Читать книгу Kubrick's Men - Richard Rambuss - Страница 10

In between the boxing movies, Kubrick made his first war film, Fear and Desire. It was also his first feature film. But before he took that step, Kubrick did two other documentaries: Flying Padre (1951) and The Seafarers (1953). Like his sports short about prizefighter Walter Cartier, Flying Padre is a male human-interest story. So in its own way is The Seafarers.

Day of the Fight cost Kubrick $3,900 to make, and he sold it to RKO-Pathé for $4,000. But the studio also gave Kubrick his next film project and a $1,500 budget to do it. Flying Padre presents Father Fred Stadtmueller, a Catholic priest who makes his pastoral visits to his far-flung flock, spread out over four thousand square miles in New Mexico, via his own single-engine airplane. Though he later developed a fear of flying and refused to travel by plane, Kubrick himself held a pilot’s license when he did this nine-minute movie, which he wanted to call Sky Pilot, a pun on a slang term for a priest. Flying Padre employs the same “day-in-the-life” narrative framework as Day of the Fight, though here it’s two days. Another carryover from Kubrick’s first documentary to his second is a concern with religious rites and objects. He films Fr. Stadtmueller in full priestly regalia, conducting “solemn services” for a deceased ranch hand. His fancy cope and pomped biretta flamboyantly stand out within the desert cowboy mise-en-scène of the humble mission church and dusty gravesite. Stadtmueller then wings his way back to his home parish church in time to lead evening devotions. There, now dressed in his chasuble, we watch him in a peculiarly extended sequence brandish the monstrance right and left and back again for his mostly Hispanos congregants to venerate.

Day of the Fight humanizes Walter Cartier, a “fighting machine” in the ring, by giving him a dog at home. In Killer’s Kiss, Davey has pet goldfish. The padre raises canaries as his hobby. But we are made to understand that he, too, is a man’s man. The narrator, Bob Hite, informs us that Stadtmueller is a “good shot” and that he likes to hunt, as well as to work on his Piper Cub, which he has named the Spirit of St. Joseph after Jesus’s earthly father. Flying Padre is more conventional than the arty Day of the Fight, with all that film’s noir shadows, extreme angles, and double images. But its exciting final shot—a long, fast backward track of Stadtmueller posing proudly beside his aircraft—stands out as a harbinger of the man-and-machine images for which Kubrick will be known.

It would be interesting to know whether Kubrick got the assignment for The Seafarers, a promo film about the men who crew American ships, because of his way with male subjects in his first two shorts. In any case, this industrial documentary for the Seafarers International Union has its place, however minor, among Kubrick’s men’s films. Not only is the film’s subject—this “brotherhood of the sea,” with its quasi-military hierarchy and traditions—male, but so too is its specified audience of new or prospective union members. This half-hour-long color film (Kubrick’s first) is as much a recruitment tool for the union as it is a depiction of the seafaring life, or “calling” as the movie has it. “I see guys doing other things together,” says one fellow, rendering in simple words the film’s stylish visual solicitation, and “I want to be part of it.”

Nearly all of the film is shot on shore, and mostly at a union hall: one of many such places, declares the film’s narrator, CBS news reporter Don Hollenbeck, “built by seafarers to meet the needs and suit the tastes of seafarers.” (The matter of male taste will come back in the next chapter on Kubrick’s war films.) The movie takes the viewer on a tour of places in and near the union headquarters, starting with the hiring hall, where seafarers put in for berths on ships that take them around the world. It next looks in on the union offices, where Kubrick juxtaposes the narrator’s assurance that all “the machines and the files and the figures are there to serve the seafarers and not the other way around” against a striking constructivist montage of those many machines automatically whirring away. We also visit the cafeteria, barbershop, bar, the “Sea Chest” clothing store, various game rooms, a library, even a small art gallery. There the camera finds two nudie drawings that, along with a topless pin-up calendar in the barbershop shown full screen—“a pleasant sight after any voyage,” the narrator chimes in here—give this inhouse documentary a slight stag flavor now and again.

Whatever the port, these union halls serve as a “second home” for seafarers, “where no man off the ship is stranger to the rest.” (More brotherly love.) As such, that port-of-call second home makes for another of the all-male settings—the armed forces, athletics, prisons, spaceships—where so many of the stories that Kubrick’s movies tell are placed or pass through. Here his gliding camera movements about the invitingly homosocial spaces of The Seafarers are punctuated by some striking working-class male portraiture of seafarers in suits and others in short sleeves that show off sailors’ tattoos.

We see from the photographs, documentaries, and features touched upon in this chapter that Kubrick’s art from early on was deeply absorbed with men and with forms of masculinity: this in ways, as we will further see, more various and complex than has been reckoned in Kubrick criticism.