Category: Culture

In the 1950s, cinema had a big rival. Rather than spend money to watch a movie, the new fangled television became the choice. Well, OK, it wasn’t new fangled, and it was a long time since 1927, but it (tv) became popular after the war.

People loved it. They could stay home, watch something mindless for ‘free’, not have to dress up and could even eat while it was on and be nude.

Cinema fought back. It’s the period when the gimmick hit Hollywood bigly. 3D was popular, Smell-O-Vision, vibrating seats, stereo sound…

The big push was to a larger screen. Many techniques were invented to fill the big screen: Cinerama, VistaVision, Todd-AO, Super Technirama 70 and so on.

But what for content? Well, so many produers and directors turned to the religious, quasi-religious or historic epic. Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, King Of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told and more (into the 1960s).

Spartacus falls into this class. It’s set in Roman times, pretends to be a true story and is long. It was shot for the big screen. It is, as they say, an epic.

Kubrick was brought in by producer and star Kirk Douglas as the director. It’s a big starring vehicle for Douglas and his mate Tony Curtis. But there are real actors, like Laurence Olivier.

We are sure the set pieces look fantastic on a really big screen. And if you like that kind of historical stuff, maybe you will enjoy it. But boy is it boring. And at one point in its history, 23 minutes was removed, but this has been restored ish.

Kubrick tried his best to make something of it, but by all accounts hated it. It sticks out like a sore thumb in Kubrick’s filmography, and he would probably have made a better film if he had tackled it ten years later.

It’s hard to separate Kubrick’s first two films at the bottom of any list. They have a lot in common, black and white, barely an hour, variable photography and dodgy dubbed soundtrack.

Both have some points of interest, and if you are a Kubrick fan, you may want to watch them, but we don’t think they bear repeated viewing.

This is Kubrick working to a strict schedule and budget, a few tens of thousands of dollars. Killer’s Kiss is back on the boxing theme after an earlier short.

Neither was a box office success.

There are points of interest, it’s just a director learning his craft.

There was a time when there were shops on the high street that sold books. Some shops actually specialised in books about film. Amazing. We have piles of books about films and film history and film people.

We would guess that one of the directors most written about must be the late Stanley Kubrick. We have more than twenty books about him and his works. There must be so many articles in magazines we wonder what else there is to say about him.

We’re not going to go through his biography as you can read that elsewhere. Enough to say he started making short films in the USA in the early 1950s, then made longer movies before going to the UK in the 1960s and making his later films there.

So, we want to look briefly at the Kubrick feature films and put them into some sort of order, worst to best.

A stupid and impossible task, right, and one that going to cause some controversy? Absolutely, but it’s our personal and subjective view so feel free to argue about it.