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| Name | Luck |
|---|---|
| Caption | Theatrical poster |
| Director | Soham Shah |
| Producer | Shree Ashtavinayak Cine Vision Ltd |
| Writer | Renzil D'Silva Soham Shah |
| Starring | Mithun Chakraborty Sanjay DuttImran Khan (actor)Shruti Haasan Danny DenzongpaRavi KishanChitrashi RawatRati Agnihotri |
| Music | Salim-Sulaiman |
| Cinematography | Santosh Thundiyil |
| Distributor | Indian Films |
| Released | 24 July 2009 |
| Runtime | 141 minutes |
| Country | |
| Language | Hindi |
Luck is a 2009 Hindi action-thriller film directed and written by Soham Shah, and produced by Shree Ashtavinayak Cine Vision Ltd. The leading roles were played by Mithun Chakraborty,debutant Shruti Haasan, Imran Khan and Sanjay Dutt; the other significant parts, and fellow members of the gang were played by Danny Denzongpa, Ravi Kishan and Chitrashi Rawat, prominent actors from the Indian film industry. The camera of the film was handled by Santosh Thundiyil, whilst composer duo Salim-Sulaiman recorded the musical score. The film is loosely based on 2002 Spanish movie Intacto.
The film opened to Indian audiences on 24 July 2009. The film opened with mixed reviews by critics.
Karim Moussa, is a very lucky person seeing the story of his life. He remained the sole survivor when a mosque collapsed in Maharashtra when he was just a child of nine months and was amongst very few survivors of another incident at the age of 12. When he was 14, he challenged three friends to jump from a four-storied building and remained alive, though with some injuries, and won. He started gambling at 19 and since then tried out his luck in different places of the world and became known as Moussa Bhai. To him gambling and drug smuggling have become old ways to get money, his latest interest is investment on people's luck.
The film then focuses on Ram Mehra (Imran Khan). Ram, whose father committed suicide due to bankruptcy, left Ram to pay 20 crore rupees to a bank within three months in order to regain his house. Threatened by Inspector Patil (Manoj Rajdutt), Ram cannot tell his mother (Rati Agnihotri) about this fearing for her blood pressure problems. He unsuccessfully applied for a US visa three times. One of Ram's friends, the owner of a small store, suggests an alternate way but even then Ram has to pay 20 lakh rupees to get the visa.
A car stops by the store two nights at the same time and a man, not revealing his face, buys a lottery ticket both times which Ram hands him on behalf of his friend. Ram now plans to steal money from the bank he works in, but on his way, he gets into trouble and is chased by guards. He suddenly sees the same car which stopped by the store and is saved by the man who bought the lottery tickets. The man in the car (Danny Denzongpa) tells Ram his name, Lakhan Tamang, and gives Ram 1 lakh rupees and explains that Ram is very lucky as Tamang bought lottery tickets for two years without any success until he took tickets from Ram both of which won him 2 lakh rupees. He then offers Ram 20 lakh rupees for which Ram has to gamble with him for 20 days.
They win money with Ram's luck but on the fifth day they are caught by Swami to whom Tamang owes three lakh rupees. Tamang challenges him that Ram will light Swami's broken lighter five consecutive times and stakes his life against six hundred thousand rupees. Ram does light for five times but outside asks Tamang to leave him as he fears for his life.
The film now shifts to the story of Major Jawan Pratap Singh (Mithun Chakrabarty), who is a soldier and a lucky one as he fought in many battles and faced numerous bullets none that could kill him. He is in need of money for the operation of his wife, Sheela (Rupa Ganguly).
Tamang visits Pakistan where he sees Shortcut (Chitrashi Rawat), a 16 year old girl, who is also known to be lucky as any camel she rides wins the race and observes her winning one despite her camel's half-broken leg. Tamang pays four lakh rupees to "export" her to South Africa.
Tamang then invites Raghav (Ravi Kishan) to the game. Raghav was hanged but did not die and escaped jail as Indian law doesn't allow one person to be hanged twice.
Tamang tries to invite Ram and was failing but when Moussa showed Ram that there is no other choice, Ram was on board.
All competitors arrive in Cape Town. Ram meets Angela (Snita Mahey) before he is blindfolded and his hands are tied and gets him into a truck where Ram meets a girl (Shruti Haasan). Her name is revealed to be Ayesha and Tamang says she took part in the game once before.
In their first game, all competitors shoot the person to their right at the same time. Only few die. Later that night Raghav starts hitting on Ayesha and they have a drink.
The second game is where all people take parachutes and jump off from a helicopter. Among the unlucky is Ayesha whose parachute doesn't open but she is saved by Ram, who developed a liking towards her, and afterwards, they start getting closer.
In the third game, everyone is left in a hollow tank with one of everyone's hand locked with handcuffs and in front of them are 300 keys and one each will open the handcuffs and added to their trouble are the sharks that swim around them as they start opening the handcuffs as the tank sinks. Only one dies and one (Shortcut) is harmed and hospitalized as one of her legs is lost to a shark while saving herself.
Before the final game, it is revealed that Ayesha is dead and it is Natasha (her twin-sister) playing, taking Ayesha's character whilst seeking revenge on Moussa. In the final game, Ram, on whom the bid is the highest ever, has to save Natasha before the train she's tied to hits an oil tanker while Major Singh will help him and Raghav will shoot at Ram and the other survivors try to stop Ram. Ram successfully saves Natasha and Major survives a mine bomb. Ram wins 20 crore rupees.
In the climax, Ram stakes his reward and challenges Moussa to a game where two pistols are dug in coal the train's carrying and one has to find one and shoot the other. Moussa finds both but hands one to Ram and both shoot at the same time and hit each other, Ram is shot at the place of his heart and Moussa survives as he is hit at shoulder.
Later, Ram is shown to have survived due to his heart being at right side (dextrocardia), very rare for a human, rather than left and eventually wins back his reward.
Shortcut's leg is fixed by a prosthesis, Jawan Pratap saves his wife and maintains his title "Lucky Major Jawan Pratap Singh" and Ram and Natasha become life partners.
In 4 weeks, the film collected Rs 11,98,12,950 in India, meanwhile collecting Rs 1,63,945 in the UK and Rs 1,49,333 in US. This was far below expectations and earned even below Imran's previous release ''Kidnap.
