Review of Fear and Desire (1953) by Sean D — 06 Aug 2012

Stanley Kubrick was so ashamed of his first feature film that he shoveled large sums of money toward the company that held its rights in order to keep it from the public. Sadly, or luckily, the filmmaker has made far too big an impact on the world of cinema for any work of his to be kept in the dark, and although this film is a far cry from the rest of the director's nearly perfect oeuvre, it is a fascinating experiment in darkness, boundary and shame, human themes he couldn't shake even through his last film, 'Eyes Wide Shut' (1999).

Kubrick would revisit the war film several times and he would treat the subject alternatively with tragedy, humor, irony and gritty criticism. But here he uses it most simply, as a time where people are pushed to their limits.

Here, the fine line between human and animal is stretched and bended, and Kubrick injects his characters with a lunacy that is almost too far outside the boundaries of human identification for us to connect with it.

The style of the film mirrors its characters' psyches, and what starts as a by-the-books war adventure involving four crash survivors on enemy lines soon turns into a wild excursion into madness. The idea of bravery is what is explored most interestingly here.

It is the idea that turns madness into heroism here, and it flip-flops identities in the film's final frames so that we are left wondering if there really are any "good guys". Who do we "root" for? What side are we on? Kubrick suggests an answer both simple and complex: the one we're on.