SCHICKEL, RICHARD

Film critic Richard Schickel weighed in on STANLEY KUBRICK with his essay “The Futuristic Films of Stanley Kubrick” forOmni’s Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies: The Future According to Science Fiction Cinema,edited by Danny Peary and published by Doubleday/Dolphin in 1984. Schickel describes Kubrick as “one of the true intellectuals” in America “ever to make movies. ”The director’s “tricks with superbly misleading ex post facto rationalizations” compels “a certain caution when confronting his work critically. ”DR. STRANGELOVEis “not to be read solely as a cautionary tale comically put. ” In2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY,Kubrick speculates on “the reverse of what he considered inStrangelove.It is not the triumph of unreason, but the triumph of reason that is presented here as a cause for alarm.”The “bitterly ironic”A CLOCKWORK ORANGElacks “the antic spirit ofDr. Strangelove,or the soaring optimism of2001,” but it is,“in terms of sheer technique, Kubrick’s most arresting work as well as his most morally ambivalent one. ” In the last film of this “intellectual trilogy,” Schickel continues, Kubrick reminds us “that life is indeed too short, that salvation, rebirth of the kind he has proposed, is not a matter of hasty reform, not something to be quickly and easily achieved. ”

Besides being the first-string film critic forLifemagazine until it ceased publication in 1972 and forTimemagazine since 1973, Richard Schickel wrote and produced several television specials and series, includingLife Goes to the Movies, The Movie Crazy Years, Hollywood: You Must Remember This,andThe Men Who Made the Moviesfor PBS. Besides a novel,Another I,Another You,he has written star biographies of Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, and James Cagney, as well asD. W. Griffith: An American Life(1984), andClint Eastwood: A Biography(1996). Schickel’s critical studies includeThe Disney Version:The Life,Times,Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney(1968),Second Sight: Notes on Some Movies, 1965–1970, His Picture in the Papers: A Speculation on Celebrity in America, Based on the life of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.(1973), andIntimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity(1985). The essay annotated above was also reprinted under the title “Stanley Kubrick:The Unbearable Brevity of Being” in the collectionSchickel on Film(1989).

J. M. W.