Category:Hindi-language films Category:2009 films Category:Indian films Category:2000s action films
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Playername | Imran Khan |
|---|---|
| Country | Pakistan |
| Fullname | Imran Khan Niazi |
| Living | true |
| Dayofbirth | 25 |
| Monthofbirth | 11 |
| Yearofbirth | 1952 |
| Placeofbirth | Lahore, Punjab |
| Countryofbirth | Pakistan |
| Batting | Right-handed |
| Bowling | Right-arm fast |
| Role | All-rounder |
| International | true |
| Testdebutdate | 3 June |
| Testdebutyear | 1971 |
| Testdebutagainst | England |
| Testcap | 65 |
| Lasttestdate | 7 January |
| Lasttestyear | 1992 |
| Lasttestagainst | Sri Lanka |
| Odidebutdate | 31 August |
| Odidebutyear | 1974 |
| Odidebutagainst | England |
| Odicap | 12 |
| Lastodidate | 25 March |
| Lastodiyear | 1992 |
| Lastodiagainst | England |
| Club1 | Sussex |
| Year1 | 1977 – 1988 |
| Club2 | New South Wales |
| Year2 | 1984/85 |
| Club3 | PIA |
| Year3 | 1975 – 1981 |
| Club4 | Worcestershire |
| Year4 | 1971 – 1976 |
| Club5 | Oxford University |
| Year5 | 1973 – 1975 |
| Club6 | Lahore |
| Year6 | 1969 – 1971 |
| | columns | 4 |
| Column1 | Test |
| Matches1 | 88 |
| Runs1 | 3807 |
| Bat avg1 | 37.69 |
| 100s/50s1 | 6/18 |
| Top score1 | 136 |
| Deliveries1 | 19458 |
| Wickets1 | 362 |
| Bowl avg1 | 22.81 |
| Fivefor1 | 23 |
| Tenfor1 | 6 |
| Best bowling1 | 8/58 |
| Catches/stumpings1 | 28/– |
| Column2 | ODI |
| Matches2 | 175 |
| Runs2 | 3709 |
| Bat avg2 | 33.41 |
| 100s/50s2 | 1/19 |
| Top score2 | 102* |
| Deliveries2 | 7461 |
| Wickets2 | 182 |
| Bowl avg2 | 26.61 |
| Fivefor2 | 1 |
| Tenfor2 | n/a |
| Best bowling2 | 6/14 |
| Catches/stumpings2 | 36/– |
| Column3 | FC |
| Matches3 | 382 |
| Runs3 | 17771 |
| Bat avg3 | 36.79 |
| 100s/50s3 | 30/93 |
| Top score3 | 170 |
| Deliveries3 | 65224 |
| Wickets3 | 1287 |
| Bowl avg3 | 22.32 |
| Fivefor3 | 70 |
| Tenfor3 | 13 |
| Best bowling3 | 8/34 |
| Catches/stumpings3 | 117/– |
| Column4 | LA |
| Matches4 | 425 |
| Runs4 | 10100 |
| Bat avg4 | 33.22 |
| 100s/50s4 | 5/66 |
| Top score4 | 114* |
| Deliveries4 | 19122 |
| Wickets4 | 507 |
| Bowl avg4 | 22.31 |
| Fivefor4 | 6 |
| Tenfor4 | n/a |
| Best bowling4 | 6/14 |
| Catches/stumpings4 | 84/– |
| Date | 26 June |
| Year | 2008 |
| Source | http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Players/1/1383/1383.html CricketArchive |
Imran Khan Niazi (Punjabi, }}) (born 25 November 1952) is a retired Pakistani cricketer who played international cricket for two decades in the late twentieth century and has been a politician since the mid-1990s. Currently, besides his political activism, Khan is also a charity worker and cricket commentator.
Khan played for the Pakistani cricket team from 1971 to 1992 and served as its captain intermittently throughout 1982-1992. After retiring from cricket at the end of the 1987 World Cup, he was called back to join the team in 1988. At 39, Khan led his teammates to Pakistan's first and only World Cup victory in 1992. He has a record of 3807 runs and 362 wickets in Test cricket, making him one of eight world cricketers to have achieved an 'All-rounder's Triple' in Test matches.
In April 1996, Khan founded and became the chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice), a small and marginal political party, of which he is the only member ever elected to Parliament. and Ikramullah Khan Niazi, a civil engineer, in Lahore. A quiet and shy boy in his youth, Khan grew up in a middle-class Niazi Pathan family with four sisters. Settled in Punjab, Khan's father descended from the Pashtun (Pathan) Niazi Shermankhel tribe of Mianwali in Punjab . Khan was educated at Aitchison College, the Cathedral School in Lahore, and the Royal Grammar School Worcester in England, where he excelled at cricket. In 1972, he enrolled to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Keble College, Oxford, where he graduated with a second-class degree in Politics and a third in Economics.
On 16 May 1995, Khan married English socialite Jemima Goldsmith, a convert to Islam, in a two-minute Islamic ceremony in Paris. A month later, on 21 June, they were married again in a civil ceremony at the Richmond register office in England, followed by a reception at the Goldsmiths' house in Surrey. The marriage, described as "tough" by Khan, As an agreement of his marriage, Khan spent four months a year in England. On 22 June 2004, it was announced that the Khans had divorced because it was "difficult for Jemima to adapt to life in Pakistan".
Khan now resides in Bani Gala, Islamabad, where he built a farmhouse with the money he gained from selling his London flat. He grows fruit trees, wheat, and keeps cows, while also maintaining a cricket ground for his two sons, who visit during their holidays. Khan was part of Oxford University's Blues Cricket team during the 1973-75 seasons.
In 1971, Khan made his Test cricket debut against England at Birmingham. Three years later, he debuted in the One Day International (ODI) match, once again playing against England at Nottingham for the Prudential Trophy. After graduating from Oxford and finishing his tenure at Worcestershire, he returned to Pakistan in 1976 and secured a permanent place on his native national team starting from the 1976-77 season, during which they faced New Zealand and Australia. Khan also achieved a Test Cricket Bowling rating of 922 points against India on 30 January 1983. Highest at the time, the performance ranks third on ICC's All Time Test Bowling Rating.
