Kubrick stood on the shoulders of no one. He was his own invention, it turns out – an  unassuming child of the Bronx with big black eyeballs and a healthy disinterest in public schooling. So intense was his apathy toward the educators at Taft High School, banal hacks if you believe his description, that he virtually sabotaged any chance at a college career with marks something short of genius.

Due to the enormous popularity of the G.I. Bill (the newly minted federal program affording honorably discharged vets a free ride) it became necessary for financially strapped universities to demand from their candidates a cumulative grade point average of 75 simply to fill out an application. Kubrick’s unremarkable 67 GPA, a secret he would hold with him well into his 30s, would force his hand. But Kubrick never flinched. He snatched his light meter, plastic chess set and dove headfirst into deeper waters, thanks be to the gods of cinema.

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After selling two picture stories in 1945, Kubrick landed an apprenticeship and six months later was appointed staff photojournalist all at Look magazine. During his four-year tenure at the periodical, between the ages of 18 and 21, Kubrick earned a modest salary, hustled chess in Central Park, directed and eventually sold three short documentaries, and acquired the technical, entrepreneurial and intellectual work ethic needed to execute the most ambitious personal vision of any American filmmaker ever to work in the studio system.

First up was a mulligan, he would later acknowledge, FEAR AND DESIRE, though the film traveled the art-house circuit in New York for some time eventually making back its initial investment. Kubrick secured financing privately (a $17,000 loan from an uncle) for a largely allegorical work about four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines trying to make their way back home. Kubrick called it his ‘unfortunate  first film’, one he would try to scorch, literally, from the face of the earth. If it weren’t for an unknown print at the George Eastman House in Rochester, a museum of photography, he might have succeeded.

THE KILLING (after his first fully-formed picture, KILLER’S KISS) was Kubrick’s first critical success. He managed a decent production budget and a chance to work with his first bona fide star in Sterling Hayden. THE KILLING lead to an even bigger name, not to mention Kubrick going for broke stylistically. It was a hint of what would become his cinematic DNA over the next half-century – themes of a failed system and exemplary camerawork rendered on an epic scale. The star was Kirk Douglas and the film was an international smash, the anti-war masterpiece, Paths of Glory.

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Kubrick reveals much of this early biography in a thrilling 1966 interview with physicist Jeremy Bernstein. In it, the master is frank, playful, and emotionally open, perhaps because the interrogator was a personal friend and esteemed scientist, not a member of the Hollywood foreign press. It is a revealing portrait of an auteur now fully in command of his craft, putting the final touches on the greatest art film in history – 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here we find Kubrick standing on the precipice of cinematic immortality, and you sense it in his voice; he is confident, on the verge of earning an unprecedented studio contract of total autonomy. Soon, he would transplant his family to England for good, a private decision that inspired mostly public damnation, the kind of tabloid cruelty spun from the lowest and highest of brows, a plague which would follow him the rest of his career. But Stanley was shrewd at exploiting a situation, using the opportunity to shut his doors to annoying press junkets and, more significantly, studio interference forever.

You can imagine Warners new HD-DVD Kubrick Collection, of which the rare Bernstein interview is featured, comes highly anticipated among cinephiles (and Blu-Ray haters) this holiday season. It includes 2001, a double-disc of Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, each presented in high definition and stock full of bonus materials, some illuminating and inane. But one thing is constant in this HD collection: save for a screening of 2001 I saw a few months ago in orgasmic 70mm, the films have never looked finer.

NOTE: Full Metal Jacket has also been released, but apparently wasn’t available for our review. Maybe next Christmas.

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001 is probably the strongest HD title here – in presentation, packaging and bonus material. In order to get the biggest bang for their featurette buck, though, it’s clear Warners shot a master documentary for the entire collection, much of it all too familiar material for any fan committed enough to spend $130 for four Kubrick DVDs. Interviews with colleagues, collaborators and critics are sliced and diced into their appropriate ‘themes’ for each disc, mostly twenty-minute docs on his life and legacy – shockingly pedestrian when you consider Kubrick is the only American auteur without the honor of a thoughtful, rigorous and professional deconstruction on DVD, Criterion or otherwise. 

