A few days ago I mentioned watching A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket. My interest was kindled by a visit to the Kubrick exhibition at the Design Museum.
My previous visits to the Design Museum, with the exception of one jolly lunch in the restaurant, had been unsatisfactory; “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Now the museum has, at last, put on something really worth seeing. I may go back as, after more than an hour, I was only half way round, it was lunchtime and I was feeling like a little something at the Italian restaurant across the road.
Like me you may not immediately remember Kubrick’s canon.
That’s the films he directed and the other two columns are if he also was writer or producer. What is so striking is the control he exercised and the different genres he dived into. Barry Lyndon, a personal favourite, is better than David Lean. The Shining is better than Hitchcock; Spartacus is better than Ben Hur; you get the idea. The exhibition has long (sometimes 30 minutes) clips from the films and heaps of interesting stuff about the productions. I found it absorbing.
One of his least successful films, in my opinion, is Dr Strangelove – it’s comedy that has dated. One of his films that never came to fruition is Napoleon. There is a huge amount of material about this aborted project including Aubrey Hepburn’s polite hand-written brush-off when he asks her to play Josephine. Other actors approached were Jack Nicholson (to play Boney), Charlotte Rampling, Peter O’Toole and Alec Guinness. The Hollywood studios lost their bottle – it was super-big-budget. MGM backed out and United Artists stepped in before losing their nerve too.
Phil Hoad read the outline script dated 1969 and wrote about it in The Guardian.
“Scale and spectacle are what confidently storm through in the script. Kubrick, thanks to frankly frightening research habits (his index-card system for the film apparently ran to 25,000 entries), breezily shoehorns in Napoleon’s entire military career, and the treatment is punctuated with its greatest hits: the tactical masterstroke at the siege of Toulon that made his name; his early Italian and Egyptian forays; Austerlitz; the disastrous Russian campaign; the rearguard action fighting off the coalition of European powers; his Hundred Days after exile to Elba trying to re-establish himself. Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1970 Waterloo set a panoramic high-water mark, but Barry Lyndon leaves little doubt that Kubrick’s Napoleon would have been a visual 21-gun salute. Several moments stand out on paper: the eerie entry into an abandoned Moscow (shades of this in the second half of Full Metal Jacket?); a sumptuous Franco-Russian diplomatic reception held mid-stream on the Niemen river; seven pages of masterfully delineated sturm und drang at Waterloo as the wheels finally fall off the French military machine.”
It is a huge exhibition befitting such a giant. Brought up in the Bronx, Kubrick came to England in 1961 and stayed until his death in 1999 making most of his films here. This led to a city in Vietnam being recreated at a disused gas works in Docklands for Full Metal Jacket. The exhibition depicts Kubrick the man and has voluminous content about his films – it is strongly recommended if you are a cineaste.
Take a look at some of his output.