Khan achieved the all-rounder's triple (securing 3000 runs and 300 wickets) in 75 Tests, the second fastest record behind Ian Botham's 72. He is also established as having the second highest all-time batting average of 61.86 for a Test batsman playing at position 6 of the batting order. He played his last Test match for Pakistan in January 1992, against Sri Lanka at Faisalabad. Khan retired permanently from cricket six months after his last ODI, the historic 1992 World Cup final against England at Melbourne, Australia. He ended his career with 88 Test matches, 126 innings and scored 3807 runs at an average of 37.69, including six centuries and 18 fifties. His highest score was 136 runs. As a bowler, he took 362 wickets in Test cricket, which made him the first Pakistani and world's fourth bowler to do so. Khan's first year as captain was the peak of his legacy as a fast bowler as well as an all-rounder. He recorded the best Test bowling of his career while taking 8 wickets for 58 runs against Sri Lanka at Lahore in 1981-82. In 1996, Khan successfully defended himself in a libel action brought forth by former English captain and all-rounder Ian Botham and batsman Allan Lamb over comments they alleged were made by Khan in two articles about the above-mentioned ball-tampering and another article published in an Indian magazine, India Today. They claimed that, in the latter publication, Khan had called the two cricketers "racist, ill-educated and lacking in class." Khan protested that he had been misquoted, saying that he was defending himself after having admitted that he tampered with a ball in a county match 18 years ago. Khan won the libel case, which the judge labeled a "complete exercise in futility", with a 10-2 majority decision by the jury. the Guardian, the Independent, and the Telegraph. Khan also sometimes appears as a cricket commentator on Asian and British sports networks, including BBC Urdu and the Star TV network. while he was also a columnist for sify.com for the 2005 India-Pakistan Test series. He has provided analysis for every cricket World Cup since 1992, which includes providing match summaries for BBC during the 1999 World Cup.
In November 2009 Khan underwent emergency surgery at Lahore's Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital to remove an obstruction in his small intestine.
During the 1990s, Khan also served as UNICEF's Special Representative for Sports
On 27 April 2008, Khan's brainchild, a technical college in the Mianwali District called Namal College, was inaugurated. Namal College was built by the Mianwali Development Trust (MDT), as chaired by Khan, and was made an associate college of the University of Bradford in December 2005. Currently, Khan is building another cancer hospital in Karachi, using his successful Lahore institution as a model. While in London, he also works with the Lord’s Taverners, a cricket charity.
| Name | Imran Khan Niazi |
|---|---|
| Birth date | November 25, 1952 |
| Birth place | Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan |
| Party | Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf |
| Spouse | Jemima Khan (1995 - 2004) |
| Children | 2 |
| Residence | Lahore |
| Occupation | Political activist / social worker |
| Religion | Islam |
| Website | http://www.insaf.pk/ |
A few years after the end of his professional career as a cricketer, Khan entered electoral politics while admitting that he had never voted in an election before. Since then, his most significant political work has been to protest against ruling politicians such as Pervez Musharraf and Asif Ali Zardari and his opposition to the US and UK foreign policy. Khan's "politics are not taken seriously in Pakistan and at best rated as single column news items in most newspapers." As reported and by his own admission, Khan's most prominent political supporters are women and the youth. In Pakistan, the reaction to his political work has been reported to be such that, "Mention his name at dinner tables and the reaction is the same: people roll their eyes, chuckle lightly, then exhale a sad sigh."
On 25 April 1996, Khan founded his own political party called the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) with a proposed slogan of "Justice, Humanity and Self Esteem." During the 2002 election season, he also voiced his opposition to Pakistan's logistical support of US troops in Afghanistan by claiming that their country had become a "servant of America." Once in office, Khan voted in favor of the pro-Taliban Islamist candidate for prime minister in 2002, bypassing Musharraf's choice.
On 6 May 2005, Khan became one of the first Muslim figures to criticize a 300-word Newsweek story about the alleged desecration of the Qur'an in a U.S. military prison at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Khan held a press conference to denounce the article and demanded that Gen. Pervez Musharraf secure an apology from American president George W. Bush for the incident. During George W. Bush's visit to Pakistan in March 2006, Khan was placed under house arrest in Islamabad after his threats of organizing a protest.
On 2 October 2007, as part of the All Parties Democratic Movement, Khan joined 85 other MPs to resign from Parliament in protest of the Presidential election scheduled for 6 October, which General Musharraf was contesting without resigning as army chief. On 3 November 2007, Khan was put under house arrest at his father's home hours after President Musharraf declared a state of emergency in Pakistan. Khan had demanded the death penalty for Musharraf after the imposition of emergency rule, which he equated to "committing treason". The next day, on 4 November, Khan escaped and went into peripatetic hiding. He eventually came out of hiding on 14 November to join a student protest at the University of the Punjab. At the rally, Khan was captured by students from the Jamaat-i-Islami political party, who claimed that Khan was an uninvited nuisance at the rally, and they handed him over to the police, who charged him under the Anti-terrorism act for allegedly inciting people to pick up arms, calling for civil disobedience, and for spreading hatred. Incarcerated in the Dera Ghazi Khan Jail, Khan's relatives had access to him and were able to meet him to deliver goods during his week-long stay in jail. On 19 November, Khan let out the word through PTI members and his family that he had begun a hunger strike but the Deputy Superintendent of Dera Ghazi Khan Jail denied this news, saying that Khan had bread, eggs and fruit for breakfast. Khan was one of the 3,000 political prisoners released from imprisonment on 21 November 2007.
His party boycotted the national elections on 18 February 2008 and hence, no member of PTI has served in Parliament since Khan's resignation in 2007. Despite no longer being a member of Parliament, Khan was placed under house arrest in the crackdown by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari of anti-government protests on 15 March 2009.
Khan has credited his decision to enter politics with a spiritual awakening, influenced by his conversations with a mystic from the Sufi sect of Islam that began in the last years of his cricket career. "I never drank or smoked, but I used to do my share of partying. In my spiritual evolution there was a block," he explained to the American Washington Post. As an MP, Khan sometimes voted with a bloc of hard-line religious parties such as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, whose leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, he supported for prime minister over Musharraf's candidate in 2002. Rehman is a pro-Taliban cleric who has called for holy war against the United States. In June 2007, Khan publicly deplored Britain for knighting Indian-born author Salman Rushdie. He said, "Western civilisation should have been mindful of the injury the writer had caused to the Muslim community by writing his highly controversial book, The Satanic Verses."
