The “marvellous” psychological thriller that left Stanley Kubrick “glued to the TV set”
To be a great auteur, you pretty much need to be a cinephile. There have certainly been exceptions to this rule – Agnès Varda had hardly seen any movies when she became a director – but in general, a successful director must be well-versed in the world of cinema. After all, why wouldn’t they want to be?
But does having cinephilic levels of interest in the art form guarantee a good filmmaker? This certainly isn’t always the case, but for Kubrick, it was his obsession with movies – paired with a seemingly innate understanding of aesthetics and the human condition – that allowed him to become one of the most influential directors to have ever contributed to the medium. His knowledge of everything from epic silent films to obscure foreign auteurs was vital to building him a diverse cinematic education.
With his expansive interest in movies, he moved from genre to genre with apparent ease, tackling sci-fi to epic proportions with his legendary 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the true terrors of isolation and mental deterioration with The Shining, and decades-spanning drama with Barry Lyndon. Kubrick was open-minded when it came to consuming films, which was reflected in his diverse catalogue of work, and he often found himself watching movies he knew nothing about in the hopes of stumbling upon some unexpected display of genius.
This was the case when he was watching TV one night, and the film he came across had him “glued” to the screen. Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé, released in 1967, is a criminally underrated psychological thriller with the Kubrick stamp of approval, which he discussed in a 1980 interview.
“I first encountered Saura’s work by chance and in a rather strange way one day when I got home quite late and turned on the television; a film in Spanish with subtitles, that I knew absolutely nothing about, and besides, I’d missed the first half hour. It was hard for me to follow and understand, but at the same time, I was convinced it was the film of a great director,” he explained.
“I watched the rest of the film glued to the TV set, and when it was over, I picked up a newspaper and saw that it was Peppermint Frappé by Carlos Saura. Later, I found a copy of the film, which of course I watched from the beginning and with great enthusiasm,” Kubrick added.
Starring Geraldine Chaplin and José Luis López Vázquez, the movie is a Hitchcock-esque thriller about obsession, and Kubrick simply thought it was amazing. He continued, “Since then, all of Saura’s films that I’ve seen have confirmed the high quality of his work. He is an extremely brilliant director, and what strikes me in particular is the marvellous use he makes of his actors.”
Saura went on to become an incredibly successful filmmaker, winning several prestigious awards during his career, such as the Jury Prize for La prima Angélica at the Cannes Film Festival. Often blending surrealist themes into his work, Suara released many films over the years, but it was Peppermint Frappé, one of his earlier features, that simply captivated Kubrick like nothing else, leaving him “glued to the TV set”.
