Fear and Desire

 (1953)

Fear and Desire Blu-ray offers solid video and great audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
Four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines must confront their fears and desires.

For more about Fear and Desire and the Fear and Desire Blu-ray release, see the Fear and Desire Blu-ray Review

Starring: Paul Mazursky, Frank Silvera, Kenneth Harp, Virginia Leith
Director: Stanley Kubrick

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Fear and Desire Blu-ray Review

"If you have to hate me, please try to like me also."

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, September 28, 2012

Thomas Edison made 1,000 failed attempts before successfully creating a commercially viable incandescent lightbulb. The Wright Brothers' first flyer prototypes were disasters. Einstein had to revise his early special theory of relativity to include gravitational fields. The point is, geniuses rarely get it right the first time, and their eventual reputations are predicated on practice, sweat equity, and the willingness to learn from previous mistakes and perfect their craft. This certainly applies to cinema titan Stanley Kubrick, who later referred to his debut narrative feature, 1953's Fear and Desire, as "a bumbling amateur film exercise." It may be an apocryphal story, but he supposedly even spent years tracking down and destroying prints in an effort to keep the film from being seen.

By and large, it hasn't been seen. For years, the only ways to view it—aside from rare 35mm screenings—were duped VHS tapes and bootlegged DVDs. (More recently, the public domain film can be found streaming online.) Fear and Desire has never received a proper, official home video release. Until now. With a print restored by the Library of Congress, Kino-Lorber has finally brought the cult gem within easy reach of Kubrick fans and scholars, with a new high definition transfer that's almost certainly the best the film has looked since its brief theatrical run. It's no 2001: A Space Odyssey—and it bears all the marks of a green director trying a bit too hard—but Fear and Desire contains many of the seeds of Kubrick's style and is certainly worth watching at least once.

Behind enemy lines...

For a fairly close comparison in tone, imagine an amateurish black and white version of The Thin Red Line made in the 1950s. The soldiers on a vague mission. The poetic voiceover narration. The existential inquiries. The horrors of war and the way they inevitably bring out the worst in man. Add to all that a Twilight Zone-style ending, and you've got Fear and Desire. Scripted by Howard Sackler—one of Kubrick's high school classmates, and the future writer of the boxing drama The Great White Hope—the film opens with a view of a forested mountain as a narrator sets the scene with a rather Rod Serling-esque intro: "There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, or one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear—and doubt and death—are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind."

Which is, of course, a longwinded way of saying "the story you're about to see is an allegory and not based on real characters or events." More than Kubrick's direction, the film is domineered by the florid and sometimes cryptic quality of Sackler's dialogue, which strains hard for philosophical profundity but comes up short. At one point, the contemplative Lieutenant Corby (Kenneth Harp) chuckles to himself and says, "No man is an island? Perhaps that was true a long time ago, before the Ice Age. The glaciers have melted away, and now we're all islands, parts of a world made of islands only." It's simultaneously obtuse and far too obvious, and that goes for most of the characters' interior monologues and exterior ramblings. This is a film that doesn't know the value of silence, and it certainly doesn't help that much of the acting is histrionically overplayed.

The symbolic war drama begins after Lt. Corby has crashed six miles behind enemy lines with his small platoon—the tough Sgt. Mac (Frank Silvera), softhearted Pvt. Fletcher (Stephen Colt), and the soon to be insane Pvt. Sidney (Paul Mazursky). The lieutenant has a plan to build a raft and float them down a river to friendly territory, but their escape is slowed by a series of violent encounters that Kubrick and Sackler use to tamely illustrate man's animal nature.

The most effective of these is an impressionistically edited, almost Eisenstein-like montage sequence where the Lieutenant and his men bust into a shack and kill a pair of enemy combatants who had been peacefully eating dinner. Kubrick cuts rapidly between shots of our protagonists stabbing their victims, a table covered in spilled stew, and a dying soldier's hand as it twitchingly clutches a half-eaten hunk of bread. The need for food then gives way to physical desire when the possibly PTSD-afflicted Pvt. Sidney is unwisely left alone to guard a captured peasant girl (Virginia Leith) tied with belts to a tree. Sidney madly squawks on an on about Shakespeare's The Tempest—coincidentally, Mazursky would go on to direct a modernized film version of the play starring John Cassavetes in 1983—and his attempt to untie the girl so he can embrace her predictably ends in tragedy. Meanwhile, Mac grows irrationally obsessed with killing a high-ranking general he's spied in a heavily guarded base downstream.

