Product Description

The most complete account yet of one of the most original and stimulating film-makers of the post-war years: Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Barry Lindon, Full Metal Jacket ! A biography of this pre-eminent cultural figure is long overdue. Few film-makers have managed to maintain their mystique over forty years; Kubrick succeeded by preparing his films for years, so that each distilled the essence of the zeitgeist. To the generation of the 1950s, he was one of the few directors to achieve, with Paths of Glory, the dignity and stature of the European cinema in an American film. To 1960s audiences, he's the man who made both Dr Strangelove, the ultimate anti-war movie, and the counter-culture classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1970s he created that archetypal hymn to urban violence, A Clockwork Orange. In the 1980s, he put Stephen King on screen in The Shining. In continental Europe especially, Kubrick is regarded as one of the handful of great living film-makers. Born in the Bronx in 1928 of Central European stock, Kubrick still lives in moody seclusion in Borehamwood, where he bought a house soon after moving to the UK in 1961.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143098 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author
John Baxter is a film critic, novelist, biographer and broadcaster (born in Australia), whose film books include The Hollywood Exiles, Stunt: The Great Movie Stuntmen, An Appalling Talent: The Life of Ken Russell, Science Fiction in the Cinema, The Cinema of John Ford, The Cinema of Josef Von Sternberg, Fellini and Bunuel. His Steven Spielberg: The Unauthorised Biography was published by HarperCollins in June 1996.

Customer Reviews

The late Stanley Kubrick................. From a distance
If Stanley Kubrick was a "talented shxt" as Kirk Douglas put it, then Baxter's book is a good stare at it from a distance. The problem with any book about Kubrick is that no-one really knew him. Sure, the myths exist, but trying to find the man inside them is damn near impossible. It feels like Baxter knows this, and therefore details the professional events in Kubrick's life, perhaps to squeeze closed the gap of non-recognition between Kubrick and his audience.

He succeeds quite amicably, bearing in mind that its hard to accurately scrutinize the thought processes of a creature from only its footprints. I am writing this a week after Mr. Kubrick's death, having finished my second reading just over a fortnight ago. I can't help but think that Baxter should issue a revised version of this book in the Summer (1999) including all the information he can glean from Kubricks final piece "Eyes Wide Shut".

Overall then, a good book. Read it if you've never really looked at Kubrick before - but other, more complete posthumous works will follow hereafter that might serve to give the bigger picture.

Keith

A really well written book about an extraordinary man.
Kubrick is a fascinating man but probably as difficult to write about as he was to work with because of his reclusive nature. However, John Baxter writes a tremendously gripping but objective account of his life. I found it difficult to put down. The book also includes some interesting photographs of Kubrick directing and some of the sets. If Baxter is to do a second edition I would like to see more content on Eyes Wide Shut and AI.

lurid titillation
Set in a future Britain, decrepid and reactionary, it cuts close to the bone when it comes to Englishness. Alex is the aesthetic hooligan, a sci-fi Mod, a Regency dandy who stalks the Thamesmead housing estate before going home to the grotesque working class kitsch of his parents. Also the script's use of Burgess's Nadsat is dazzling - and funny: "Well, well, well! Well if it isn't fat stinking billy goat Billy Boy in poison! How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarble, ya eunuch jelly thou!"

The film is stacked with superb performances from younger, hairier versions of talents that went on to become stalwarts of the British acting aristocracy. Directed with assurance and filled with the cynicism, paranoia, visual flair (and lurid titillation) that characterised so much of his work, this is vintage Kubrick and classic cinema.