In 2008, as part of the Hall of Shame awards for 2007, Pakistan's Newsline magazine gave Khan the "Paris Hilton award for being the most undeserving media darling." The 'citation' for Khan read: "He is the leader of a party that is the proud holder of one National Assembly seat (and) gets media coverage inversely proportional to his political influence." The Guardian has described the coverage garnered by Khan's post-retirement activities in England, where he made his name as a cricket star and a night-club regular, as "terrible tosh, with danger attached. It turns a great (and greatly miserable) Third World nation into a gossip-column annex. We may all choke on such frivolity." After the 2008 general elections, political columnist Azam Khalil addressed Khan, who remains respected as a cricket legend, as one of the "utter failures in Pakistani politics". Writing in the Frontier Post, Khalil added: "Imran Khan has time and again changed his political course and at present has no political ideology and therefore was not taken seriously by a vast majority of the people."
In 1976 as well as 1980, Khan was awarded The Cricket Society Wetherall Award for being the leading all-rounder in English first-class cricket. He was also named Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1983, Sussex Cricket Society Player of the Year in 1985, and the Indian Cricket Cricketer of the Year in 1990.
On 8 July 2004, Khan was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2004 Asian Jewel Awards in London, for "acting as a figurehead for many international charities and working passionately and extensively in fund-raising activities. On 13 December 2007, Khan received the Humanitarian Award at the Asian Sports Awards in Kuala Lumpur for his efforts in setting up the first cancer hospital in Pakistan. In 2009, at International Cricket Council's centennial year celebration, Khan was one of fifty-five cricketers inducted into the ICC Hall of Fame.
Books
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Category:Alumni of Keble College, Oxford Category:Chancellors of the University of Bradford Category:Cricketers at the 1975 Cricket World Cup Category:Cricketers at the 1979 Cricket World Cup Category:Cricketers at the 1983 Cricket World Cup Category:Cricketers at the 1987 Cricket World Cup Category:Cricketers at the 1992 Cricket World Cup Category:Fellows of Keble College, Oxford Category:Hilal-i-Imtiaz Category:International Cricket Council Hall of Fame inductees Category:Lahore cricketers Category:Old Aitchisonians Category:Old Elizabethans Category:Oxford University cricketers Category:Pakistani athlete-politicians Category:Pakistani cricket captains Category:Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf politicians Category:Pakistan International Airlines cricketers Category:Pakistani politicians Category:Pakistan One Day International cricketers Category:Pakistan Test cricketers Category:Pashtun people Category:People from Lahore Category:People from Mianwali District Category:Sussex cricketers Category:Wisden Cricketers of the Year Category:Worcestershire cricketers Category:World Series Cricket players Category:1952 births Category:Living people Category:Wisden Leading Cricketers in the World Category:New South Wales cricketers
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| Name | Shruti Haasan |
|---|---|
| Caption | Shruti Haasan at a promotional event for Anaganaga O Dheerudu in 2009 |
| Birthdate | January 28, 1986 |
| Birthname | Shruti Rajalakshmi Haasan |
| Birth place | Chennai, India |
| Yearsactive | 1992; 1997; 2000 - present |
| Occupation | Singer, Model, Actress, Music composer |
Later Haasan shifted her focus to cinema and music, and eventually travelled to the USA to continue to learn music at the Musicians Institute in California, before returning to Chennai.
Shruti Haasan had the opportunity to sing with veteran singer K J Yesudas for the movie 'En Mana Vaanil' under Ilaiyaraaja's music. The song was 'Roattorap paattuch chaththam'. The movie was released in 2002. She has sung in a Tamil film, for Gautham Menon's Vaaranam Aayiram under the composition of Harris Jayaraj. As of November 2008, Haasan is also midway through her untitled debut album, which she has composed, written and sung, and is set for release in mid-2009. A further song was recorded under her voice for her Hindi film, Luck.
In September 2010, Haasan collaberated with Dave Kushner for the film, Hisss. Whilst Kushner composed the track, Shruti Haasan wrote the lyrics, sang and also appears in a promotional video for the film, singing the song.
In 2000 Haasan made her cinematic debut in the Tamil and Hindi bilingual film, Hey Ram, directed by her father. She made a cameo appearance as the daughter of Vallabhai Patel in the biopic of Mahatma Gandhi.
After rejecting prominent film offers, most notably the lead role in Venkat Prabhu's Saroja, reports suggested in late 2007 that Haasan was set to make her full debut as a heroine in 2008 with a movie opposite Madhavan directed by Nishikanth Kamath. Despite Madhavan admitting that the news "was premature", she signed up to the film, which was titled, Endrendrum Punnagai, only to be stalled prior to production. Eventually Haasan signed up to Soham Shah's Luck opposite Imran Khan, a Bollywood film. However, despite the film gathering much publicity prior to release, it became a critical and commercial flop. In mid 2010, Shruti was signed by A. R. Murugadoss to star opposite Surya Sivakumar in his next film 7aam Arivu, and the film's shoot began in June.
She has also given her voice to an HIV/AIDS education animated software tutorial created by the nonprofit organization TeachAIDS.
Category:1986 births Category:Indian actors Category:Indian film actors Category:Hindi film actors Category:Indian female models Category:Living people Category:Tamil actors Category:Tamil people Category:Tamil musicians Category:Tamil film score composers Category:Indian film score composers Category:Tamil singers Category:Kollywood playback singers Category:Indian female singers
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of his music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in Schubert's work increased dramatically in the decades following his death at the age of 31. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th Century. Today, Schubert is admired as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.
, D. 960]] (composed in 1828) |description|played by Randolph Hokanson |filename=Schubert - Piano Sonatas - 5 Moderato.ogg|title=1. Molto moderato|description=|format=Ogg |filename2=Schubert - Piano Sonatas - 6 Andante.ogg|title2=2. Andante sostenuto|description2=|format2=Ogg |filename3=Schubert - Piano Sonatas - 7 Scherzo.ogg|title3=3. Scherzo. Allegro vivace con delicatezza|description3=|format3=Ogg |filename4=Schubert - Piano Sonatas - 8 Allegro.ogg|title4=4. Allegro, ma non troppo|description4=Performed by Randolph Hokanson|format4=Ogg }}
At the age of five, Schubert began receiving regular instruction from his father and a year later was enrolled at his father's school. His formal musical education also began around the same time. His father continued to teach him the basics of the violin, At 7, Schubert began receiving lessons from Michael Holzer, the local church organist and choirmaster. Holzer's lessons seem to have mainly consisted of conversations and expressions of admiration and the boy gained more from his acquaintance with a friendly joiner's apprentice who used to take him to a neighboring pianoforte warehouse where he had the opportunity to practice on better instruments. He also played the viola in the family string quartet, with brothers Ferdinand and Ignaz on violin and his father on the cello. Schubert wrote many of his early string quartets for this ensemble.