You’ll find a few memorable quotes, however, in 2001’s “Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick,” including the brilliant post-impressionist painter, Christiane Kubrick, reflecting on how impressive it was to see her husband’s prediction of Earth’s image from outer space: “One has to remember, when Stanley made 2001, we hadn’t yet been to the moon. We had no idea what Earth looked like. I told him he almost got it. It needed more blue.” In the same featurette, Steven Spielberg speaks of the unstoppable quality of his mentor’s films: “I dare you to turn off a Kubrick picture. It’s impossible. You can’t stop watching! It simply is the greatest craft in the history of cinema.” And Sydney Pollack recalls Kubrick’s obsession with getting it right: “When people say someone’s a ‘perfectionist’, usually it’s a kind of euphemism for a pain-in-the-ass. Stanley was the first actual perfectionist I’d encountered in my sixty years in this business. He didn’t shoot a helicopter shot, it had to be the greatest helicopter shot. He didn’t shoot a steadycam shot. It had to be the greatest steadycam shot… It was as if his entire reputation hung on each take. This was Stanley’s legacy.”

The real goods of the 2001 disc arrives in the original source material from Warners’ archives, including the rare Bernstein audio interview, a digital photo album of Kubrick’s career at Look, and a charmingly retro sales pitch from the company’s then publisher, Vern Myers, soliciting display advertising dollars on the heels of 2001’s 1967 release. Contained in this reel are never-before-seen images of Kubrick at work in Borehamwood Studios, interviews with the film’s technical advisors at NASA, philosophizing from a youthful Arthur C. Clarke, and an amusing, surprisingly spot-on forecast of the life of an interstellar executive in the new millennium, complete with a crude laptop/email/videochat attaché prototype.

Rounding out 2001’s bonus materials are clumsy ontological musings on the possibility of extraterrestrial life from the film’s star, Keir Dullea, in both a documentary and accompanying commentary track, neither of which are particularly memorable. It’s a worthy casualty, though, on an otherwise stacked disc.

CONTENTS: 1080p transfer with Commentary Track (Keir Dullea w/ Gary Lockwood); The Making of Myth documentary; 4 featurettes; FX Conceptual Work documentary; Kubrick’s Look Photo Album; Bernstein Audio Interview; Theatrical Trailer.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Attacked by the UK’s Ministry of Culture, exploited by copy-cat hooligans (most of whom had never actually seen the picture), and finally redacted by its creator in an attempt to stop the numerous death threats on his doorstep, Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE would  ultimately inherit from its detractors its most successful marketing device – ‘the most violent film ever made’.

I might add to this ridiculous rap sheet, ‘the greatest voiceover narration ever made,’ but, again, you won’t find much of a critical analysis on what is the weakest offering in the set, what I consider to be his finest hour. This comes as a major disappointment, of course, considering CLOCKWORK’s double-disc cock tease; instead, we get all Malcolm, all the time.

Rumor has it, in exchange for participating in a commentary track (the best part of this DVD), its star Malcolm McDowell demanded Warners re-issue his pet project directed by mentor Lindsay Anderson, O Lucky Man!, not to mention a documentary dedicated to his entire career. Warners apparently acquiesced producing a jaw-dropping 90-minute travelogue of McDowell’s greatest misses, post Alex de Large. After the amusing anecdotes of his masterful Kubrick collaboration, most of which can be heard on the far more engaging commentary track with accomplished documentarian Nick Redman, we must endure McDowell recount bad decision after bad decision in an over 100-film career, most of which was released exclusively on DVD and Ukranian basic cable.

I say just toss that second disc.

CONTENTS: 1080p transfer with Commentary Track (Malcolm McDowell w/documentarian Nick Redman); Still Tickin’: The Return of Clockwork Orange documentary; Making a Clockwork Orange featurette; O Lucky Malcolm!; Theatrical Trailer.

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