It read like Agatha Christie: “The police were summoned to Mr. Kubrick's rural home in Hertfordshire, north of London, yesterday afternoon, when he was pronounced dead.” Thus ran the Times report on Monday, March 8th, confirming that the foremost man of mystery in modern cinema—the Howard Hughes of Hertfordshire—had retained the patent on his secrecy to the end. The myth of Stanley Kubrick is now intact, unlikely to be broken, and it can only add to the agonies of expectation that will attend the delivery of Eyes Wide Shut. Twelve years we've been waiting for a new Kubrick picture, and this psychodrama, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, was set for release on July 16th. One wonders whether Warner Bros., out of respect for the deceased, will now move the release date forward.

Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, at a time when his parents were living on Clinton Avenue in the Bronx. His assiduous biographer, Vincent LoBrutto, has dug through the school records at P.S. 90 and unearthed the fact that in matters of Personality, Works and Plays Well with Others, Completes Work, Is Generally Careful, Respects Rights of Others, and Speaks Clearly the young Stanley was deemed to be unsatisfactory. It's hard to see why the principal didn't simply stick a label on his forehead saying “Is Destined to Become Movie Director” and leave it at that. In an effort to invigorate his son, the dashing Dr. Jacques Kubrick gave him a still camera and taught him to play chess—an inspired, if slightly ominous, combination. Like Nabokov, whose most infamous novel was transmuted into Kubrick's sleekest film, Kubrick would later be hailed as the grand master of aesthetic strategy—or, if you prefer, as the Bobby Fischer of cinema, the hermit wonk who used his players like pawns and trapped his harried audiences in check.

Kubrick went on to William Howard Taft High School, where he played percussion in the school orchestra and drums in the Taft Swing Band. It is a mark of the obsessive that he should never dump his interests, and Kubrick may be unique among directors in being more rapidly recognized by his choice of music than by his dialogue. Not many viewers could quote from a Kubrick script, unless you count the cry of “Here's Johnny!” from The Shining, but pretty well everyone was swayed by his lunar use of Strauss in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (He even played music on his sets to maintain the mood.) At sixteen, Kubrick sold a picture to Look for twenty-five bucks, and when he graduated the magazine took him on as a staff photographer. He moved to the Village and made Day of the Fight, a boxing documentary about the middleweight Walter Cartier, and then, in 1953, his first feature, a wartime drama entitled Fear and Desire. It cost a little over fifty thousand dollars, and the associate producer was Stanley's Uncle Martin.

From here on, the ascent was vertiginous: to make a movie called Killer's Kiss followed by one called The Killing argues a slight narrowness of range, but what in the dullard looks like repetition can, in the case of a nimble talent, signal the impassioned beginnings of a style. The first of these two pictures took Kubrick back into boxing, and the second was the tale of a racetrack heist; both are fatalistic yet light on their feet, and alarmingly insolent toward the demands of chronology. They are as good a way of getting into training for Pulp Fiction as you will ever find. If anything, Kubrick could hardly keep pace with his own tricks, and The Killing suffers from a hilarious voice-over: “Four days later, at seven-thirty A.m., Sherry Peatty was wide awake.” Given the choice, I would take Killer's Kiss, with its cheap, graying, dawn-and-dusk hunger for New York—all those quick loving glances at dance-hall posters and ice-cream sundaes in a window. Because Kubrick was still learning, and was hobbled by a tight budget, he couldn't help stumbling up against life; the story of his subsequent career has been the slow and maniacal banishment of that young man's riskiness, to the point where feelings, like rainfall, can be measured by the inch.

It was Paths of Glory, in 1957, that put Kubrick on the map. Like most antiwar films, it burst awake during the war sequences themselves—Kirk Douglas as a colonel with a conscience in the French Army of 1916, leading his men from hump to shell hole for no better reason than to earn the honor of a pointless death. When three of them are court-martialled for cowardice, he defends them, in the echoing hall of a château—not the last time Kubrick would thrill to the rap of heels, or the formal maneuver of figures, in a cavernous space. Such crisp rigor of design was tensed against the liberal ambitions of the story, and that struggle makes Paths of Glory his most satisfying movie; as with Lolita, there was a natural ease and density to the performances which forbade the youthful Kubrick, unlike his riper self, to treat the art of moviemaking as a scientific experiment.

The following years were a flourish:

Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. By the end of the sixties, many people were on their knees before the Kubrick phenomenon, or out of their heads; to me it feels as if he opened the air lock. There is something majestically unbreathable in his conception of cinema. His notorious devotion to the multiple take—actors have frequently spoken of shooting a scene thirty or forty times, and the men's last meal in Paths of Glory required sixty-eight roast ducks—speaks not of Flaubertian accuracy but of a furious refusal to accept that the world cannot be bent to his will. That Kubrick remained so calm and courteous on the set makes that fury all the more credible. Tony Curtis, in his autobiography, talks about a scene between Kirk Douglas and himself in Spartacus, during which crucified bodies hung in the distance. At a given moment in the script, the body on the twentieth cross was supposed to writhe a little. When it failed to obey, Kubrick sent his assistant director to remonstrate. Back came the report: “It's a fucking dummy.” Kubrick was unmoved. “Put on wires and wiggle it,” he said.

