Trojan Horse: A Negative Space Odyssey

Image via If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger…

Surely you’ve all noticed it — the opening image of Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON features the concealed image of a cartoon horse.

No?

Artist’s impression.

You can see it now, surely?

I think we can agree that Kubrick placed this image there to apologise for the shooting of the racehorse in THE KILLING, or to express his admiration for the Grand National winner Red Rum (later the subject of a more blatant homage in THE SHINING) or as a tribute to his friend Slim Pickens who owned a horse with a perpetually indignant expression, called Alan.

FC5: Left-Handed Guns

1) THE ASPHALT JUNGLE 2) THE KILLING.

“THE ASPHALT JUNGLE became the model for a number of films of this genre,” wrote John Huston, modestly enough. As well as inspiring probably 60% of Jean-Pierre Melville’s films, the movie served as a source of inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s first really good picture, so it seems worthwhile to look at the two together, to see what aspects of Kubrick come from Huston and where he breaks out on his own. Film Club meets the Fever Dream Double Feature.

Calhern and Lawrence.

“Crime is a left-handed form of human endeavour,” opines the paymaster of Huston’s gang, Ambassador Trentino of Sylvania (Louis Calhern), and Huston says this line encapsulates “the tone of the film.” Not it’s message, you understand. Huston, who arguably didn’t believe in very many things, doesn’t tend to have messages in his movies, he merely adopts different tones. He’s sincere in his belief that these tones are honest representations of the way the world feels to some of his characters. He doesn’t necessarily give them credit himself. When he was preparing to work on the script of SERGEANT YORK, co-writer Howard Koch reminded him that their previous collaboration, a stage play entitled In Time to Come, was about peace through collective security, and that this, by contrast, was a pro-war picture. “Well, we’re in a war,” said Huston, sketching away unperturbed.

Huston disdains to preach at us, which makes him seem quite modern in some respects — THE ASPHALT JUNGLE picks up on those aspects of ’30s Warner gangster movies which made it past the censor without neat morals branded on their hides, and looks forward to the movies of Scorsese. It coolly portrays a certain lifestyle with the eye of an anthropologist, not an apologist. Huston has some sympathy for his characters, especially the most hopeless. His later masterpiece FAT CITY would likewise find most compassion for those most without a chance. It’s odd that Huston, who some people found cruel and sadistic, should show these traces of tenderness in a tough movie. And it’s odd that MGM made this one — I guess somebody was dazzled by the “Crime Does Not Pay” conclusion. But it’s really “Crime Often Does Not Pay — Sadly.”

Whitmore and Hayden.

The biggest loser in this bunch is the hooligan, Johnny Guitar/Jack D Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a failed farmer, gambler and strong-arm man. His backstory (“that black colt”) gives him a poetic sadness, which in Hayden’s gristly hands becomes a kind of monomania. It’s also noteworthy that his self-pity prevents him from feeling anything for his sometime girlfriend, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), a rather pitiable creature and possibly the model for all the women in Kubrick’s more misanthropic THE KILLING.

Huston’s adaptation of W.R. Burnett’s novel, co-scripted with Ben Maddow (INTRUDER IN THE DUST, which I hope to see soon) reputedly sticks close to the book and only made adjustments for the sake of the censor, working around their strictures with care and guile. When the Production Code enforcers stipulated that Louis Calhern couldn’t kill himself if he was in his right mind, Huston had him tear up his suicide note before blowing his brains out. The fact that this professional lawyer can’t finish a simple note proves that his mind is in total disarray, argued Huston. They bought it.

The other main sop to the censor was the police commissioner’s speech near the end, designed to excuse the presence of a corrupt cop in the story. This is very nicely written but rather drags the film down in its last third, and in plot verisimilitude terms the cop shouldn’t really have  been caught at all.

Albert Band, later a producer of drive-in trash and straight-to-video nonsense, was Huston’s production assistant, according to Lawrence Grobel’s excellent book The Hustons. Huston announced that he was going to cast unknowns, and started with Marc Lawrence as Cobby, the bookie who finally puts up the money for the heist when Calhern can’t. “Marc was probably the most famous criminal face in the movies at that time,” laughed Band. Huston had already used him in KEY LARGO. (And THIS is why I’m referring to the actors by character names from other films.) Huston also screen-tested writer and artist Ludwig Bemelmans for the part of the gang’s mastermind, but when producer Arthur Hornblower showed him a reel of Sam Jaffe, Huston happily cast his actor friend. “The film was very well cast,” is just about the only thing Huston says about it in his autobio.

Only Huston wanted to cast Monroe. “Look at the ass on that little girl,” he mused.