Schubert first came to the attention of Antonio Salieri, then Vienna's leading musical authority, in 1804, when his vocal talent was recognized. His exposure to these pieces and various lighter compositions, combined with his occasional visits to the opera set the foundation for his greater musical knowledge. Schubert's friendship with Spaun began at the Stadtkonvikt and endured through his lifetime. In those early days, the more well-to-do Spaun furnished the impoverished Schubert with manuscript paper.
Meanwhile, his genius began to show in his compositions. Schubert was occasionally permitted to lead the Stadtkonvikt's orchestra, and Salieri decided to begin training him privately in musical composition and theory in these years. It was the first germ of that amateur orchestra for which, in later years, many of his compositions were written. During the remainder of his stay at the Stadtkonvikt he wrote a good deal of chamber music, several songs, some miscellaneous pieces for the pianoforte and, among his more ambitious efforts, a Kyrie (D. 31) and Salve Regina (D. 27), an octet for wind instruments (D. 72/72a, said to commemorate the 1812 death of his mother), a cantata for guitar and male voices (D. 110, in honor of his father's birthday in 1813), and his first symphony (D. 82).
One of Schubert's most prolific years was 1815. He composed over 20,000 bars of music, more than half of which was for orchestra, including nine church works, a symphony, and about 140 Lieder. In that year, he was also introduced to Anselm Hüttenbrenner and Franz von Schober, who would become his lifelong friends. Another friend, Johann Mayrhofer, was introduced to him by Spaun in 1814.
Significant changes happened in 1816. Schober, a student of good family and some means, invited Schubert to room with him at his mother's house. The proposal was particularly opportune, for Schubert had just made the unsuccessful application for the post of Kapellmeister at Laibach, and he had also decided not to resume teaching duties at his father's school. By the end of the year, he became a guest in Schober's lodgings. For a time, he attempted to increase the household resources by giving music lessons, but they were soon abandoned, and he devoted himself to composition. "I compose every morning, and when one piece is done, I begin another." During this year, he focused on orchestral and choral works, although he also continued to write Lieder. Much of this work was unpublished, but manuscripts and copies circulated among friends and admirers.
In early 1817, Schober introduced Schubert to Johann Michael Vogl, a prominent baritone twenty years Schubert's senior. Vogl, for whom Schubert went on to write a great many songs, became one of Schubert's main proponents in Viennese musical circles. He also met Joseph Hüttenbrenner (brother to Anselm), who also played a role in promoting Schubert's music. These, and an increasing circle of friends and musicians, became responsible for promoting, collecting, and, after his death, preserving, his work.
In late 1817, Schubert's father gained a new position at a school in Rossau (not far from Lichtental). Schubert rejoined his father and reluctantly took up teaching duties there. In early 1818, he was rejected for membership in the prestigious Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, something that might have furthered his musical career.
Schubert spent the summer of 1818 as music teacher to the family of Count Johann Karl Esterházy at their château in Zseliz (then in Hungary, now in Slovakia). His duties were relatively light (teaching piano and singing to the two daughters, Marie and Karoline), and the pay relatively good. As a result, he happily continued to compose during this time. It may have been at this time that he wrote one of his now world-famous compositions, the Marche militaire No. 1 in D major. On his return from Zseliz, he took up residence with his friend Mayrhofer. The respite at Zseliz led to a succession of compositions for piano duet.
The tight circle of friends that Schubert surrounded himself with was dealt a blow in early 1820. Schubert and four of his friends were arrested by the Austrian secret police, who were suspicious of any type of student gatherings. One of Schubert's friends, Johann Senn, was put on trial, imprisoned for over a year, and then permanently banned from Vienna. The other four, including Schubert, were "severely reprimanded", in part for "inveighing against [officials] with insulting and opprobrious language". While Schubert never saw Senn again, he did set some of his poems, "Selige Welt" and "Schwanengesang", to music. The incident may have played a role in a falling-out with Mayrhofer, with whom he was living at the time.
The production of the two operas turned Schubert's attention more firmly than ever in the direction of the stage, where, for a variety of reasons, he was almost completely unsuccessful. In 1822, Alfonso und Estrella was refused, partly owing to its libretto. Fierrabras (D. 796) was rejected in the fall of 1823, but this was largely due to the popularity of Rossini and the Italian operatic style, and the failure of Carl Maria von Weber's Euryanthe. Die Verschworenen (The Conspirators, D. 787) was prohibited by the censor (apparently on the grounds of its title), and Rosamunde (D. 797) was withdrawn after two nights, owing to the poor quality of the play for which Schubert had written incidental music. Of these works, the two former are written on a scale which would make their performances exceedingly difficult (Fierrabras, for instance, contains over 1,000 pages of manuscript score), but Die Verschworenen is a bright attractive comedy, and Rosamunde contains some of the most charming music that Schubert ever composed. In 1822, he made the acquaintance of both Weber and Beethoven, but little came of it in either case. Beethoven is said to have acknowledged the younger man's gifts on a few occasions, but some of this is likely legend and in any case he could not have known the real scope of Schubert's music - especially not the instrumental works - as so little of it was printed or performed in the composer's lifetime. On his deathbed, Beethoven is said to have looked into some of the younger man's works and exclaimed, "Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert!" but what would have come of it if he had recovered we can never know.
In the autumn of 1822, Schubert embarked suddenly on a work which more decisively than almost any other in those years showed his maturing personal vision, the "Unfinished Symphony" in B minor. The reason he left it unfinished after two movements and sketches some way into a third remains an enigma, and it is also remarkable that he didn't mention it to any of his friends even though, as Brian Newbould notes, he must have felt thrilled by what he was achieving here.
In the spring of 1824 he wrote the Octet in F (D. 803), "A Sketch for a Grand Symphony"; and in the summer went back to Zseliz. There he became attracted to Hungarian musical idiom, and wrote the Divertissement à la hongroise (D. 818) for piano duet and the String Quartet in A minor (D. 804).
It has been said that he held a hopeless passion for his pupil, the Countess Karoline Eszterházy, but the only work he dedicated to her was his Fantasie in F minor (D. 940) for piano duet. His friend Bauernfeld penned the following verse, which appears to reference Schubert's unrequited sentiments:
In love with a Countess of youthful grace, —A pupil of Galt's; in desperate case Young Schubert surrenders himself to another, And fain would avoid such affectionate pother
Despite his preoccupation with the stage, and later with his official duties, he found time during these years for a significant amount of composition. He completed the Mass in A flat (D. 678) and, in 1822, began the "Unfinished Symphony" (Symphony No. 8 in B minor, , D. 759). Why the symphony was "unfinished" has been debated endlessly without resolution. In 1824, he wrote the variations for flute and piano on "Trockne Blumen", from the cycle Die schöne Müllerin, and several string quartets. He also wrote the Arpeggione Sonata (D. 821), at a time when there was a minor craze over that instrument.
