Fear and Desire

In the realm of literature, the early or adolescent works of a writer are often referred to as juvenilia. These early works are usually published long after the artist has gained considerable fame, in an effort, no doubt, to document the development of the artist’s style from the first stumbling attempts to the later, mature forms. I don’t know whether the term has ever been applied to filmmakers, but if ever a film deserved to be called a juvenilis work, then Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire is the one.

When only 25 years old, Kubrick quit his full-time job as a staff photographer at Look magazine and set out to make his first feature length film. For his first film he would be director, cinematographer and editor. The screenplay for Fear and Desire was written by his high school classmate Howard Sackler, who would go on to become a successful playwright and screenwriter in Hollywood. Sackler’s screenplay also has all the hallmarks of a juvenilis work: overly ambitious in its themes, clumsy characterization and often embarrassingly pretentious dialogue. But none of this seems to have fazed young Stanley: he clearly thought that this screenplay was the one that would announce his genius.

In retrospect one might even say that upon each of the rather dubious qualities represented by Sackler’s screenplay, Kubrick would subsequently build a very successful career.

Fear and Desire opens upon a slow establishing shot, looking across far mountains and a forest. The voice-over tells us that there is a war going on in this forest, but not any particular war, or even a war that might conceivably happen in the near future. This is just an unknown war; a container, if you like, for Sackler’s meditation on—yes, you guessed it—fear and desire.

Kubrick next introduces us to his motley crew of conscripts, lost behind enemy lines after their plane has crashed in the forest. Of the actors that Kubrick cast for these roles, only two would go on to have a substantial career: Paul Mazursky, who plays the extremely disturbed Private Sidney, and who would go on to become an actor, writer and film director; and Frank Silvera, who plays the brutish Sergeant Mac Silvera, and whose very first film role had only been the year previous in The Cimarron Kid, would go on to become a very successful character actor.

The lost soldiers decide to built a makeshift raft and sail down the river to freedom, but just before they can climb aboard the raft they spy a beautiful young girl bathing in the river. They follow her and capture her. Kubrik’s camera ogles her as much as the soldiers in his story (the girl is played by Virginia Leith, whom Life magazine evidently described as ‘a big find’ at the time, but who would subsequently only rise to such stellar heights as the so-bad-its-good brilliance of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die).

The soldiers leave the girl tied to a tree, watched over by the baby-faced Private Sidney. Incomprehensibly (at least in terms of screenplay coherence) the rest of the team forget about their plans of escaping and set off to kill the Captain of the opposing side, whose headquarters is just down the river. The following scene, between the young girl and Private Sidney, is probably the best scene in the film —not because it is well handled by Kubrick, but because it (no doubt inadvertently) plays out like a weird expressionist tableau.

Subsequently, in a kind of Twilight Zone reveal, we see that the Captain and his officers are the exact doubles of our heroes.

And that, it must be admitted, is the overall feel of Kubrick’s first feature film. It feels and looks like an early Twilight Zone episode. It has all the hallmarks of a Rod Serling humanistic allegory. It is a low budget idea, and it is shot utilising only a couple of locations, just like a TZ story. The fact that this film is only 60 minutes long only adds to this strange impression.

You might think that this resemblance to an early Twilight Zone episode was a good thing, but in the case of Fear and Desire the resemblance is only superficial. Screenwriter Sackler is certainly no Serling, and Kubrick essentially fumbles his way through the story and characterisations. Sure, there are some nicely framed shots that might conceivably be construed as pointing towards Kubrick’ future masterful style, but to be honest I can’t really see why anyone would want to release this film on DVD. It is not only a piece of juvenilia, it is, well, juvenile.

Things start off badly for Kubrick, even in the opening scene. Here we are introduced to our lost band of soldiers. They are assembled in a glade, the sun shining on their combat gear. They argue and plan. To articulate the relative position of the soldiers, Kubrick attempts some pretty complicated indicators of spacial relationships in terms of the shot sequence. Unfortunately this articulation falters on even the most basic level: the eye-line matching between shots that allows the audience to understand who is talking to whom in a sequence is consistently broken by Kubrick, and his odd, even disturbing, cuts to tight close-ups of the actors’ faces appear as nothing less than a last-ditch attempt at the editing bench to salvage his clumsy blocking and photography of the scene.

There is however at least one redeeming feature of having this film available on DVD: if you want to show beginning filmmakers how a significant filmmaker began by struggling with film form while trying to make a feature film, then you have the perfect instructional in Fear and Desire.

The DVD also features one of Kubrick’s early documentary shorts, The Seafarers. The film was funded by the Seafarers International Union, and is an interesting propagandistic period piece, shot in colour. Both this short film and Fear and Desire have been permanently archived in the Library of Congress’ Motion Picture collection.