With the High Llama’s plan, the job goes ahead, amid extreme chiaroscuro lighting effects, beautiful unfamiliar cityscapes (especially scene 1), and an atmosphere of foreboding, since Ambassador Trentino plans to sell them all out, ditch his invalid wife and run off with Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe), his mind-bogglingly luscious girlfriend. Joining the gang are Anthony Caruso (whose honest wife is the only woman with any backbone in the film) and hunchbacked James Whitmore. The scheme itself seems surprisingly simple, at least since we’ve become accustomed to the Rube Goldberg-meets-Machiavelli scheming of THE KILLING, RIFIFI, et al. There are two reasons it goes wrong (discounting the requirements of the censor)…

The first is luck, or fate, and it’s explicitly pointed out by Jaffe. A prowl car responding to another crime unexpectedly shows up. A gun goes off by itself. The kind of things you can’t plan for, or if you did, you wouldn’t risk doing anything.

But Jaffe himself comes to realize there’s a second reason. The plan fails because of who the people are. Calhern is untrustworthy. Lawrence is weak. Jaffe himself is undone by his fondness for pretty girls. So Jaffe and  Whitmore are caught (Whitmore will still be serving his sentence in 1994, as the Birdman of Shawshank). Caruso and Hayden are killed, Hayden’s death a strange variant on that of the donkey protag in AU HASARD, BALTASAR.

It’s a stunning film, and I’v very glad I watched it again. I’ve been working my way through the lesser-known Huston films in recent years, which are often far better than their reputations suggest, so it was interesting to come back to one of the celebrated films and find it holds up. The cast are extremely good — I especially like the weaklings, when they break down (I empathise so readily with a good sniveling weakling): Lawrence and Calhern. The burst of violence when Hayden erases Calhern’s private eye sidekick is sensational in its staging, anticipating the startling abruption of THE KILLING’s massacre. Harold Rosson lights the seedy locations with harsh yet moody effects, and Miklos Rosza not only contributes a marvelously doom-laden score, he does something he rarely ever did: stays out of the way for most of the film. I love Rosza, but he has a tendency to overdo things. Not here.

Gerald Fried’s music for THE KILLING, a bunch of snare-drum and aggro, is a lot less pleasing to the ear. I wonder if Kubrick didn’t switch to largely sourced music because so many of the composers he worked with weren’t very interesting? But he always had a weakness for this kind of martial theme, just as he frequently turned to war as a subject or metaphor in his work.

And, ugh! that voice-over. I guess they needed something to make sense of the timeline, especially for audiences at the time, but it does make me wince a little, especially compared to the beautiful VO in BARRY LYNDON. Although I guess it wouldn’t have made sense for them to hire Sir Michael Hordern to narrate this one. Might make an amusing mash-up though. The KILLING guy, Art Gilmore, sounds kind of dumb. The writing is part of it: since this is a spoken element of the film, it should really have  been scripted by Jim Thompson, but I fear it wasn’t.

A little bird tells me there’s actually a mistake in the film’s complicated timeline, but doesn’t tell me where. Seems too dull to go looking for it, even though I’ve long championed the notion of Kubrick not as a perfectionist machine-mind, but as a kind of shambling, dopey muddler — but I’ll reward anybody who locates it for me. But I *did* notice that one of the horses in the first race we overhear appears to be called Stanley K. The first example of SK’s in-jokey side (given free rein in EYES WIDE SHUT)?

Sterling Hayden is back, as a very different kind of character, less sympathetic but the perfect man to mouth Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled, hard-assed dialogue. Boiled-ass? Having a half-decent budget for the first time, Kubrick is able to build upon his experience from his first two cheapies and make a far more tight, visually logical film, and he’s able to fill the frame with great character players. Jay C. Flippen is robbed of all his usual aw-shucks mannerisms and plays it hard but human. Elisha Cook Jnr. is maybe the first guy to go Over The Top And Beyond Infinity in a Kubrick film. And Marie Windsor, as his scheming wife, now strikes me as the heart and soul of the film. “You’ve got a great big dollar sign where most women have a heart,” as Hayden tells her.

A handsome couple.

Kubrick, like his hoods, was always on the lookout for the main chance, picking his next film with care to raise his profile, consolidate the critical respect he had so far, and move higher up. In 1956 his chief task was to get a really good B-movie under his belt, something that would qualify him for A-picture jobs. PATHS OF GLORY (one of my very favourites) was the A-picture, where according to Kirk Douglas (whom I don’t exactly trust) Kubes’ greatest concern was to have a commercial hit, to which end he attempted to add a happy ending. Never quite been able to bring myself to believe that, wholly. SPARTACUS was the epic, but without any artistic control, Kubrick was unhappy and shrank down for LOLITA, using the book’s reputation (as masterpiece; as scandalous and unfilmable) to garner a rep for iconoclasm. And so on. The difficulty in choosing a project increased as SK’s acclaim increased, and the more things he was celebrated for, the fewer things were left for him to try…

So one of the terrific and liberating things about THE KILLING is that it’s made at a time when Kubes has everything to prove, and he goes all out to do so, but on a small scale. The artistic ambition of the film itself is modest, Stan’s ambitions in general are vast. Borrowing Huston’s set-up, leading man and lighting style, he grafts on Ophuls’ unchained camera, gliding through walls like an Overlook Hotel spectre, shamelessly foregrounding the cheap sets and cheaper dialogue, making one of the first art-house noirs (maybe DETOUR is the first?) if we can allow such a thing. That non-linear timeline — who else was doing that in ’56?

Against the obvious strengths, weaknesses are pretty insignificant. Hayden’s plan is over-elaborate (the great Timothy Carey’s role is redundant and if he got caught and told who hired him, the gig would be up) and could easily miscarry in a thousand ways. As in THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, Hayden has apparently the ability to knock out a healthy cop with a single punch. I never quite believe this in movies. I’m not sure about the biology of it, but if Mike Tyson takes several blows to fell an opponent, I don’t get how a man like Hayden can do it in one. OK, he’s not wearing gloves, but that’s surely more likely to result in busted teeth/nose/jaw/knuckles, and doesn’t increase the chances of unconsciousness greatly. It’s the back of the head you have to hit to bring on that kind of brain damage (Joe Turkel’s injury in PATHS OF GLORY is much more convincing, horribly so: and spot Joe at 4.57 into this one), preferably with a blackjack. Sorry, I didn’t intend this as a how-to guide, I’m just saying movies win extra points from me if they avoid implausible cliches.

The photography by Lucien Ballard (Mr. Merle Oberon) does a superb job synthesizing the stark, source-lit noir aesthetic with the fluid camera style, even if Stanley K. had to threaten to fire the guy on day one (a case of establishing the juvenile auteur’s authority over the pushy veteran cameraman: Kubrick was just 28). The Elisha Cook massacre, perhaps inspired by THE ASPHALT JUNGLE’s shockingly sudden whip-pan shooting, is jolting and quite credible, even if the aftermath is hard to make sense of. By reducing the action to a couple of quick shots, Kubes gives us the impression that we’ve seen a coherent exercise in gunplay, even if we haven’t.

The movie’s  influence is all over Tarantino’s work, from the questions-first, answers-later structure of RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION to the way the guy comes out of the kitchen shooting in the latter film (although the outcome there is different: it’s kind of a joke about THE KILLING’s total slaughter that the guy blasting away at Travolta and Jackson misses every shot). More than spaghetti westerns and kung-fu flicks, THE KILLING is the film that’s necessary to QT’s existence. But personally I think Kubrick’s morally blank, cool stare is more compelling and meaningful than QT’s hip, flip referencing.

A teenage audience member in Belfast once asked me about this scene. I was amazed: “You’re a teenager in Belfast and you don’t know what a cavity search is?”

I’ll own up to the latter myself though: in my film CRY FOR BOBO I shamelessly swiped Kubrick’s faulty suitcase for my own CRY FOR BOBO (non-UK residents, see HERE), along with the strip-search from CLOCKWORK ORANGE, also drawing on Kubrick’s symmetrical, wide-angle lensed compositional style. It’s the post-modern age, I’m afraid.

The burst suitcase is another instance of the Fickle Finger (or poodle) of Fate meddling in human affairs, as in THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, but it can also be argued that Hayden’s impatience is to blame. If only he’d bought a couple of smaller, better cases! It’s been argued that Kubrick’s films are all about what HAL 9000 would call human error, the inherent faultiness of human nature leading to complex systems collapsing in disarray. That certainly holds good for DR STRANGELOVE, and can be read into 2001… is the system in question in EYES WIDE SHUT the institution of marriage? Is THE SHINING really just about how not to look after a hotel? A sort of gothic Fawlty Towers? But it’s fair to say SK’s work is united by a somewhat skeptical view of humanity’s virtues, with the Spielberg footnote A.I. looking forward to a day when we will all be replaced by more efficient, humane machinery, lording it over an ice-palace New York. So there’s that to look forward to.

Love the vacant taxi which blatantly drives right past Hayden and his girlfriend without slowing. “I don’t stop for losers!”

