Stanley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Documentaries

In ear­ly 1950, Stan­ley Kubrick was a 21-year-old staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Look mag­a­zine. At night he haunt­ed the movie the­aters, watch­ing clas­sics at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art and cur­rent releas­es else­where. He made a point of see­ing just about every movie that came out, no mat­ter how bad it was.

“I’d had my job with Look since I was sev­en­teen, and I’d always been inter­est­ed in films,” Kubrick told writer Joseph Gelmis in 1969, “but it nev­er actu­al­ly occurred to me to make a film on my own until I had a talk with a friend from high school, Alex Singer, who want­ed to be a direc­tor him­self.”

Singer worked as an office boy at The March of Time, a com­pa­ny that pro­duced news­reels. He told Kubrick that he heard the com­pa­ny spent $40,000 to make a one-reel doc­u­men­tary. Kubrick was deeply impressed. “I said to him, ‘Gee, that’s a lot of mon­ey,’ ” Kubrick told Jere­my Bern­stein of The New York­er in 1966. “I said ‘I can’t believe it costs that much to make eight or nine min­utes of film.’ ” Kubrick got on the phone to film sup­pli­ers, lab­o­ra­to­ries and equip­ment rental hous­es and crunched the num­bers. He cal­cu­lat­ed that he could make a nine-minute film for about $3,500. “We thought we could make a con­sid­er­able prof­it,” he told Bern­stein.

Kubrick decid­ed to make a film about mid­dleweight box­er Wal­ter Carti­er, who he had done a pho­to sto­ry on for Look the pre­vi­ous year. He rent­ed a spring-loaded 35mm Bell & How­ell Eye­mo cam­era and dived into the project. “I was cam­era­man, direc­tor, edi­tor, assis­tant edi­tor, sound effects man–you name it, I did it,” Kubrick told Gelmis. “It was invalu­able expe­ri­ence, because being forced to do every­thing myself I gained a sound and com­pre­hen­sive grasp of all the tech­ni­cal aspects of film­mak­ing.”

The result­ing film, Day of the Fight, brings the look and feel of film noir to the news­reel form. (Watch the com­plete 16-minute film above.) It fol­lows Carti­er and his twin broth­er, Vin­cent, in the hours lead­ing up to his fight with a for­mi­da­ble oppo­nent named Bob­by James. The scenes were all care­ful­ly planned, except for the big fight at the end, which was filmed live on April 17, 1950 at Lau­rel Gar­dens in Newark, New Jer­sey.

Kubrick rent­ed two Eye­mos that night, one for him­self and the oth­er for Singer. Kubrick hand-held his cam­era and moved around–at one point even hold­ing the cam­era under­neath the box­ers and shoot­ing straight upward–while Singer pro­vid­ed basic cov­er­age with his cam­era on a tri­pod. The Eye­mos took 100-foot rolls of film, which meant Kubrick and Singer were con­stant­ly chang­ing film. They tried to time it so that one was shoot­ing while the oth­er was reload­ing. “It was pret­ty busy and pret­ty hec­tic,” Singer told Vin­cent LoBrut­to for Stan­ley Kubrick: A Bio­graphy. “We had to get it. It had to be down on film–there was no pic­ture with­out get­ting this fight.”

They got it. When Carti­er deliv­ered the knock-out punch, Kubrick was reload­ing but Singer cap­tured the moment. To com­plete the project, Kubrick hired his child­hood friend Ger­ald Fried to com­pose music, and CBS news­man Dou­glas Edwards to pro­vide nar­ra­tion. Day of the Fight was gen­er­al­ly well-received. As LoBrut­to writes, “Kubrick­’s innate pho­to­graph­ic sense and the pas­sion he brought to the project result­ed in a film devoid of the com­mon pit­falls of novice film­mak­ers.”

But when Kubrick set out to mar­ket the film, he found he had already stum­bled into a pit­fall of the novice busi­ness­man. The movie had cost about $3,900 to make. “When we began to take it around to the var­i­ous com­pa­nies to sell it,” he told Bern­stein, “they all liked it, but we were offered things like $1,500 and $2,500. At one point I said to them, ‘Why are you offer­ing us so lit­tle for this? One-reel shorts get $40,000!’ They said, ‘You must be crazy.’ ”

Kubrick even­tu­al­ly sold it to RKO-Pathé for about $100 less than it cost him to make, he told Bern­stein. He did have the sat­is­fac­tion of see­ing the Day of the Fight at New York’s Para­mount The­atre at an April 26, 1951 screen­ing of My For­bid­den Past, star­ring Robert Mitchum and Ava Gard­ner. “It was very excit­ing to see it on the screen, and it got a nation-wide and world-wide dis­tri­b­u­tion,” Kubrick told Bern­stein. “Every­body liked it and they said it was good. I thought that I’d get mil­lions of offers–of which I got none, to do any­thing.”

Fly­ing Padre:

Actu­al­ly Kubrick did get one offer after the suc­cess of Day of the Fight. RKO-Pathé paid him $1,500 to make a news­reel about a priest in New Mex­i­co who got around his vast parish in a Piper Cub air­plane. Fly­ing Padre (above) tells the sto­ry of two days in the life of Rev. Fred Stadt­mueller.

“Unlike Day of the Fight,” writes LoBrut­to, “Fly­ing Padre is a rather typ­i­cal human-inter­est news­reel doc­u­men­tary. Kubrick­’s film­mak­ing skills are assured but reveal less of the cin­e­mat­ic tal­ent that lies with­in. The pho­tog­ra­phy is even­ly lit. Shots are com­posed in clas­sic pho­to­jour­nal­ist style, pleas­ing and art­ful to the eye.”

All of Kubrick­’s expenses–travel, film, equip­ment rental–came out of his $1,500 fee, so again he made do with­out a crew. Even after restrict­ing the run­ning time to nine min­utes, he bare­ly broke even. Kubrick would lat­er describe the film, released in 1951, as “sil­ly.”

The Sea­far­ers:

After break­ing even on Fly­ing Padre, Kubrick could read the writ­ing on the wall. Short doc­u­men­taries did­n’t pay. Sur­pris­ing­ly, it was at pre­cise­ly this point that he decid­ed to for­mal­ly quit his job at Look and devote him­self to film­mak­ing. As he explained to Bern­stein, “I found out how much fea­ture films were being made for–you know, millions–and had cal­cu­lat­ed that I could make a fea­ture film for about ten thou­sand dol­lars.”

So once again Kubrick was off to the races. While rais­ing mon­ey for his first fea­ture film, Fear and Desire (find it in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online), he accept­ed a pay­ing job direct­ing a 30-minute film for the Sea­far­ers Inter­na­tion­al Union. The Sea­far­ers (above), released in 1953, is of lit­tle note aside from being Kubrick­’s first col­or film. He nev­er men­tioned it in inter­views.

Look­ing back on his ear­ly doc­u­men­tary work in a 1968 inter­view for Eye mag­a­zine, Kubrick put things into per­spec­tive: “Even though the first cou­ple of films were bad, they were well pho­tographed, and they had a good look about them, which did impress peo­ple.”