Stuff

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.