Photoshopping Hayden doesn’t seem to make that much difference.

“What’s the difference?” mumbles Hayden at THE KILLING’s end, a more than usually pointed and depressing summation of the noir ethos.

Perfectionist, my ass!

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

‘I’m getting a little weary of the “crazed perfectionist” tag.’ ~ Stanley Kubrick.

This is about KUBRICK’S MISTAKES. I like mistakes. As Lars Von Trier’s T-shirt said during the making of BREAKING THE WAVES, “Mistakes are good.” Only sensible thing he ever said.

“A director is someone who presides over accidents,” as Welles said.

And all the talk about Kubrick’s meticulousness, while it certainly describes a real phenomenon, can get rather predictable, can become a barrier to seeing the films. So this piece is about the OTHER Kubrick, the goofy bungler whose films are a collection of cock-ups and fumbles.

Yeah, right.

But let’s see what we can find. Evidence of errors in Kubrick’s work would point to a filmmaker willing to allow a bit of slippage as long as it’s in the service of creating an interesting scene.

EYES WIDE SHUT. Start at the end — because early stuff might look like youthful inexperience. This movie has a real beaut: during the bathroom scene early on, where Cruise treats a girl who has overdosed, Kubrick and the camera crew are reflected in a bathroom mirror on the far right of the frame. No mistaking it.

When David Wingrove saw the film with his partner Roland Man, Roland was incandescent at this aggravated howler: “They — had — over a year – to — shoot — it!” he hissed.

But by the time the film came to video and DVD, the offending edge action was gone, either masked out by the transfer to 4:3 framing, or removed by some digital jiggery-pokery by the Kubrick heirs. Yet they had been adamant that the film was “finished” at the time of SK’s death — if so, what business did they have tinkering subsequently? Either Kubrick somehow missed the offending material not only during filming, but all through post, or he decided it didn’t matter to him, or he had some plan to eliminate it but neglected to tell anyone: any way you cut it, this was an amusing Ed Woodian slip-up, and that just makes me like Stan more.

Kubrickians either love or are embarrassed by EWS, but what of FULL METAL JACKET? One correspondent to a film magazine pointed out that Kube’s careful reconstruction of Viet Nam in London’s docklands failed because the cloud patterns were all wrong, and they have a point — if what we’re after is complete realism. South East Asian skies, as seen for real in South East Asian films, look hazy and diffuse compared to those of Southern England.

The IMDb lists 59 mistakes in the film, mostly continuity but several factual and a few anachronisms. This kind of stuff can get pretty boring to enumerate, but I like the fact that Private Pyle shoots himself on different toilets according to different camera angles, and that there’s a crewmember in blue jeans lying in the rubble during a long steadicam shot going into battle.

Some continuity problems may stem from the delay in shooting during the training scenes: R. Lee Ermey caved in his rib cage crashing his motorcycle in Epping Forest and shooting was suspended until he’d recovered. So the fact that extras swap places while standing to attention, for instance, is not altogether surprising.

The numerous errors listed with firearms, such as full cartridges than should be empty, and guns firing without being cocked, mainly suggest that Kubrick was not so very concerned with technical accuracy in minor details, unless it helped his dramatic purpose — he would play fast and loose with authenticity when it made life easier, and during the “battlefield” of shooting there would be numerous minor screw-ups which were not worth re-shooting.

(PLATOON has only 29 mistakes listed, surprising when you consider how low the budget and short the schedule were, compared to FMJ, and also when you consider how many drugs Oliver Stone supposedly takes.)

Only idiots really care passionately about continuity mistakes (and blog about them). Kubrick was no idiot.

THE SHINING. I swear to God, when the camera crash-zooms in on the slain Scatman Crothers, he blinks.

Typo: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull bot.” There are LOTS of typos, and of course I’m being silly, they’re meant to be there.

When the phone rings in the kitchen (Jack’s got the job), Shelley Duvall moves smoothly to answer it as if she knew it was going to happen. It’s not quite a gaffe, but it suggests the downside to all those retakes: things can get a little too rehearsed-looking.

The really nice, suggestive one, is how the previous caretaker is named as Charles Grady when he’s first discussed, then Jack Nicholson calls him Delbert Grady when they meet, and Grady is fine with this. What’s going on? How does a filmmaker get a major character’s name wrong? It just adds to the weirdness, so I’d argue that it WORKS, but I don’t think it’s intentional.

Shadowplay: There are lots of camera shadows visible in Kubrick’s films, because he moves the camera a lot. I never used to notice camera shadows until I started making films, then I realised what a nightmare they are. In one shot on a student film, I edited, the crew put an actress’s wig on the camera, transforming a camera shadow into a character shadow.

