Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 21 May

Fear and Desire (Kubrick, 1953)

If you’re won­der­ing why I would recom­mend a film where the film­maker him­self tried to burn every avail­able copy all I can say is – plaint­ively – there is a vir­tue to completeness.

Fear and Desire was Stanley Kubrick’s debut fea­ture film. Up to then, he’d been a well-regarded pho­to­graph­er for Look magazine and had made two short doc­u­ment­ar­ies, but this was to be his call­ing card. The ini­tial budget of only $10,000 was found from fam­ily – most from his phar­macist uncle Martin Perveler – but the final cost was closer to $55,000, no doubt con­trib­ut­ing to Kubrick’s feel­ings about the fin­ished film.

It’s an exist­en­tial war film, set in no par­tic­u­lar con­flict but released at the height of the Korean War. We meet four ser­vice­men who are trapped sev­er­al miles behind enemy lines after their trans­port plane crashes. They have one weapon between them and little exper­i­ence. Each is an arche­type of a sort. The lieu­ten­ant (Kenneth Corby) is philo­soph­ic­al, Sgt. Mac (Frank Silvera) is a man of action, determ­ined to leave some kind of mark on this war, Private Sidney (a baby Paul Mazursky in his first screen role) is an inno­cent who is los­ing touch with whatever dis­cip­line he came into the war with, and Private Fletcher (Steve Coit) appears to be there to make up the numbers.

Over the course of the pic­ture they decide to make a raft and float back to their own lines under cov­er of dark­ness, attack an enemy sen­try post to steal their food and some weapons, identi­fy a rel­at­ively unguarded air­field where an enemy gen­er­al might be vul­ner­able to attack and – most fam­ously and most upset­tingly – they take a loc­al woman (Virginia Leith) pris­on­er and leave her to be har­assed by an increas­ingly unhinged Sidney.

Sidney’s rants are drawn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and these guys are like marooned sail­ors I sup­pose, but Sidney’s Prospero is a fig­ment of his own imagination.

Howard Sackler’s script makes the brave point that war is utterly point­less – and that both sides are basic­ally the same – by cast­ing Corby and Coit as the enemy gen­er­al and his cap­tain, respect­ively. Unless that was a response to budget limitations.

Kubrick’s visu­als – taken shot by shot – are often strik­ing but he hasn’t yet worked out how to string them togeth­er in a sat­is­fy­ing sequence and he’s also ham­strung by Sackler’s wordy screen­play. Anyway, it is barely an hour long and at least you can say you’ve seen it.

Where to watch Fear and Desire

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada and Ireland: Streaming on Prime Video

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Prime Video and Kino Film Collection or Kanopy (from par­ti­cip­at­ing pub­lic libraries)

UK: Streaming on Prime Video or Film Box Live