The setbacks of previous years were compensated for by the prosperity and happiness of 1825. Publication had been moving more rapidly; the stress of poverty was for a time lightened; and in the summer he had a pleasant holiday in Upper Austria, where he was welcomed with enthusiasm. It was during this tour that he produced his "Songs from Sir Walter Scott". This cycle contains Ellens dritter Gesang (D. 839), a setting of Adam Storck's German translation of Scott's hymn from The Lady of the Lake, which is widely, though mistakenly, referred to as "Schubert's Ave Maria". It opens with the greeting Ave Maria, which recurs in the refrain; the entire Scott/Storck text in Schubert's song is frequently substituted with the complete Latin text of the traditional Ave Maria prayer. In 1825, Schubert also wrote the Piano Sonata in A minor (Op. 42, D. 845), and began the "Great" C major Symphony (Symphony No. 9, D. 944), which was completed the following year.
From 1826 to 1828, Schubert resided continuously in Vienna, except for a brief visit to Graz in 1827. The history of his life during these three years was relatively uneventful, and is little more than a record of his compositions. In 1826, he dedicated a symphony (D. 944, that later came to be known as the "Great") to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and received an honorarium in return. In the spring of 1828, he gave, for the first and only time in his career, a public concert of his own works, which was very well received. The compositions themselves are a sufficient biography. The String Quartet in D minor (D. 810), with the variations on "Death and the Maiden", was written during the winter of 1825–1826, and first played on 25 January 1826. Later in the year, came the String Quartet in G major, (D. 887, Op. 161), the "Rondeau brillant" for piano and violin (D. 895, Op. 70,), and the Piano Sonata in G (D. 894, Op. 78) (first published under the title "Fantasia in G"). To these should be added the three Shakespearian songs, of which "Hark! Hark! the Lark" (D. 889) and "An Sylvia" (D. 891) were allegedly written on the same day, the former at a tavern where he broke his afternoon's walk, the latter on his return to his lodging in the evening.
In 1827, Schubert wrote the song cycle Winterreise (D. 911), a colossal peak of the art of art song ("remarkable" was the way it was described at the Schubertiades), the Fantasia for piano and violin in C (D. 934), the Impromptus for piano, and the two piano trios (the first in B flat (D. 898), and the second in E flat, D. 929); in 1828 the Mirjams Siegesgesang (Song of Miriam, D. 942) on a text by Franz Grillparzer, the Mass in E-flat (D. 950), the Tantum Ergo (D. 962) in the same key, the String Quintet in C (D. 956), the second Benedictus to the Mass in C, the last three piano sonatas, and the collection of songs published posthumously as Schwanengesang ("Swan-song", D. 957). This collection, while not a true song cycle, retains a unity of style amongst the individual songs, touching depths of tragedy and of the morbidly supernatural which had rarely been plumbed by any composer in the century preceding it. Six of these are set to words by Heinrich Heine, whose Buch der Lieder appeared in the autumn. The Symphony No. 9 (D. 944) is dated 1828, but Schubert scholars believe that this symphony was largely written in 1825–1826 (being referred to while he was on holiday at Gastein in 1825 - that work, once considered lost, now is generally seen as an early stage of his C major symphony) and was revised for prospective performance in 1828. This was a fairly unusual practice for Schubert, for whom publication, let alone performance, was rarely contemplated for most of his larger-scale works during his lifetime. In the last weeks of his life, he began to sketch three movements for a new Symphony in D (D. 936A).
D. 935 No. 3|description = This Impromptu is a theme and variations based on a theme from Rosamunde. Performed by Randolph Hokanson.|pos=left|format = Ogg}} The works of his last two years reveal a composer increasingly meditating on the darker side of the human psyche and human relationships, and with a deeper sense of spiritual awareness and conception of the 'beyond'. He reaches extraordinary depths in several chillingly dark songs of this period, especially in the larger cycles. For example, the song Der Doppelgänger reaching an extraordinary climax, conveying madness at the realization of rejection and imminent death - a stark and visionary picture in sound and words that had been prefigured a year before by "Der Leiermann" (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man) at the end of Winterreise - and yet the composer is able to touch repose and communion with the infinite in the almost timeless ebb and flow of the String Quintet and his last three piano sonatas, moving between joyful, vibrant poetry and remote introspection. Even in large-scale works he was sometimes using increasingly sparse textures; Newbould compares his writing in the fragmentary Tenth Symphony (D.936A), probably the work of his very last two months) with Mahler's use of folksong-like harmonics and bare soundscapes. Schubert expressed the wish, were he to survive his final illness, to further develop his knowledge of harmony and counterpoint, and had actually made appointments for lessons with the counterpoint master Simon Sechter.
Schubert wrote almost 1000 works in a remarkably short career. The largest number (over 600) of these are songs. He wrote seven complete symphonies, as well as the two movements of the "Unfinished" Symphony, a complete sketch (with partial orchestration) of a ninth, and arguable fragments of a 10th. There is a large body of music for solo piano, including 21 complete sonatas and many short dances, and a relatively large set of works for piano duet. There are nearly 30 chamber works, including some fragmentary works. His choral output includes six masses. He wrote only five operas, and no concertos.
That "appetite for experimentation" manifests itself repeatedly in Schubert's output in a wide variety of forms and genres, including opera, liturgical music, chamber and solo piano music, and symphonic works. Perhaps most familiarly, his adventurousness manifests itself as a notably original sense of modulation, as in the second movement of the String Quintet, where he modulates from C major, through E major, to reach the tonic key of C major. It also appears in unusual choices of instrumentation, as in the Arpeggione Sonata or the unconventional scoring of the Trout Quintet. If it not infrequently led Schubert up blind alleys, resulting in fragmentary works, it also enabled him to create music unlike anything that had come before, such as his two song cycles of unprecedented scope.
