the first one, Fear and Desire (1953), which Kubrick himself dismissed as "a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious."

It couldn’t have been much odder than Killer’s Kiss (1955; September 3 @ 2:30, 6, and 9:45 pm), a lurid, mannered noir reminiscent of Sam Fuller. The boxer hero, as a TV announcer says during a broadcast of one of his fights, has the bad habit of being at his worst when it counts the most. As when he has to rescue his dancehall sweetheart from the clutches of her creepy boss. The story might be pulp, but the black-and-white images photographed by Kubrick himself stand out: vistas of New York City rooftops, the redolent details of the street, and a bizarre duel involving mannequins, an ax, and a window pole that presages motifs in later films ranging from Spartacus (1960; September 11 @ noon and 3:45 and 7:30 pm) to A Clockwork Orange (1971; September 14 @ 4:15, 7, and 9:45 pm) and The Shining (1980; September 7-8 @ 4:45, 7:15, and 9:45).

The noir genre with its premise of fallen human nature and predestined fate was a natural for Kubrick, but he didn’t take it seriously for long. With his next film, The Killing (1956; September 3 @ 4 and 7:30 pm), he’s already gotten satiric. It seems like a lampoon of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, which also stars Sterling Hayden as a loser involved in a doomed heist. A hoky Dragnet voiceover narrative and Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled deadpan dialogue counterpoint Hayden’s earnest performance and Kubrick’s moody, neo-realistic imagery, edging the film toward the grotesquerie of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip. A twist ending underscores the Olympian bemusement and disdain.

Irony surrenders to pathos and outrage in Paths of Glory (1957; September 12 @ 8 pm and September 13 @ 7:30 pm), which preserves Kubrick’s bleak assessment of the human condition while suggesting that human institutions might be to blame. His tracking shots move with the grace of acknowledged influence Marcel Ophuls, tracing out in the Western Front of 1916 a world of drastic class conflict, the less elegant successor to the lush but no less cutthroat 18th-century parlors and landscapes of Barry Lyndon (1975; September 6 @ 4:30 and 8 pm). In a cavernous, rococo chalet, generals dine on delicacies while discussing plans to send hundreds of soldiers to their deaths in a futile assault on "The Anthill," an impregnable German position. The soldiers, meanwhile, cower in the deadly squalor of the trenches, powerless to alter their fate as cannon fodder. Their only hope is the incorruptible Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), the battalion leader. When a trio of scapegoats are chosen for court-martial and firing squad to atone for the unit’s failure to take the Anthill, Dax rises to defend them and to uphold the honor of France and human dignity. There is no cynicism in this film, which is the closest to flawless that Kubrick ever got, and the irony is tragic, climaxing in the elegiac coda.

Kubrick really had only two idealistic heroes in his movies, Dax and Spartacus, and Kirk Douglas played both. A more typical Kubrick protagonist is Humbert Humbert, the haughty æsthete adrift in Middle America in his adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1960; September 9-10 @ 2 and 7 pm). Played by James Mason, Humbert is a soul capable of the purest kind of love; unfortunately, it’s pedophilic. Cast as the 12-year-old love object of the title, the 14-year-old Sue Lyon was criticized as too old (any younger and the film could never have been made). More problematic is Lolita’s timidity in probing the frontier between innocence and depravity. The latter quality is embodied not so much by Humbert but by his nemesis and alter ego, Peter Sellers’s manic, damned Quilty. Had the surreal inventiveness of the film’s opening and closing frame story been maintained throughout, Lolita might have challenged Kubrick’s next film as his comic masterpiece.

Kubrick probably felt the same way, as he offered Sellers four of the leading roles in Dr. Strangelove (1964; September 9-10 @ 5 and 10 pm), the most subversive black comedy in the history of Hollywood. One, the B-52 pilot Major T.J. "King" Kong, Sellers turned down (Slim Pickens took it, turning in an iconic performance). But the three that he accepted embody Kubrick’s analysis of human nature. President Merkin Muffley is humanistic, rational, and ineffectual. Captain Mandrake is decent, resourceful, and also ineffectual. Strangelove, the reformed Nazi scientist, the evil genius and death principle incarnate who helps engineer humanity’s doom, offers humanity its only hope of survival. At least for the privileged few. The chalet of the ruling class in Paths of Glory has become the mineshaft refuge of the elite in Strangelove.

