Stanley Kubrick

Reuters

IT IS the dialogue that seems especially puzzling in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Stanley Kubrick's best-known film. Why is it so awful? The film is marvellous to watch. The use of a Strauss waltz, “The Blue Danube”, as accompanying music is both innovative and successful. But the wooden words? Still, Mr Kubrick was forgiven when the film came out in 1968. Even great directors should be allowed to make mistakes.

That view, though kind, was itself mistaken. As the film has been watched and watched again, and increasingly admired, the dialogue has come to be accepted as appallingly accurate. This is the new minimalist language, call it min-lan, invented by Houston's space people and now used wherever simple messages need to be put over quickly. Motorway signs, advertisements, even television soaps, all use min-lan. Mr Kubrick anticipated a world where a tiny spoken vocabulary, and even fewer written words, were all you needed to get by. The eloquence of, say, “Casablanca”, made in 1942, had been superseded by the frugality of Hal, the talking robot in “2001”. Of all the horrors, existing and potential, confronted in Mr Kubrick's films, the abandoning of literacy is perhaps the most dismaying. Books, newspapers, if they survived at all, would be for an elite, and regarded in an urgent world as irrelevant as medieval manuscripts.

Stanley Kubrick himself did his best to insulate himself from what he regarded as the pains of modern living, which included cars, flying and the attentions of reporters, while carrying on with his career as a maker of films with a world-wide audience. In the 1960s he moved from Hollywood to England and bought a statelyish house near, but not too near, London. Here he lived with the fourth of his wives and three daughters. When making a film he would be driven each day, at not more than 30 miles an hour, to Pinewood studios, a well-equipped survivor from the days when Britain had a large and flourishing film industry. During his time in England he gave few interviews and avoided having his picture taken, which is why published photographs of him are as a younger man.

Absolute control

The young Kubrick had a quick success. He took a snap of a man selling newspapers reporting the death of President Roosevelt. Look magazine bought the picture and offered him a job. He was poised to go to university, but at 17 who could turn down such a chance? Later, Mr Kubrick was to disparage formal learning, as self-educated people sometimes do. “I never learned anything at all at school,” he said. He was, anyway, hardly a teacher's favourite: films were his only real interest. In New York he could see practically every film that was ever made, either at the commercial cinema or at the Museum of Modern Art. He said that seeing so many bad films made him feel he could do better. He left Look and, with money borrowed from his father, a doctor, he made a number of short documentaries which he sold to a Hollywood company.

Hollywood was sufficiently impressed by his talent to allow him to make some low-cost feature films, among them “Paths of Glory”, set in the first world war, his first critical success, in 1957. Two years later he was given real money to spend on “Spartacus”, a Roman epic. At 29 Mr Kubrick was regarded as a major director who could name his own terms. But he disliked working as part of a team. He sought control of the script, the editing, the lighting, the music, as well as the direction, as he had in his early shoestring movies. Only then could he accurately convey his dark view of the world, which in some ways accords with that of Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English philosopher remembered for his observation that life in the state of nature is “nasty, brutish and short”. Stanley Kubrick's great films, “Dr Strangelove”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Lolita” and “2001”, are, as far as Mr Kubrick could order things, untouched by any hand other than his.

England gave him freedom. Far from the moguls of Hollywood, he could indulge his costly obsession for perfection. He shot the closing of a car door more than 70 times before he was satisfied it looked right. Actors would be taken mercilessly through a scene again and again. Some would quit, fleeing into the arms of their psychiatrist. Actors were flattered to be asked to work in a Kubrick film, but for some once was enough. “You don't have to be nice to be talented,” Kirk Douglas said of Mr Kubrick. “2001” took so long to make that its backers asked if they would have to wait until then to see it.

His final film, “Eyes Wide Shut”, was 12 months overdue when it was completed just before he died. Mr Kubrick has been customarily secretive about it. Little has been revealed, although there are rumours that in it Tom Cruise wears a dress. The film is due to be shown in July or thereabouts, and the moguls seem confident that it will be successful, commercially and critically, as most Kubrick films have been. Stanley Kubrick might have been odd, but in the end he delivered the goods, and such goods.