While he was clearly influenced by the Classical sonata forms of Beethoven and Mozart (his early works, among them notably the 5th Symphony, are particularly Mozartean), his formal structures and his developments tend to give the impression more of melodic development than of harmonic drama. This combination of Classical form and long-breathed Romantic melody sometimes lends them a discursive style: his 9th Symphony was described by Robert Schumann as running to "heavenly lengths". His harmonic innovations include movements in which the first section ends in the key of the subdominant rather than the dominant (as in the last movement of the Trout Quintet). Schubert's practice here was a forerunner of the common Romantic technique of relaxing, rather than raising, tension in the middle of a movement, with final resolution postponed to the very end.
It was in the genre of the Lied, however, that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Plantinga remarks, "In his more than six hundred Lieder he explored and expanded the potentialities of the genre as no composer before him." Prior to Schubert's influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities burgeoned by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism. Among Schubert's treatments of the poetry of Goethe, his settings of Gretchen am Spinnrade and Der Erlkönig are particularly striking for their dramatic content, forward-looking uses of harmony, and their use of eloquent pictorial keyboard figurations, such as the depiction of the spinning wheel and treadle in the piano in Gretchen and the furious and ceaseless gallop in Erlkönig. Also of particular note are his two song cycles on the poems of Wilhelm Müller, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, which helped to establish the genre and its potential for musical, poetic, and almost operatic dramatic narrative. The Theaterzeitung, writing about Winterreise at the time, commented that it was a work that "none can sing or hear without being deeply moved". Antonín Dvořák wrote in 1894 that Schubert, whom he considered one of the truly great composers, was clearly influential on shorter works, especially Lieder and shorter piano works: "The tendency of the romantic school has been toward short forms, and although Weber helped to show the way, to Schubert belongs the chief credit of originating the short models of piano forte pieces which the romantic school has preferably cultivated. [...] Schubert created a new epoch with the Lied. [...] All other songwriters have followed in his footsteps."
Schubert's compositional style progressed rapidly throughout his short life. The loss of potential masterpieces caused by his early death at 31 was perhaps best expressed in the epitaph on his large tombstone written by the poet Franz Grillparzer, "Here music has buried a treasure, but even fairer hopes."
Schubert's chamber music continues to be popular. In a poll of classical music listeners announced in October 2008, the ABC in Australia found that Schubert's chamber works dominated the field, with the Trout Quintet coming first, followed by two of his other works.
From the 1830s through the 1870s, Franz Liszt transcribed and arranged a number of Schubert's works, particularly the songs. Liszt, who was a significant force in spreading Schubert's work after his death, said Schubert was "the most poetic musician who ever lived." Schubert's symphonies were of particular interest to Antonín Dvořák, with Hector Berlioz and Anton Bruckner acknowledging the influence of the "Great" Symphony.
Some of the disagreement continued into the 20th century. George Grove in his 1908 Dictionary of Music and Musicians, assigned the Great as number 10, and the Unfinished as number 9. (It is unclear from his article which symphonies, fragmentary or otherwise, are numbers 7 and 8.) However, the Unfinished is now generally referred to as number 8 in the English-speaking world, with the Great at number 9. Number 10 is generally acknowledged to be the D. 936a fragment, for which a completion by Brian Newbould exists. The 1978 revision to the Deutsch catalog leaves D. 729 without a number (in spite of numerous completions), and assigns number 7 to the Unfinished and number 8 to the Great. As a consequence, generally available scores for the later symphonies may be published using conflicting numbers.
Grove and Sullivan also suggested that there may have been a "lost" symphony. Immediately before Schubert's death, his friend Eduard von Bauernfeld recorded the existence of an additional symphony, dated 1828 (although this does not necessarily indicate the year of composition) named the "Letzte" or "Last" symphony. Brian Newbould Karlsruhe saw the first production of his opera Fierrabras.
In 1928, Schubert week was held in Europe and the United states to mark the centenary of the composer's death. Works by Schubert were performed in churches, in concert halls, and on radio stations. A competition, with top prize money of $10,000 and sponsorship by the Columbia Phonograph Company, was held for "original symphonic works presented as an apotheosis of the lyrical genius of Schubert, and dedicated to his memory".
In 1977, the German electronic band Kraftwerk recorded a tribute song called "Franz Schubert", which can be found on the album Trans-Europe Express.
Elizabeth Norman McKay and Brian Newbould have done a great deal of research on the life and music of Schubert in recent years, including scholarly journal articles and books. Newbould made a completion of Schubert's fragmentary 10th symphony.
Additional readings (sources from German Wikipedia article):
Category:1797 births Category:1828 deaths Category:People from Alsergrund * Category:19th-century Austrian people Category:19th-century composers Category:Austrian composers Category:Austrian expatriates in Hungary Category:Austrian Roman Catholics Category:Austrian people of Moravian German descent Category:Austrian people of Silesian German descent Category:Burials at the Zentralfriedhof Category:Child classical musicians Category:Classical era composers Category:House of Esterházy Category:Opera composers Category:Romantic composers Category:Viennese composers
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| Name | Stanley Kubrick |
|---|---|
| Caption | 1940s self-portrait with a Leica III camera during the time Kubrick worked for Look.From the book Drama and Shadows. |
| Birth date | July 26, 1928 |
| Birth place | Manhattan, New York, |
| Influences | Max Ophuls, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica |
| Influenced | Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Michael Mann, George A. Romero, Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Gaspar Noé |
| Death date | March 07, 1999 |
| Death place | Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Spouse | Toba Metz (1948–1951; divorced) Ruth Sobotka (1954–1957; divorced) Christiane Harlan (1958–1999; his death) |
| Occupation | Film director, film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, film editor |
| Years active | 1951–1999 |
Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism, and his reclusiveness about his films and personal life. He maintained almost complete artistic control, making movies according to his own whims and time constraints, but with the rare advantage of big-studio financial support for all his endeavors.
Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail—his later films often have elements of surrealism and expressionism that eschews structured linear narrative. His films are repeatedly described as slow and methodical, and are often perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature. A recurring theme in his films is man's inhumanity to man. While often viewed as expressing an ironic pessimism, a few critics feel his films contain a cautious optimism when viewed more carefully.
