Some directors possess an instantly recognisable signature; others, merely a consistency of style and treatment; but the worrying thing about Stanley Kubrick was the way he once made excellent films which seemed to reveal so little of their director's personality that they might almost have come out of a vacuum. While admiring The Killing and, even more, Paths of Glory, one couldn't help wondering whether Kubrick might not turn out after all as simply a brilliant packager of artistically viable merchandise, giving the turn of the screw of his clever talent to the production of something several shades more incisive, but no more personal, than the gangster films or anti-war films which were in the commercial air….

Looking back after Lolita, however (the film which, capped by Dr. Strangelove, finally removed any reservations about Kubrick as a director), the pattern of Kubrick's personality and its development emerged quite clearly….

[Kubrick's] films tend, like Bergman's, to follow a characteristic pattern.

Most reviewers complained of Lolita, for instance, that it was too cold and calculating, that is completely missed the eroticism of Nabokov's novel. While true enough, this is irrelevant as criticism, because what Kubrick was after was not an evocation of Humbert's sensuous joy in his nymphet, but of his obsessive fear of what his tabooed love will bring. Nabokov's Lolita begins with Humbert's bitter-sweet recollection, his story already over, of his past joy and pain…. Kubrick's Lolita begins with the end itself, the brutal act of murder which is the inevitable outcome of Humbert's sense of guilt. And whereas the novel is in effect an epic poem on the love of Humbert and Lolita in which the ambiguous Quilty, who swells into an avenging Fury in Humbert's mind, appears only halfway through, in the film Quilty is an immediate, tangible presence throughout, teasing and terrifying Humbert into destroying him.

It is thus the nature of the obsession and its consequences which interest Kubrick; and each of his films charts an obsession—or, more precisely, charts an action in which a fatal flaw in human nature or in society brings disaster. In Killer's Kiss (1955), a young boxer falls in love, and because his girl is involved with a lecherous crook, becomes enmeshed in a round of violence and murder. In The Killing (1956), five men in desperate need of money plan a perfect robbery, and end in a maze of betrayals and killings. In Paths of Glory (1957), three soldiers involved in an impossible attack, initiated because a general's reputation is at stake, find themselves arbitrarily selected as scapegoats and shot for cowardice. In Spartacus (1959–60), the hero instigates a slave rebellion against Rome, the ranks close against him and he ends up crucified, his revolt a total failure. In Lolita (1961), Humbert Humbert indulges his forbidden love for his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, is caught up in a fantasy of retribution, and brings about his own doom by shooting his ambiguous pursuer. And in Dr. Strangelove (1963), of course, "a single slip-up" brings the end of the world.

If each of the films ends in defeat, it is not so much because Kubrick is cynical or pessimistic, as because the mechanism of human nature, operating within the structure of society, creates a vicious circle which can permit no other solution. If Spartacus, or Colonel Dax (in Paths of Glory), tries to right an injustice from the noblest of motives, then society in the shape of Roman senators and slave merchants, or the military hierarchy, will have to stifle the impulse in order to preserve its status quo; if Humbert Humbert loves a minor then, even though she technically seduced him, and even though he was not even her first lover, society must label him a criminal, a corrupter of youth; if a young boxer (Killer's Kiss) braves the under-world to rescue his girl, he will spark off a recoil of violence likely to strain her courage and make her betray him; if mutual trust and co-operation is required to carry out a plan, then conflicting interests and suspicion will wreck it (The Killing). (p. 69)

Life, in Kubrick's films, is a dilemma in which people are trapped by the mechanics of expediency—their own, other people's, or society's. The trap is set at the beginning of each film, and as we watch the mouse making his pitiful, obstinate attempts to steal the cheese before the steel closes in on him, we know that by the end the trap will be sprung. Although there is no point in pushing the comparison very far, it is perhaps worth noting the similarity of approach in Sophoclean tragedy, where malign Fate inexorably prevents the hero from escaping or attaining his goal; where a point of crisis is dramatised, and all action is pared down and deployed so as to illuminate the scope and significance of that crisis….

Kubrick has often been called a cold director, but his purpose in Paths of Glory is not to make one weep for the three innocent puppets who are shot. In the condemned cell scenes, for instance, there is an almost Buñuelian avoidance of sentimental identification in the varying levels of hysteria in the three prisoners, in the pious platitudes of the priest, in the struggle which breaks out between the priest and one of the men; and above all in the preparation for execution of the prisoner with the fractured skull ("Pinch his cheeks a couple of times … it may make him open his eyes"), and the sudden squashing of the cockroach ("Now you got the edge on him") which Corporal Arnaud has just sadly remarked will be alive when they are dead tomorrow—the first mature examples of the humour noir which flowered in Lolita and Strangelove. Instead of tears, Kubrick wants his audience to break out in a cold sweat at the intricate, ruthless manipulations which make the three men's deaths inescapable. Throughout, therefore, he has adopted an almost mathematical style, fairly obviously though effectively in his use of contrasts (cutting from the elegance of the château to the mud and smoke of the trenches), and more subtly in his overall style. (p. 70)

Although Killer's Kiss is only partly successful, and meanders too much to achieve the taut, driving inevitability of the Kubrick "film as trap" which I have tried to define, it is a curiously attractive film, evidently made under the dual influence of neo-realism (the sequences in Davy's room, or when he wanders quietly in Gloria's room, looking and wondering at her things) and Wellesian baroque (the fight among the wax dummies hanging in a storeroom, the beating up in the alley, a good deal of chiaroscuro lighting in the dancehall scenes and elsewhere). The film, too, reveals Kubrick's brilliant talent for pictorial composition, here perhaps a little mannered, and later kept severely in check….

[It] was with Lolita that Kubrick demonstrated that, despite the failure of Spartacus, it was possible to adapt his style to both complexity and blockbuster length. Lolita, in fact, is a perfect example of Kubrick's film as trap, with the added complexity that although society closes its ranks in disapproval of perverts like Humbert, in this case society is ignorant of his activities, and the trap which closes in on him is a product of his own mind…. [As] we see in the brilliant opening sequence following the credits, Humbert is already caught in his trap and is impelled to kill Quilty. These twin prologues—the airy toe-painting and the long, tortuous track through the baroque jumble of packing-cases, statues, bottles, glasses and paintings in Quilty's house—are the two halves of the film in microcosm as it drives through on its firmly single, though tortuous line of Humbert's fantasy/obsession….

The film grows heavier, more abrupt in style, matching the increasing violence of Humbert's obsession, and culminating in the swift track along the loweringly dark facade of the hospital where he finally loses his Lolita for ever.

Here, and in Dr. Strangelove, with its brilliant balance between choppy newsreel urgency and the darkly brooding, flowing menace of its interiors, Kubrick has evolved a style which allows him to range with perfect freedom from utter seriousness to the wildest slapstick, without ever loosening the film's claw-like grip on the audience. (p. 72)