BARRY LYNDON. A few minor anachronisms: the term “strychnine” is used, a Yellow Labrador appears (not bred until 1899). The intriguing one is the car driving through shot in the duel with Leonard Rossiter — I’ve never managed to see it, but more than one source insists it’s there. My T.V. is not that small, plus I’ve seen the film projected several times. But I’d love the rumours to be true.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Patrick Magee’s entire performance is one glorious misjudgement.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. During the Russian Leonard Rossiter blather on the space station, Kubrick is guilty of one of the most egregiously ugly shot changes ever. It’s just a slight jump in shot distance, but it’s really LOUSY film-making. It’s about the only thing of note. Oh, when Heywood Floyd is on the vidphone to his/Kubrick’s daughter, the phone-camera TILTS to keep her in frame as she wriggles about. Pretty clever phone!

DR. STRANGELOVE. My favourite here is Peter Bull, as the Russian ambassador, struggling to keep a straight face behind Sellers’ Strangelove monologue. People laughing is never funny, but people trying NOT to laugh is delicious torture.

I like how George C. Scott falls over in mid-spiel. It feels like it HAS to be either an accident (nobody would script that, it just wouldn’t be funny on the page) or, possibly, Scott goofing around to keep himself entertained during the countless retakes. It’s said that his rather extreme performance came about through boredom, and he was a trifle dismayed when Kubrick cut together the film using only the most exaggerated and grotesque takes. A lot of those re-takes appear to have been motivated by a DESIRE for something to go wrong, for something fascinating and unrepeatable to happen. Thus, Kubrick’s most famous directions: “Do something remarkable,” or, as he liked to quote Cocteau, “Astonish me.”

LOLITA. I like this one — the IMDb suggests that Kubes can be seen walking through frame right at the start, as Humbert enters Quilty’s house. It’s certainly a mistake, but it’s not SK onscreen: why would he be in front of the camera at the start of a take? It’s the clapper boy, running for cover. SOMEBODY made a mistake when editing the dissolve from the previous scene. When you edit rushes for a 48-frame dissolve, you simply cut in the centre of where the dissolve will be, then mark the timing of the dissolve with a chinagraph pencil (I learned old fashioned film cutting just before it died out), 24 frames on either side. Whoever cut this part made the cut right after the clapper boy left, instead of waiting another 24 frames. So even though he wouldn’t have been visible in the cutting copy, when the dissolve came back from the lab, there he is in all his inappropriate glory, disappearing from view exactly halfway through the mix. So either there was no money to recut, or Kubes didn’t notice, or BETTER, didn’t mind. (It’s very brief.)

(You can see the Clapper’s arm at bottom right here.)

SPARTACUS. A truck definitely DOES drive through this one! Plus Tony Curtis wearing a Rolex, and the full panoply of Hollywood anachronism and discontinuity.

PATHS OF GLORY. The IMDb lists four goofs, including another blinking corpse. One character says he’s unmarried at the start and talks about his wife at the end. This makes me pbscurely happy. A whirlwind engagement!

John Gavin is cast in the film, despite not being a very good actor.

THE KILLING. A few continuity and firearms goofs. Supposedly most of what the V.O. says is inaccurate because Kubes didn’t want a V.O. in the first place.

KILLER’S KISS. The warehouse fight. SK “crosses the line” repeatedly during the fight in the dummy warehouse. He does this deliberately in other films, jumping exactly 180º in odd ways in FULL METAL JACKET and THE SHINING, but here the effect is disruptive and confusing, all but ruining the film’s most promising sequence. A beginner’s mistake.

FEAR AND DESIRE. Too many screw-ups to list. I think Stan should have cast his hot wife, Toba, in it. That would have helped.

We could take the Malcolm McDowell view: “The human element will trip you up every time. If it wasn’t for that, he could make the perfect film,” which presupposes that the “perfection” aimed at is chimeric and the quest for it quixotic. But Kubrick was well aware of the problems. Steadicam operator Garrett Morris has said, “We would have long conversations about the elusive nature of perfection. After ten takes the thing falls off the wall because the tape holding it there peeled, entropy takes over, we’re all getting older…”

I prefer to think that the obsessive repetition was just what Kubrick always said it was: a desire to keep filming until something happened that was worth putting in a film. It’s not a futile quest for an unattainable ideal, just the desire to keep going until something wonderful occurs in front of the lens. Kubrick’s opinion of what’s wonderful may differ from yours, sometimes, but it’s perfectly commendable to strive for it, and to not care too much how many mistakes are made along the way.