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To get the dark blossoms of Barry Lyndon and The Shining and Full Metal Jacket you need seeds, the very young Stanley Kubrick plants them in his lugubrious, arresting debut. Men behind enemy lines in an allegory set "outside of history," a laboratory distillation of guys-on-a-mission yarns, "a picnic film, an excursion" (Kurosawa on Sanshiro Sugata). The morbid intellectualism of the Lieutenant (Kenneth Harp) and the sturdy primitiveness of the Sergeant (Frank Silvera) comprise the crux of combat, in between there's the tabula rasa (Stephen Coit) and the soldier (Paul Mazursky) pantomiming the first instance of the filmmaker's already obsessive vision of human beings as machines that must inevitably go awry. A landscape at once abstract and scrubby, huge faces in Soviet low angles, a raid that leaves contorted bodies and squashed food. "Cold stew on a blazing island, we've just made a perfect definition of war." The river is pure primordial sludge, the siren (Virginia Leith) who would pacify the warriors in Paths of Glory is here silent and gunned down, the confrontation with the enemy is an encounter with the Self. Free-floating koans fill the air: "No man is an island. Perhaps that was true long age, before the Ice Age... It's too bad the sun doesn't burn us green instead of brown... You try door after door when you hear voices you like behind them. Then the knobs come off in your hand!" Prospero, Huck Finn and Proteus are some of the names dropped in this Beckettian backyard, "all a trick we perform when we would rather not die immediately." Apocalypse Now and The Thin Red Line flow from here. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |