For those curious to view this early effort from Kubrick, a beautiful print can now be streamed via Amazon Prime. I can understand why Kubrick wanted to destroy any prints of this -- it's an amateurish effort that doesn't begin to hint at the great films to come. Still, for film freaks, it's a curiosity that's hard to resist.By the way -- that exploitive pink poster image attached to this page is amazing in its lack of any accurate sense of the film!

I enjoyed this movie but I can see why Stanley Kubrick did his best to try to destroy every copy after it was released. It only exists today because at the time Kodak made a copy of the film before Kubrick could destroy every other copy in existence. It's good too because I think it is important to know Kubrick's origins as a movie-maker (outside of a few short documentaries) and definitely his first script that made it to the silver screen. I guess I was most impressed that it was a movie from 1952. To put that into context, it's the same year that "Singing in the Rain" came out, and the ideas and film-making techniques presented here were way ahead of their time. I think that Stanley was maybe trying to put too many ideas into what is essentially a short film. It makes it feel much longer as your watching it than it actually is, and not always for the better.Some of the problems I had, and these are more problems with being what is more or less a student film than anything else, some of the acting was poor, a few times it was a bit too obvious that the dubbing was done over the original sound (if there was sound originally, I'm not sure). I wish the girl had a bigger part. I wish Kubrick knew how to properly encode things here and didn't just spell everything out for the audience, then Kubrick wouldn't have felt so ashamed and this could have a Room 237 all its own. Okay, it probably wouldn't actually, I mean Dr. Strangelove is also heavily encoded but there's no "CRM 114" movie or something like that explaining how it's all a metaphor for Kubrick staging the Kennedy assassination or something equally as crazy.I digress, I did enjoy the film, I liked that it focused mostly on a small group of men caught in a bad situation, but focused on them each as individuals as the movie went on. We saw how with one of them the pressure gets to be too much and what happens with them after. I liked the captain a lot who also ended playing the General, the enemy in the movie. I liked that it wasn't clear who was on which side for the entirety of the movie as the whole thing is meant as a metaphor for war itself rather than any war specifically. It's just that these things don't come off in the right way, I think. I know what he's going for, he's showing the horrors of war and the war itself doesn't matter, you'll notice they attack people who can't defend themselves, the General himself says "I surrender" before they kill him. In the context of their enemy, the men we follow are savages. I think it's not even clear whether they can even understand what the enemy soldiers say. I mean, after all, the woman they capture can't speak their language and her single-word only line in the movie, "boat," she says like she's just sounding out the words they are saying. It has some interesting scenes and I don't think Kubrick needed to be so hard on himself for making it. I would recommend this to both fans of Kubrick and fans of movies from the 50s. For its time, it's really unique.

Stanley Kubrick's first feature film was thought lost for many years, but fortunately a copy has been restored and now anyone can watch the first work by maybe the greatest director of all time. Sure, "Fear and Desire" is no masterpiece as Kubrick's late works, not even close, but it still manages to somehow show the brilliance that surrounds the director's works. Set in a metaphoric place as the narrator urges us to know (and yes, that's the main problem of the film: it's too explanatory, something Kubrick will grow extremely away from), representing any war and not one in particular, showing how the event of falling into the enemy lines affects four soldiers, leading one to madness, another to the search for glory and so on. Although very heavily expository, the writing is not as bad as many (including the director himself!) say: the concepts are smart, but surely too stuffed into an hour's film. What I really think should be praised is the powerful idea of using the same actors to perform both sides of the conflict, building up an unsettling sequence close to the end of the movie, which also stands to mean that both sides of a war fight for the same values turned upside down.Obviously, the true highlight of the film is the man behind the camera, with beautiful shots and careful cinematography. The kiddo was already off to a great start.

This movie was horrible. The acting was either dull and flat, or way over the top. This wasn't a B movie, but a no budget Z movie. Some of the worst and I mean worst acting in history. Also, a junior high school student in a dumb bell English class could of written a better script. This was suppose to be an earth shattering artist anti war film, but it is pure trash. They whole film has a complete fake look to it. The action scenes look like they were done by a high school drama class. One of the main characters goes out of his mind for no reason and then goes and kills a woman for no reason either. Everyone in the film is wearing a bizarre mixture of military uniforms. Three are wearing Waffen SS battle fatigues and Nazi helmets. Six guards are wearing Japanese military uniforms and helmets, the two generals are wearing German dress uniforms, and the main.character is wearing a World War II US. flight style uniform. Bizarre film not worth seeing. Horrible trash.