The episodic parts never quite come together into a satisfying whole, not even after the shocking final act, which is more mystifying than powerful, an O. Henry twist without the sudden jolt of narrative clarity or emotional impact. In fact, nothing about Fear and Desire seems particularly well put together—the pacing drags, the performances are stagy, the over-steeped writing verges on silly—and if the film weren't directed by Stanley Kubrick, I doubt we'd be revisiting it today. But since it was made by the man who would become one of the most revered filmmakers of the 20th century, it's naturally the source of a lot of historical and cult curiosity. And there are flashes of future Kubrick here. Although his signature single-point perspective isn't on display—the visual technique that provided The Shining's fearful symmetry—the cinematography is often impressive, with stark chiaroscuro lighting during the few indoor scenes and gorgeous documentarian closeups of the soldiers' weathered faces. More than anything, Fear and Desire—with its themes of bestial man, existential absurdity, and the dehumanizing effects of war—feels like a rough, rough draft of the ideas Kubrick would later hone in Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and Full Metal Jacket.

Note: Several sources—including imdb.com—give the film's runtime as 72 minutes, but this seems to be incorrect. This edition runs for just over 61 minutes and nothing appears to be missing. I'll contact Kino-Lorber for clarification and update this page when and if I find out anything.

Fear and Desire Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

Previously only available on bootlegged VHS tapes and DVDs—or streaming in some dark corner of the internet—Fear and Desire now gets its first official home video release, courtesy of Kino-Lorber. Using a rare 35mm print restored by the Library of Congress, the film has been given a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that seems entirely true to source. And when I say "true to source," I mean the print doesn't seem to be digitally touched up in any way. This is good, in that there's been no edge enhancement or digital noise reduction applied—the grain structure looks completely natural—but on the flip side, the print hasn't been cleaned up much either. Unlike, say, Criterion, who will painstakingly remove specks and scratches and other debris using software, Kino's editorial policy—so to speak—is to present prints "as is." Fortunately, there's not much age-related wear and tear here, although you will notice semi-regular white flecks, mild jitters here and there, and some brightness fluctuations. There's also some strong vignetting in the top corners of the frame at times, but this has everything to do with how the film was shot and couldn't possibly be removed without severe cropping.

Let's not nitpick—Fear and Desire looks wonderful in high definition, and this Blu-ray absolutely marks the best possible way to see the film aside from traveling to the George Eastman House for an infrequent 35mm exhibition. Clarity is dramatically improved from unofficial copies—usually twice or thrice duped—and the level of detail is often exceptional, especially in Kubrick's tight closeups of the soldiers' faces. The black and white gradation is strong as well; there are a few shots where contrast is a little flat, but I'm certain this too goes back to the source. For the most part, Kubrick's intense chiaroscuro lighting—all deep shadows and funneled blasts of light—is gorgeous to behold. And as you'd hope, there are no compression or encode issues to mar the experience.

Fear and Desire Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

Kino has blessed Fear and Desire with an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 stereo track, which seems to reproduce the film's audio with as fine a degree of clarity as possible. This was an extremely low budget production, and Kubrick shot it without sound, dubbing all the dialogue and effects in after the fact. Invariably, the dubbing is noticeable—everything sounds more stagy than realistic—but the voices are at least clean and unmuffled and mostly easy to understand. (The effects are unavoidably wimpy; listen for those impotent gunshots and the puttering whir of a prop plane flying overhead.) A key aspect of the film's tone is the dramatic orchestral score by Gerald Fried, who would later compose for The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the original Star Trek, and the Roots mini-series. The music sounds great; a little thin in the high end—like a lot of films from this period—but with a good sense of presence. The only real shortcoming here is that Kino has neglected to provide subtitles, which would be helpful for deciphering some of Sidney's more unintelligible rants.

Fear and Desire Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

• The Seafarers (1080p, 28:55): Stanley Kubrick's first color film was this 1953 industrial documentary, paid for and overseen by The Seafarers International Union. Basically, it's a half-hour commercial about how wonderful the SIU is for its members, covering the sense of community within the union, medical benefits, and the importance of collective bargaining. If it weren't for the titles and an impressive dolly shot through the SIU cafeteria, you'd never guess this was directed by Kubrick.

Fear and Desire Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

Kubrick himself was highly critical of Fear and Desire, his first narrative feature, and it's not hard to see why—it is unmistakably amateurish and floridly poetic in a rather forced way. But there are fleeting glimpses of the director's future genius here—the frantic murder montage, for one—and much of the cinematography is starkly evocative. Despite Kubrick's lifelong wishes to the contrary, the film is a part of cinema history and definitely deserves to be seen. Thanks to Kino-Lorber and the Library of Congress, this is now much easier; the bootlegged DVDs and VHS tapes of yore are now permanently supplanted by this gorgeous new Blu-ray, the film's first official home video release. Kubrick completists will definitely want to add this one to their collections, but all dedicated cinephiles should see it at least once. Recommended!

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