The director was never content with Spartacus, a project that he had inherited from Anthony Mann, but he got his revenge in films like 2001 and Barry Lyndon, with their formidable blend of maximum control and—in every sense—zero gravity. He made no bones about his space odyssey. “On the deepest psychological level,” he said, “the film's plot symbolized the search for God, and it finally postulates what is little less than a scientific definition of God.” And there you have Stanley Kubrick. Whatever else movies do, they do not postulate definitions; if they try they die. What possible religious revelation could be vouchsafed by a movie whose only memorable character was a gay computer? At this distance, within two years of the title's prediction, 2001 looks dated and bloated; watching the flight attendants on the moon shuttle, I only wish that Kubrick had had the courage to call it “1968: A Bad Year for Hats.” Even Dr. Strangelove, that most brilliant of black jokes, seems stranded these days. The test of satire is that it outlive the conditions that bred the original outrage, but Kubrick's satire was seldom more than high-flown sarcasm, and his Cold War complaint feels closer to Ionesco than to Swift; the news that nuclear weapons could be bad for your health was hardly radical, but no one can forget the absurdist rattle of cartoon men in their subterranean tombs.

That film suggested a fascinating flaw: it was, if anything, twice as paranoid as the establishment that it chose to lampoon. Twenty-three years later, Full Metal Jacket hit the same vein; what made it so repellent was the viewer's battered suspicion that the savagery of the movie was itself more insidious than a boot camp. Kubrick is proof that, while films appear to offer divine opportunities of order, they can also run monstrously amok. Is there a worse great movie than A Clockwork Orange in existence? It asked, at brain-freezing length, whether the cure for criminal tendencies might be harsher than the crime, but the more pressing issue was whether the film should be considered guilty of a similar excess. This is not a question of screen violence, most of which is over and done within the first half hour, to be replaced by interminable talk; it is a matter of Kubrick's antiseptic vision—of a world whose immaculate rooms stretch out to the embrace of a greedy, wide-angle lens, and where the beating of a tramp takes place in a tunnel as clean as a spaceship. “It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen,” the delinquent hero says, and you wonder which reality Kubrick himself would favor. When rape turns into a dance, is that a valuable social comment or the showpiece of a cold choreographer?

It is only fair to recall the millions who thrilled to Kubrick—who saw courage in that moral ambivalence, and found in his misanthropy a welcome counterblast to the warm fuzz of Hollywood. There is no denying the breadth and thrust of his technique; if The Shining seemed like his most beautifully achieved work of the last twenty years, that is because the newfangled Steadicam was not the toy of a nerd but a genuine aid to prowling emotional inquiry—both curiosity and cat. Whether the film is scary, as opposed to doomy and unsettling, is open to debate; one problem with redefining horror, or any other genre, is that you can arrive at your destination and realize that you forgot to pack the horror. Such was Kubrick's genius, and also the source of his emptiness: he wanted to make everything new—the plushest costume drama ever, the most baroque science fiction, the war to end all wars—but, for all his erudition, he rarely paused to ponder what might lie in the bedrock of the old, or the ordinary, or the much loved.

That is purely an artistic shortfall. As a husband, father, and friend, Kubrick was by all accounts good and generous company—“a great beard-scratcher,” according to his colleague Saul Bass. I am not sure that Kubrick was well served by the legends that accrued to him like coral: according to LoBrutto, the director of Full Metal Jacket had three hundred palm trees photographed in Spain so that the ones he liked could be uprooted and shipped to the East End. But his desolate Vietnam still smelled of London; and how could such a perfectionist bear to shoot Lolita—that love letter to America, a road movie waiting to happen—in the shires of England? Authenticity is by no means an automatic virtue; it can sometimes reek of panic—of a half-confession that the truth, far from being companionably to hand (as it seems to be for Jean Renoir or Howard Hawks), may already be slipping through your grasp. If Kubrick had acknowledged that elusiveness, his films might have been funnier; instead, you can feel snowbound by his lack of humor, like Jack Nicholson frosted into the Overlook Hotel with his own cracked mind to keep him company. Still, no pro can be expected to turn amateur again, and we should honor and remember Kubrick for having followed his fanatical instincts to the limit, where no man had gone before. His grand dream was to make a film about Napoleon, and both he and his admirers were crestfallen that it never came about. Watching the body of his work again, however, and cowering with awe at those stately, imperial tracking shots, I think it safe to say that Stanley Kubrick did Napoleon proud after all.