Stanley Kubrick was 24 years old when he made Fear and Desire in 1952. He was an autodidact who barely graduated high school and never went to college and, by this time, a former staff photographer for Look magazine with a few documentary shorts to his name. He financed his first feature largely with a loan from his uncle, a pharmacist. A budget of around $10,000, according to Kubrick, ballooned in post-production to costs of about $53,000, and the young director was bailed out by producer Richard de Rochemont in return for his work on a television series about President Lincoln. Fear and Desire premiered at the Venice Film Festival under the title Shape of Fear (an earlier title was The Trap), received warm if somewhat condescending reviews, and gained the admiration of James Agee and Mark Van Doren. (Kubrick cut about ten minutes from the film between Venice and its New York opening at Rockefeller Center in 1953; those have now been restored, so in a way we are watching Shape of Fear for the first time in 71 years.) After the distributor died suddenly mid-release, the film went out of circulation. It was also out of copyright and in the public domain. Revivals in the mid-1990s based on the few remaining collectors’ prints were discouraged by Kubrick himself, who called Fear and Desire “a bumbling amateur film exercise” in a letter released by his publicist at Warner Brothers.
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