Listening to Stanley Kubrick (3 page)

Unlike Douglas Edwards’s narration in
Day of the Fight
, Bob Hite’s narration is less stylized and more pleasant. There is no noir poetry here, and there is no darkness in either the shots or Shilkret’s music. It is a businesslike affair that gets the job done, although there is little to suggest elements of Kubrick’s style that we have come to expect. The music is a bit clichéd at times, even mimicking the actions on-screen with musical gestures (for example, an ascending melody accompanying the rising airplane), a practice that has come to be called, “mickey-mousing.”

Kubrick’s third short,
The Seafarers
, was a documentary for the Seafarers International Union, Atlantic and Gulf Coast District AFL. Because the work was produced on such a small budget, the music for the film is stock. It is an innocuous background score with the main purpose of filling in sound in between sections of narration. The film explains the benefits of joining the union, including medical benefits, insurance, and a place to socialize with other seafaring men when ashore. Will Chasan wrote the copy and Don Hollenbeck narrated the film. This short was often omitted from filmographies of Kubrick until the mid-1970s, when Gene Phillips mentioned it in a monograph about Stanley Kubrick. Phillips learned of it from Frank Tomasulo, the audio-visual director of the Seafarers International Union. When Tomasulo began the job, he asked to see all of the previous AV materials for the union and was shocked to see that “the” Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the film.
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The film remained lost to the general public until recently, when Alexander Pietrzak bought the rights to the film from the Seafarers Union and released the short on DVD.

First Features

Kubrick’s first feature was
Fear and Desire
. Intending to produce the film without the financial support of a studio, Kubrick raised about $10,000 from family and friends. Before shooting began, Kubrick told an interviewer at the
New York Journal-American
, “I’m very certain we can do it for $50,000. The answer is careful planning. We have worked out every scene, every shot. There will be no writers, producers, directors or art directors to contend with. There won’t be any time lost in argument or discussion. There will be only one boss—me.”
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The production ended up costing about $53,000 in the final tally. Shooting the film without synched sound—a decision Kubrick thought would save money—actually added a great deal to the cost of the film. Kubrick said of the decision, “The dubbing was a big mistake on my part; the actual shooting cost of the film was nine thousand dollars but because I didn’t know what I was doing with the soundtrack it cost me another thirty thousand.”
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Investor Richard de Rochemont (whose older brother created
The March of Time
newsreel series) helped Kubrick deal with the costs of post-production, including paying part of the fees for the twenty-three musicians who played on the score. After
Fear and Desire
, de Rochemont gave Kubrick a job shooting second unit footage for a television series on Abraham Lincoln. One of the main investors in the film was Kubrick’s uncle, Martin Perveler. Perveler was a wealthy man who owned a couple of drugstores in California, and he believed in Kubrick’s talent. After asking for—and not getting—a multipicture deal with his nephew, Perveler settled for an associate producer credit on this single film. Kubrick chose Gerald Fried to compose the score. Fried had grand designs for the music.

The music was supposed to mourn the world’s innocence. . . .This movie was supposed to say everything. There were going to be no more movies after this. So I had to be sophisticated, profound yet emphatic with the fate of us poor human beings. So it had to be important, profound, meaningful, touching, despairing but yet triumphant. I thought it was pretty good at the time.
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A review of the film in the
New York Post
said, “The musical score is considered especially important, since it runs the gamut of the film drama’s expression.”
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Fear and Desire
was released in theaters on 31 March 1953. Despite Kubrick’s intense work on the film, reviews were mixed. A review in the
New York Mirror
said, “Kubrick is at his best with the camera. He shows flashes of brilliance, then spoils the impact with repetition.”
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Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Mark Van Doren wrote a blurb for the film that was quoted in many ads. It read, in part, “A brilliant and unforgettable film. Everything contributes to a total effect that is both serious and original, and to a suspense that nothing ever breaks.”
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John McCarten of the
New Yorker
expressed a contrary viewpoint, calling
Fear and Desire
“almost a classic piece of malarkey.”
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In this film, four soldiers from an unnamed army are in an unnamed war against an unnamed enemy. The characters are of the type often seen in war movies, the leader who guides through intellect (Lieutenant Corby), the passionate, brave, if impetuous sergeant (Mac
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), the young, impressionable newbie (Private Sydney), and a character whose most pronounced feature is a southern accent (Private Fletcher). Caught behind enemy lines, this quartet makes a plan to build a raft and float downriver to their own territory. Their plans are complicated by the discovery of an enemy base and by the presence of a woman who accidentally finds them.

