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Seen in retrospect, a first feature by a major filmmaker can be a revelation particularly if, as with Stanley Kubrick\u2019s low-budget war movie \u201cFear and Desire<\/a>,\u201d it concerns a career-long preoccupation \u2014 and even more so if the filmmaker has attempted to suppress it.<\/p>\n An independent production which, although fictional, premiered in the documentary section of the 1952 Venice Film Festival<\/a>, \u201cFear and Desire\u201d is getting a weeklong run at Metrograph, 70 years after its release in the United States.<\/p>\n Kubrick, 23, had left his job as a staff photographer for Look magazine when he undertook the project, crediting himself as director, photographer and editor, as well as producer. The means were modest; the story, written by a high-school buddy, Howard Sackler, was epic. A portentous voice-over locates the action \u201coutside history.\u201d Four universal \u2014 albeit obviously American \u2014 soldiers, trapped six miles behind enemy lines, battle their respective demons in an attempted return to base.<\/p>\n In addition to its allegorical framework, the film partakes in then fashionable existentialism. The same actor (Kenneth Harp) is cast as both the squad\u2019s loquaciously philosophical lieutenant and an equally introspective enemy general. The soundtrack is heavy with the men\u2019s internal musings. The new digital restoration includes nine minutes, mostly post-dubbed dialogue, cut after Venice when the film\u2019s title was changed from \u201cThe Shape of Fear\u201d by the distributor Joseph Burstyn<\/a>, the pre-eminent U.S. importer of Italian neorealist films who also released the independent classic \u201cLittle Fugitive<\/a>\u201d in 1953.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n However arty, \u201cFear and Desire\u201d is squarely in the American B-movie tradition. The situation \u2014 a cutoff platoon \u2014 and the pragmatic use of close-ups suggest Samuel Fuller\u2019s Korean War quickie \u201cThe Steel Helmet<\/a>,\u201d which opened in 1951. Instantly notorious for depicting an American war crime, it is a movie Kubrick might well have seen.<\/p>\n In Fuller\u2019s film, an enraged soldier shoots an unarmed North Korean prisoner of war. In Kubrick\u2019s, an unbalanced recruit (the future director Paul Mazursky) abuses and ultimately kills a local woman (Virginia Leith) who, having stumbled upon the four soldiers, is bound to a tree, and left in his charge. The sequence which juxtaposes Mazursky\u2019s babbling with the woman\u2019s petrified silence is the movie\u2019s heart of darkness. Although Leith has virtually no dialogue, her image was featured in the movie\u2019s ads.<\/p>\n \u201cFear and Desire\u201d is clumsily dubbed but strikingly photographed. A.H. Weiler\u2019s New York Times review<\/a> was both sympathetic and supportive, crediting Kubrick and Sackler with \u201ca moody, often visually powerful study\u201d of men under stress. The movie was not, however, a success. Nor was it a fond memory for its maker.<\/p>\n When \u201cFear and Desire\u201d was revived at Film Forum in 1994, Kubrick had a Warner Bros. publicist bombard local critics with letters<\/a> expressing Kubrick\u2019s feeling that the movie was nothing more than a \u201cbumbling amateur film exercise,\u201d written by a failed poet (an unkind reference to Sackler, who some 25 years after \u201cFear and Desire\u201d was awarded a Pulitzer<\/a> for his play \u201cThe Great White Hope\u201d).<\/p>\n Kubrick characterized \u201cFear and Desire\u201d as \u201ca completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.\u201d While undeniably pretentious, the movie is neither inept nor boring. Its oddity lies in its being both a prelude and footnote to Kubrick\u2019s remarkable career.<\/p>\n Fear and Desire<\/strong><\/p>\n Sept. 22-29, Metrograph in Manhattan, metrograph.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n