Criterion's Complete Kubrick Opens the Vault on the Director's Earliest, Roughest Films

Stanley Kubrick called his own first narrative feature "boring and pretentious" — and then spent years trying to erase it. That verdict, delivered by an older Kubrick on 1952's Fear and Desire, anchors the opening chapter of Criterion's The Complete Kubrick, a box set now being explored era by era in a dedicated feature season on The Film Stage.

The set's earliest discs trace Kubrick's path from Look magazine photographer to fledgling director, writes Elena Vasquez.

What do the early documentary shorts reveal?

Three shorts precede the features: Day of the Fight (1951), Flying Padre (1951) and The Seafarers (1953). Each showcases the visual mastery Kubrick developed at Look, evoking entire milieus around stories of intensely driven men.

Day of the Fight, shot in Kubrick's native Manhattan, follows middleweight boxer brothers Walter and Vincent Cartier, both WWII veterans. Kubrick refused neutral observation even then: he lent his own dog to Walter for a staged gentleness scene under Douglas Edwards' melodramatic narration. His ring photography here would be heavily revisited — in some shots remade — for Killer's Kiss.

Flying Padre follows a Catholic priest crisscrossing rural New Mexico by light aircraft. The Film Stage's reviewer calls it the closest glimpse of what a Kubrick Western might have been, citing tilted wooden crosses and expressionistic close-ups.

The Seafarers, commissioned by the Seafarers' International Union, remains a time capsule of the American union's golden years — and Kubrick's first color film, notable also for its pin-up posters, presented with frank amusement as the first sexually charged images in a Kubrick film.

Why did Kubrick want Fear and Desire destroyed?

Made at 23 with financing largely from his pharmacist uncle Martin Perveler, Fear and Desire runs 63 minutes. Kubrick destroyed what reels he could find and forbade his wife Christiane from ever seeing it.

The Film Stage's assessment is unsparing: a "laughable amateur hour" in which four lost army men — Frank Silvera, Kenneth Harp, Paul Mazursky and Stephen Coit — monologue through overcooked lines like "We spend our lives running our fingers down the lists and directories, looking for our real names, our permanent addresses." Kubrick reportedly recalled that line with particular embarrassment.

Yet the reviewer finds the failure instructive. The debut "singlehandedly shatters the image of the boy genius preternaturally destined for greatness," proving a certifiably bad first film did not stop a driven, self-critical filmmaker from becoming the Kubrick of legend. Even here, his fixations — absurdism, duality, civilization's slipping mask — appear, with the same actors playing both armies in an abstract war allegory.

What does Killer's Kiss (1955) achieve?

Kubrick's first acknowledged narrative feature stars Jamie Smith as a down-and-out boxer and Irene Kane as a gangster's girl, with Silvera returning. Howard Sackler, later of The Great White Hope, wrote the still-hammy script.

Its strength is location photography: extensive New York shooting that captured midcentury grit — pickpockets, billboards, fog-smothered skyscrapers — a texture his polished London soundstage films never replicated. Two sequences stand out: a ballet monologue featuring Kubrick's then-girlfriend, real-life ballerina Ruth Sobotka, and a mannequin-filled storage-room showdown.

The takeaway: by 1955 Kubrick was fully formed as a visual storyteller. Only the words failed him — a problem solved by the literary collaborations, from 2001: A Space Odyssey onward, that shaped the rest of the canon.