Synopsis and Score Description for
Fear and Desire

The film opens with a cue called “Meditation on War.” It begins with a lonely solo line played slowly, and with much rhythmic freedom, by the bassoon:

Soon, low strings accompany the line while the title cards flash on-screen. The musical lines descend, giving the sense of things getting worse and more desperate. The title cards for Fried’s name and Kubrick’s name are accented with military-like brass horn calls. The music has gradually grown loud and frantic, but the score softens as the narrative begins with a voiceover:

There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, or one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.

At the end of the voiceover, plane noise takes over from the score and blurs the line between the low rumbling of the soundtrack and the engine sound. There is no music during the exposition of the plot, as Fletcher explains the soldiers’ position; all we hear in the background is distant gunfire. The characters hear rustling in the woods and find a dog with a collar. Sydney, who is gentle and kind, pets the dog, but Corby shoos the dog away. As the men head toward the river Corby warns, “Some more animals might show up,” a line that is greeted with a string-heavy sting complete with pizzicato and tremolos over a woodwind chord progression. Both Kubrick and Fried are foreshadowing the appearance of the woman (she’s called a “strange half-animal girl” in the advertisements, but she seems human enough, even if she doesn’t understand their language or speak very much).

The sting cue continues with tremolos underscoring a cue that seems to reflect both the passing of time (there is a “tick tock” feel to the melody) and the relentless forward motion of the men:

Fried’s contrapuntal music continues, accompanying the overlapping voiceovers of the soldiers as we hear the thoughts of each of them. Their thoughts range from the simple “Getting hungry” to the fearful “No dying in the woods!” to the paranoid “Are they watching me?” The soldiers come upon a road. The score is silent, as are the men, as they wait to see if they can cross. Mac goes up ahead to see if the coast is clear. He signals the men over and the scene fades to black. The transition to the new scene—by the river—is accompanied by a brief musical cue.

Mac spots a small airstrip and a base some ways in the distance. They ignore it for the moment, and finish building the raft they’ll take down the river after dark. An enemy plane flies overhead, forcing them into the woods, and they come upon a house where enemy soldiers are eating dinner. They decide to ambush the house and take the weapons inside. Fried’s tense and fast-moving music accompanies the attack, but only as far as the door of the house. Once the soldiers enter, the music stops and, like
Day of the Fight
, the sound of the struggle is the only soundtrack. The four soldiers kill the two men in the house and take their weapons. A third enemy soldier enters a few minutes later and is shot by Mac. Worried about the noise of the gunshot, three of the men leave the house, but the lieutenant stays behind, looking at the dead men. We hear his voiceover, accompanied by low sounds in the orchestra:

We spend our lives running our fingers down the lists and directories, looking for our real names, our permanent addresses. No man is an island? Perhaps that was true a long time ago, before the ice age. The glaciers have melted away and now we’re all islands. Parts of a world made of islands only.

The next day, the men return to the river to find their raft. When a native girl sees them, Mac grabs her to keep her from screaming. They decide to tie her to a tree with their belts to prevent her from running to the enemy base and giving them away. Sydney is put in charge of watching her while the others go to check on the raft. As the other men leave him, Sydney begins to slowly unravel. He remembers the ambush to get the guns and the brutality of his fellow soldiers. In the score, the double bass plays low notes as two lines in the clarinets—one low and one high—echo each other. Soon, a bassoon joins in, as does a violin. Sydney’s parody of the general—to make the girl smile—is accompanied by mocking waltz in the woodwinds. As he drifts further and further from sanity, his unstable mental state is represented in the music by ascending and descending glissandos in the trombone and violin.

The other three find the raft, which does not appear to be surrounded by the enemy. Mac looks around some more, observing the enemy general through binoculars. He begins to become obsessed with killing him. There is no musical underscore for this scene, but the music returns as the scene changes to Sydney trying to entertain the girl. His efforts become more desperate and cloying. He tells her a story about a magician,
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and the music reflects what she must see in him—growing insanity—although she does not appear as frightened as one might expect. The meter and rhythm of the music suggest a courtly dance, but the dissonance of the harmonies tells us that something is wrong with this courtship.

Sydney brings the girl water, cupped in his hand, and as she drinks, the soundtrack features a sinister-sounding arpeggio in the strings: