Channel Surfing: ‘Fear and Desire’
“Dr. Strangelove” it’s not.
On Wednesday night, Turner Classic Movies presents a true curiosity: “Fear and Desire,” Stanley Kubrick’s first feature film. According to TCM it will be the television debut of the 1953 movie, which Kubrick suppressed during his lifetime.
Moody, chilly, almost unbearably artsy and just over an hour long, “Fear and Desire” is an allegorical war film about four soldiers of an unidentified army, caught behind enemy lines in an unnamed war. (From the opening narration: “These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind.” That gives you an idea.) A kind review in The New York Times said, “Its overall effect is entirely worthy of the sincere effort put into it.”
Kubrick, then 24, would revisit the themes of courage versus fear, civilization versus barbarity and class versus class on the battlefield in “Paths of Glory” four years later and regularly throughout his career.
The film is weighed down — sunk, really — by the mock-poetic dialogue and raft of allusions (“The Tempest” is a particular touchstone) in the screenplay by the playwright Howard Sackler (“The Great White Hope”). He appears to have been deeply affected by John Huston’s “Red Badge of Courage” two years before. “Fear and Desire” is necessary viewing for Kubrick completists, though, and there are a few arresting images that presage the fastidious stylist of the future, like a tight shot of the impossibly twisted legs of a fallen soldier. Cineastes will also note the appearance of a very young Paul Mazursky, in his first screen acting role, as a frightened private.
The broadcast of “Fear and Desire” at 8 p.m. is part of a series on TCM celebrating the motion-picture preservation efforts of the George Eastman House. It runs until 4:45 a.m. Thursday, ending with “Goldstein” (1965), the debut of another, and better, American director, Philip Kaufman.
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