Fear and Desire
| Fear and Desire | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Produced by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Written by | Howard Sackler |
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| Narrated by | David Allen |
| Music by | Gerald Fried |
| Cinematography | Stanley Kubrick |
| Edited by | Stanley Kubrick |
| Distributed by | Joseph Burstyn |
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Release date
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Running time
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62 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $39,000-$53,000 |
Fear and Desire is a 1953 American anti-war film directed, produced, and edited by Stanley Kubrick. The film was Kubrick's directorial debut.
Fear and Desire opens with an off-screen narration by actor David Allen who tells the audience:
The story is set during a war between two unidentified countries. An airplane carrying four soldiers from one country has crashed six miles behind enemy lines. The soldiers come upon a river and build a raft, hoping they can use the waterway to reach their battalion. As they are building their raft, they are approached by a young peasant girl who does not speak their language. The soldiers apprehend the girl and bind her to a tree with their belts. The youngest of them is left behind to guard the girl. He starts to talk to her, but as she doesn't understand him he talks always more as a delirium and when he unbelts her believing she will embrace him, she tries to escape and the young soldier shoots her dead. Mac, another soldier of the four persuades the commander to let him take the raft for a solo voyage in connection with a plan to kill an enemy general at a nearby base. The remaining two soldiers successfully infiltrate the base. They talk and eat with their own general and return to the river to await Mac. Sitting there they philosophize about war and how no man is made for it.
Prior to shooting Fear and Desire, Kubrick was a Look photographer who had directed two short documentaries in 1951, Day of the Fight and Flying Padre. Both films were acquired for theatrical release by RKO Radio Pictures. Based on his experiences in creating short films, Kubrick felt he was ready to make a narrative feature film. Kubrick quit his full-time job with Look and set forth to create Fear and Desire.
The screenplay was written by Howard Sackler, a classmate of Kubrick’s at William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx, New York; Sackler later won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1968 drama The Great White Hope. Paul Mazursky, who would later receive recognition as the director of such films as Harry and Tonto and An Unmarried Woman, was cast as the soldier who kills the captive peasant.
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