‘Fear and Desire’: The Stanley Kubrick movie that deserved to burned
Every single person, without fail, has done something that they not only regret but wish they could permanently erase from existence. For a perfectionist such as Stanley Kubrick, that left him with only one option when he created a work of cinema he was profoundly and deeply unhappy with.
The longer his career went on, the more the filmmaker went on to become defined by his working methods, not that he set out with that intention. He knew exactly what he wanted down to each individual frame, and if he didn’t think he could achieve it, then the movie wasn’t worth making.
All auteurs need to start somewhere, though, and it’s not as if a brash upstart could boot open the doors to studio boardrooms and make ridiculous demands. For example, what would the power players have said if Kubrick had suggested that his debut spend years in development, shoot hundreds of takes, or push his more experienced cast members to the brink? Nobody knows because it never would have been allowed to happen.
Instead, he was forced to start from the bottom and work his way up, albeit while retaining some degree of authorship. Kubrick produced his 1952 independent anti-war film Fear and Desire from a screenplay written by former classmate Howard Sackler, so he wasn’t exactly dropped in at the deep end and handed a mandate that saw him shepherding the production with one arm tied behind his back.
Still, with a thrifty budget and a crew that consisted only of Kubrick, five actors, five crew members, and three labourers, the pressure was on. It can often take a filmmaker years and several films before they hit their stride, and as unreasonable as it would have been to expect him to arrive on the scene a fully-formed master of his craft, that was always how he saw himself.
Obviously, history would make it abundantly clear that confidence wasn’t misplaced by even one iota, but the end results left him desperately unhappy. Ruminating on the horrors of war, Fear and Desire finds a plane crashing behind enemy lines in the midst of a conflict between two unnamed countries, with four surviving soldiers tasked to find their way back to their compatriots.
However, they stumble across a local woman and realise the effects of the war are significantly wider-ranging than their current plight. The lack of resources and the threadbare crew he had at his disposal forced Kubrick into some experimentation, but critics couldn’t have cared less about the rookie going out of his way to make the most of the tools he had at his disposal.
Too arty to be mainstream and too mainstream to be arty, Fear and Desire found itself trapped in an unwinnable middle ground. It was far from being a critical darling and a million miles away from a box office success, which was more than enough for Kubrick to try and distance himself as far away from it as humanly possible.
Dismissing his debut as a “bumbling amateur film exercise” and a “completely inept oddity”, the future icon of the moving image reportedly wanted to wipe it off the face of the cinematic map. According to Paul Mazursky, Kubrick “tried to have the negative burned” because he hated it so much, with his professional dissatisfaction reaching such a point that he actively tried to ensure audiences would never be able to see the self-perceived atrocity he’d committed.
In an interview with Michael Gelmis, Kubrick described Fear and Desire as being “not a film I remember with any pride, except for the fact it was finished,” which ironically made him the creator of its unique legacy. Is it his worst feature? Absolutely, and he’d be the first to admit it, but did it deserve to be cast into the fire and withheld from everyone on the planet? Definitely not.
Simply by virtue of the fact he went on to become Stanley Kubrick, Fear and Desire is an important cinematic artefact. If he hadn’t talked about it at all, then nobody would have paid it much heed beyond its status as his first movie. Instead, the famous firebrand tearing it limb-from-limb made it a must-see for supporters of his work, and tales of his disdain growing so vitriolic he’d have burned every single copy if he could only add to the legend he was so dead against it forming.
