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Paths to glory

FROM "LOLITA" TO "2001," STANLEY KUBRICK EMBODIED THE DIRECTOR AS HERO.

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BY MICHAEL SRAGOW

Stanley Kubrick, who died Sunday at his home in England at the age of 70, forged a whole new paradigm for American moviemakers. Between "The Killing" in 1956 and "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968, he put together as potent a 12-year stretch as any director in history. And in the era when directors were superstars, Kubrick was practically a god. He wouldn't go the route of the old-fashioned studio auteurs who alternated between personal films and hack work. Each of his films carried his stamp. Even when he took over the direction of "Spartacus" from Anthony Mann, he made the elaborate spectacle his own. And he was both tough and foxy. His audacious leaps paid off financially, creatively and in the kind of clout that comes from artistic authority.

Kubrick was a culture hero before the counterculture made that a common phrase. Bright city kids revered him for the iconoclastic wit of "Lolita" (1962) and "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), and they were the ones who started the ground swell for "2001" after its initially spotty business and reviews. Renata Adler, in her mixed New York Times notice, declared that the movie's "whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child: chess games, body-building exercises, beds on the spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard Johnson's, birthday phone calls." That eclectic sensibility is what young '50s and '60s intellectuals loved about the film. In "Dr. Strangelove," Kubrick had given us his Mad magazine movie, and with "2001" he gave us not a science-fiction comic book but a science-fiction epic, just as the equally elusive Thomas Pynchon would do five years later with "Gravity's Rainbow."

By the time "2001" came out, fans -- and I was one of them -- knew about Kubrick's years as a recalcitrant Bronx schoolboy with a passion for chess and photography. We knew about his early career as a Look photographer who plowed his own money into a documentary short ("Day of the Fight," in 1950) and made two more before going on to his apprentice features, "Fear and Desire" (1953) and "Killer's Kiss" (1955). But he avoided the fawning show-biz attention that every kid who has a film at Sundance now begs for. I can't remember ever seeing him on an awards show or a talk show; the first time I read anything personal about him was in a Hollywood dispatch from the resolutely nonglitzy Dwight Macdonald. Still, in those years you couldn't speak to a budding writer or director without having Kubrick's name come up. He didn't court fame -- he earned it. For a dozen years, no filmmaker seemed more connected to the culture he sprang from or more prescient about where he could take it next.

Long before film noir became chic, Kubrick had taken its trenchant attitude to the limit in his breakthrough film, "The Killing." This thieves-falling-out caper has characters so overheated yet so recognizable that its elements of black comedy never sink down into camp. Sterling Hayden anchors the film as the ex-convict who engineers a solid plan to rob a racetrack. Kubrick emphasizes Hayden's rugged frame -- especially in the airport where he's finally caught -- as if this rock of criminal integrity couldn't help scraping against the impersonality of the '50s. The movie's time-skipping structure, which permits us to see separate actions that take place simultaneously, is still heavily imitated. What's harder to mimic is the way Kubrick makes this structure snap shut like a trap without squashing the actors' personalities. Elisha Cook Jr. was never better -- not even in "The Maltese Falcon" -- than he is here as a henpecked cashier; and Kubrick and the great cinematographer Lucien Ballard, working in a hard-edged black-and-white, give him an eloquent send-off. When his wife (Marie Windsor) shoots him, he falls where his apartment's worn carpet catches the streetlight, and a parakeet screeches over the punk's body. The scene and the sound and Cook's tortured expression sum up the squelching of a small man's dreams.

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