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Few American directors have been able to work within the studio system of the American film industry with the independence that Stanley Kubrick has achieved. By steadily building a reputation as a filmmaker of international importance, he has gained full artistic control over his films, guiding the production of each of them from the earliest stages of planning and scripting through post-production. Kubrick has been able to capitalize on the wide artistic freedom that the major studios have accorded him because he learned the business of filmmaking from the ground up.

In the early 1950s Kubrick turned out two documentary shorts for RKO; he was then able to secure financing for two low-budget features which he says today were ?crucial in helping me to learn my craft,? but which he would otherwise prefer to forget. He made both films almost singlehandedly, doing his own camerawork, sound, and editing, besides directing the films.

Then, in 1955, he met James Harris, an aspiring producer; together they made The
Killing, about a group of small-time crooks who rob a race track. The Killing not only turned a modest profit but prompted the now-legendary remark of Time magazine that Kubrick "has shown more imagination with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town."

Kubrick next acquired the rights to Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel The Paths of Glory, and in 1957 turned it into one of the most uncompromising antiwar films ever made. Peter Cowie is cited in Major Film Directors of the American and British Cinema as saying that Kubrick uses his camera in the film ?unflinchingly, like a weapon,? as it sweeps across the slopes to record the wholesale slaughter of a division.

Spartacus, a spectacle about slavery in pre-Christian Rome, Kubrick recalls as ?the only film over which I did not have absolute control,? because the star, Kirk Douglas, was also the movie's producer. Although Spartacus turned out to be one of the better spear-and-sandal epics, Kubrick vowed never to make another film unless he was assured of total artistic freedom, and he never has.

Lolita, about a middle-aged man's obsessive infatuation with his pre-teen step-daughter, was the director's first comedy. "The surprising thing about Lolita," Pauline Kael wrote in For Keeps, "is how enjoyable it is. It's the first new American comedy since those great days in the 1940s when Preston Sturges re-created comedy with verbal slapstick. Lolita is black slapstick and at times it's so far out that you gasp as you laugh."

For those who appreciate the dark humor of Lolita, it is not hard to see that it was just a short step from that film to Kubrick's masterpiece in that genre, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, concerning a lunatic American general's decision to launch an attack inside Russia. The theme implicit in the film is man's final capitulation to his own machines of destruction. Kubrick further examined his dark vision of man in a mechanistic age in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick's view of life, as it is reflected in 2001, seems to be somewhat more optimistic than it was in his previous pictures. 2001 holds out hope for the progress of mankind through man's creative encounters with the universe. In A Clockwork Orange, however, the future appears to be less promising than it did in 2001; in the earlier film Kubrick showed (in the ?person? of the talking computer, Hal) the machine becoming human, whereas in A Clockwork Orange he shows man becoming a machine through brainwashing and thought control.

Ultimately, however, the latter film only reiterates in somewhat darker terms a repeated theme in all of Kubrick's previous work: man must retain his humanity if he is to survive in a dehumanized, highly mechanized world. Moreover, A Clockwork Orange echoes the warning of Dr. Strangelove and 2001 that man must strive to gain mastery over himself if he is to master the machines of his own invention.

After a trio of films set in the future, Kubrick reached back into the past and adapted Thackeray's historical novel Barry Lyndon to the screen in 1975. Kubrick has portrayed Barry, an eighteenth-century rogue, and his times in the same critical fashion as Thackeray did before him. The film echoes a theme which appears in much of the director's best work, that through human error the best-laid plans often go awry; and hence man is often thwarted in his efforts to achieve his goals. The central character in Lolita fails to possess a nymphet exclusively; the ?balance of terror? between nations designed to halt the nuclear arms race in Dr. Strangelove does not succeed in averting global destruction; and modern technology turns against its human instigators in Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange. In this list of films about human failure the story of Barry Lyndon easily finds a place, for its hero's lifelong schemes to become a rich nobleman in the end come to nothing. And the same can be said for the frustrated writing aspirations of the emotionally disturbed hero of Kubrick's provocative ?thinking man's thriller,? The Shining, derived from the horror novel by Stephen King.

It is clear, therefore, that Kubrick can make any source material fit comfortably into the fabric of his work as a whole, whether it be a remote and almost forgotten Thackeray novel, or a disturbing story about the Vietnam war by a contemporary writer, as with Full Metal Jacket, based on the book by Gustav Hasford. Furthermore, it is equally evident that Kubrick wants to continue to create films that will stimulate his audience to think about serious human problems, as his pictures have done from the beginning. Because of the success of his movies in the past, Kubrick can go on making films in the way he wants to, proving in the future, as he has in the past, that he values the artistic freedom which he has worked so hard to win and he has used so Well-GENE D. PHILLIPS