Clockwork Oranges and Doomsday Devices

Over the next six weeks, The Belcourt presents the entire Kubrick feature repertoire—including a free, likely never-to-be-repeated showing of his 1953 debut Fear and Desire, the film he hoped would stay hidden. (Not available on DVD, it screens 4:30 p.m. Sunday at The Frist Center courtesy of the invaluable George Eastman House archives.) That gives local moviegoers an unprecedented chance to immerse themselves in his wide-ranging work. Not even the Scene's pool of writers could agree on a single Kubrick masterpiece—hence the cases below for five must-see films.

Adapted from the one Stephen King novel even non-fans agree is great, The Shining (Oct. 31-Nov. 2) may be the most recognizable film in Kubrick's broad pantheon. King's readers (and King himself) have long criticized the director for stripping away the novel's nuanced exposition and the redemption of its central character. But the movie's desolate imagery and near-perfect casting make it the most chilling tale of cabin fever in American cinema. With its labyrinthine corridors and forebodingly gargantuan Gold Room, the fictitious Overlook Hotel—a setting that evokes the tilt of a diseased mind as surely as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—functions as the movie's most sinister character. Kubrick stalks its hallways in long, grandiose tracking shots: Impatient viewers may find them excessive, but the hypnotic takes suck us into the nightmare.

Kubrick was known for his demands upon actors: Of Shelley Duvall, he reportedly ordered 127 takes of her breakdown with a baseball bat. But his perfectionism paid off. Her doe-eyed countenance and country-mouse delivery are strangely mesmerizing; Jack Nicholson's troubled alcoholic writer remains one of the most identifiable (and heavily parodied) characters of all time; and the small but entrancing cast is rounded out by Scatman Crothers as the ill-fated sage in cook's clothing and the wunderkind Danny Lloyd, who mysteriously never again appeared on the silver screen. However much King's fans balk at his changes, Kubrick turned the haunted-house movie into a relentless glide down all-too-real corridors of sickness. —D. Patrick Rodgers

The conventional wisdom regarding Full Metal Jacket (Nov. 5-6), Kubrick's 1987 adaptation of Gustov Hasford's The Short-Timers, is that the film is lopsided and front-loaded. Split into two parts, with the first half focusing on the central character's infantry training and the second on his tour in Vietnam, Kubrick creates an arch showing his soldiers' dehumanizing progress from "ladies" to trained killers. If the first half outshines the second, it's mostly because of R. Lee Ermey's movie-stealing performance as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, whose wickedly vitriolic degradation of his troops into kill-on-command clockwork oranges (especially Vincent D'Onofrio's doughboy Gomer Pyle) pushes the film into black-comic Dr. Strangelove territory (see below). However, the back half attempts a riskier if less entertaining effect, essentially undoing the first half's conditioning by removing our narrative bearings and reducing comrades and enemies alike to braying, gutshot humanity. Like Coppola adapting Conrad's Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, Kubrick equates the Vietnam war with American imperialism and folly. Case in point: The film's final sequence of troops marching into the night singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme—an ending as anti-climactic as the end of the war itself. —Adam Gold

Dapperly coordinated hoodlums, ultraviolence, drug-laced milk, the demolition of classical ideals—Kubrick's darkly marvelous A Clockwork Orange (Nov. 13-14) will always hold great appeal for us counterculture youth. In Malcolm McDowell's Alex, we get a smirking deviant who spouts highly quotable Russo-Cockney slang, has a thing for Beethoven, and scratches his malicious itch with gang rumbles, assault on the elderly, theft, rape and murder. We empathize with our attractive, charismatic antihero as he goes from thrill-seeking reprobate to convicted murderer to behavior-modified marionette; we rejoice when he emerges as an insincerely reformed criminal. In essence, we delight in all the elements that shocked and outraged the generations before us—as the movie did in 1971, when Kubrick became the poster boy for nihilistic mayhem. And if we didn't watch it in defiance of their moral values, we'd watch it simply because, from script to sets to costumes to soundtrack, it's so damn stylish.

To be sure, there are moral issues in there somewhere, about mechanical "good" vs. free will and blah blah blah. Anthony Burgess' book is much better for all that. The appeal of the film is the mirror we fancy it holds up to us: cool, cultured, ruthless youth with a lust for extreme overindulgence, punished by society for defying its laws yet ultimately glorified for doing so. Punk on arrival, Kubrick's movie will always be adored by us vain young intellectuals. So here's to violence, sex, drugs and Beethoven rolling back over. As Alex would say: horrorshow. —Sarah Brown