If life on earth is a dead end, how about outer space? Coming after the uproarious despair of Strangelove, the near-mystic optimism of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; September 4-5 @ 1, 4:30, and 8 pm) is a surprise. But is it optimistic? In one draft of the script, the star child of the ending ignites all the hydrogen bombs on Earth, destroying the planet. The actual ending is more ambiguous, but what’s the significance of the monolith that looms over key moments of human evolution like a tombstone? Or the psychedelic trip through the "star gate" that takes Keir Dullea’s wandering astronaut to his deathbed in a fancy bedchamber right out of Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, or the Overlook Hotel? In every one of Kubrick’s films, significant exits and entrances occur through doorways in the distant recesses of the film frame, almost like the ever-receding vanishing point of 2001’s "ultimate trip." The passages in those films end up nowhere good; why should this one?

So much for outer space as an escape — how about life after death? Jack Nicholson’s caretaker in Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining achieves permanent residence in the Overlook Hotel, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous and deceased, but at the cost of the eternal recurrence of rage, violence, and damnation. His demonic face at the end mirrors that of Vincent D’Onofrio’s tortured Marine recruit in the middle of Full Metal Jacket (1987; September 12 @ 10 pm; September 13 @ 5 and 9:30 pm). Driven to madness by the dehumanizing training of his DI (though the hilarious R. Lee Ermey has lost some of his intimidating aura since his appearances on the History Channel’s Mail Call), he tells Private Joker (Matthew Modine), "I am in a world of shit." After passing through the nightmare of Vietnam, Joker agrees, adding, "But I am alive. And I am not afraid."

So much for the "fear" part of Kubrick’s orphaned first feature, Fear and Desire. How about desire? A colleague of mine, no fan of Kubrick’s other films, insists that Eyes Wide Shut (1999; September 15 @ 4:30 and 8 pm) is brilliant. He suggested I see it again. So I did — my third viewing — and I remain unconvinced. But not bored. Among the high points: Tom Cruise grinning like a lemur; Nicole Kidman reading her lines as if she had brain damage; a weird narrative detour involving the owner of a costume shop, his underage, underdressed daughter, and two tiny Asian men in drag; and the brief reflection in a bathroom fixture of a group of people who otherwise are not in the movie. Was it the film crew? Surely a director as meticulous as Kubrick would not allow such a slip in one of his films unless it was intentional. Maybe this is a window into an entirely new movie, a better one. Or a "star gate" into a world in which there would always be a Stanley Kubrick to frame it.

If an absurd melodrama involving kinky sex made one an auteur, Louis Malle would qualify. One of some two dozen or so features included in a retrospective running at both the HFA and the MFA, Fatale|Damage (1992; HFA September 24 and 28 @ 9 pm) has to be one of the least erotic movies ever made. Sex with curtain rods, anyone? And the sight of Jeremy Irons trotting nude down several flights of stairs beats out Sydney Pollack with his shirt off in Eyes Wide Shut as one of the screen’s top turnoffs.

Unfortunately, Malle is too much of a dilettante to qualify for auteur status. His films range from his debut feature, Le monde du silence|The Silent World (1956; HFA September 9 and 11 @ 7 pm), an undersea chronicle made with Jacques Cousteau and the winner of the Best Documentary Oscar, to Vanya on 42nd Street (1994; HFA September 23 @ 7 pm and September 25 @ 9 pm), an arch and touching meditation on Chekhov and the self-reflexivity of the stage. But Malle is like one of those adolescents who are brilliant in school but wane with maturity, or the lack of it. That is, he’s like the heroes of three of his best, most "auteurish" films.

The title protagonist of Lacombe, Lucien (1974; MFA September 4 @ 3:15 pm and September 7 @ 7:30) is an uncalculating opportunist. A teenager in occupied France in 1944, he responds to rejection by the local branch of the Resistance by collaborating with the Gestapo. Along the way he falls in love with a Jewish girl. It’s not the kind of problem that gets solved by irrational impulsiveness, but Malle’s documentary sensibility does justice to the story’s ambiguities.

Laurent, the adolescent hero of Le souffle au cœur|Murmur of the Heart (1971; MFA September 8 @ 2:15 pm and September 17 @ 12:30 pm), is a calculating romantic. The youngest of the three rowdy sons of a well-to-do gynecologist, he’s his mother’s pet and then some. He quotes Camus on suicide and excels at his studies despite his subversive cut-ups, and his incestuous interlude with mom ends with the family’s purging laughter.

Perhaps Laurent might grow up to become the burnt-out carouser and existential fall guy of Le feu follet|The Fire Within (1963; MFA September 3 @ 2 pm and September 15 @ 4 pm). After four months in a rehab clinic, he returns to his old haunts in Paris, to say goodbye to and denounce each of the approaches to life that he’s rejected: the bourgeois intelligentsia, the bohemian art world, the cold-blooded moneyed class. You can’t remain an adolescent, an old friend tells him, you should embrace the mediocre certainty. Malle followed that advice, and for such films as this we should be glad he did.


Issue Date: September 2 - 8, 2005
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