The film that first brought him attention to many critics was Paths of Glory, the first of three films of his about the dehumanizing effects of war. Many of his films at first got a lukewarm reception, only to be years later acclaimed as masterpieces that had a seminal influence on many later generations of film-makers. Considered especially groundbreaking was noted for being both one of the most scientifically realistic and visually innovative science-fiction films ever made while maintaining an enigmatic non-linear storyline. He voluntarily withdrew his film A Clockwork Orange from England, after it was accused of inspiring copycat crimes which in turn resulted in threats against Kubrick's family. His films were largely successful at the box-office, although Barry Lyndon performed poorly in the United States. Living authors Anthony Burgess and Stephen King were both unhappy with Kubrick's adaptations of their novels A Clockwork Orange and The Shining respectively, and both authors were engaged with subsequent adaptations. All of Kubrick's films from the mid-1950s to his death except for The Shining were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTAs. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Even though all of his films, apart from the first two, were adapted from novels or short stories, his works have been described by Jason Ankeny and others as "original and visionary". Although some critics, notably Pauline Kael, frequently detracted Kubrick, Ankeny is largely correct in describing Kubrick as one of the most "universally acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era" with a "standing unique among the filmmakers of his day."
Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, New York, the first of two children born to Jacques Leonard Kubrick (1901–85) and his wife Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–85). His sister, Barbara, was born in 1934. Jacques Kubrick, whose parents and paternal grandparents were Jewish of Austrian, Romanian and Polish origin, was a doctor. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in The Bronx.
Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve, and the game remained a lifelong obsession. He graduated from high school in 1945, but his poor grades, combined with the demand for college admissions from soldiers returning from the Second World War, eliminated any hopes of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and of education in general, maintaining that nothing about school interested him. Eventually, he sought jobs as a freelance photographer, and by graduation, he had sold a photographic series to Look magazine. Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess "for quarters" in Washington Square Park and various Manhattan chess clubs. He became an apprentice photographer for Look in 1946, and later a full-time staff photographer. (Many early [1945–50] photographs by Kubrick have been published in the book Drama and Shadows [2005, Phaidon Press] and also appear as a special feature on the 2007 Special Edition DVD of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
During his Look magazine years, Kubrick married Toba Metz (b. 1930) on May 29, 1948. They lived in Greenwich Village, eventually divorcing in 1951. During this time, Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and the cinemas of New York City. He was particularly inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of director Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style.
Kubrick and his then-wife, Toba Metz, were the only crew on the film, which was written by Kubrick's friend Howard Sackler, who later became a successful playwright. Fear and Desire garnered respectable reviews but was a commercial failure. Later in life, Kubrick was embarrassed by the film, which he dismissed as an amateur effort. He refused to allow Fear and Desire to be shown at retrospectives and public screenings and did everything possible to keep it out of circulation. At least one copy remained in the archives of the film printing company, and the film subsequently surfaced in bootleg copies.
Kubrick's marriage to Toba Metz ended during the making of Fear and Desire. He met his second wife, Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer Ruth Sobotka, in 1952. They lived together in New York's East Village from 1952 until their marriage on January 15, 1955. They moved to Hollywood that summer. Sobotka, who made a cameo appearance in Kubrick's next film, Killer's Kiss (1955), also served as art director on The Killing (1956). Like Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss is a short feature film, with a running time of slightly more than an hour. It met with limited commercial and critical success. The film is about a young heavyweight boxer at the end of his career who gets involved in a love triangle in which his rival is involved with organized crime. Both Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss were privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends.
Alex Singer introduced Kubrick to a young producer named James B. Harris, and the two became close friends. Their business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Productions, would finance Kubrick's next three films. The two bought the rights to the Lionel White novel Clean Break, which Kubrick and co-screenwriter Jim Thompson turned into The Killing. The story is about a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong after the mobsters get away with the money. (The film title may refer either to the robbery or the subsequent murder of a group of mobsters by a jealous boyfriend). Starring Sterling Hayden, The Killing was Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. As does the novel's narration, the story in the film is told out of sequence in a non-linear narrative as a consequence of retelling the events of the same day (and sometimes the same events) from the perspective of different characters. (This is not the same as using successive multiple in-world flashbacks as Citizen Kane does.) While this technique was highly unusual for contemporary 1950s American cinema, it was imitated nearly 40 years later in Reservoir Dogs by director Quentin Tarantino who has acknowledged Kubrick's film as a major influence, and critics have noticed the similarity in plot structure. In many ways, The Killing followed the conventions of film noir, both in its plotting and cinematography style. That kind of crime caper film had peaked in the 1940s; but today, many regard this film as one of the best of the noir genre. While it was not a financial success, it received good reviews.
The widespread admiration for The Killing brought Harris-Kubrick Productions to the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The studio offered them its massive collection of copyrighted stories from which to choose their next project. During this time, Kubrick also collaborated with Calder Willingham on an adaptation of the Austrian novel The Burning Secret. Although Kubrick was enthusiastic about the project, it was eventually shelved.
Kubrick's next film Paths of Glory was set during World War I and based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 antiwar novel of the same name. It follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission by their superiors. As a result of the mission's failure, three innocent soldiers are charged with cowardice and sentenced to death, allegedly as an example to the troops, but actually serving as scapegoats for the failings of their commanders. Kirk Douglas was cast as Colonel Dax, a humanitarian officer who tries to prevent the soldiers' execution. Douglas was instrumental in securing financing for the ambitious production. The film was not a significant commercial success, but it was critically acclaimed and widely admired within the industry, establishing Kubrick as a major up-and-coming young filmmaker. Critics over the years have praised the film's unsentimental, spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. Steven Spielberg has named this one of his favorite Kubrick films.
During the production of Paths of Glory in Munich, Kubrick met and romanced young German actress Christiane Harlan (credited by her stage name, "Susanne Christian"), who played the only female speaking part in the film. Kubrick divorced his second wife, Ruth Sobotka, in 1957. Christiane Susanne Harlan (b. 1932 in Germany) belonged to a theatrical family and had trained as an actress. She and Kubrick married in 1958 and remained together until his death in 1999. During her marriage to Kubrick, Christiane concentrated on her career as a painter. In addition to raising Christiane's young daughter Katharina (b. 1953) from her first marriage to the late German actor Werner Bruhns (d. 1977), the couple had two daughters, Anya (1959–2009) and Vivian (b. 1960). Christiane's brother Jan Harlan was Kubrick's executive producer from 1975 onward.
Based upon the true story of a doomed uprising of Roman slaves, Spartacus was a difficult production. Creative differences arose between Kubrick and Douglas, and the two reportedly had a stormy working relationship. Frustrated by his lack of creative control, Kubrick later largely disowned the film, which further angered Douglas. The friendship the two men had formed on Paths of Glory was destroyed by the experience of making the film. Years later, Douglas referred to Kubrick as "a talented shit."
Despite the on-set troubles, Spartacus was a critical and commercial success and established Kubrick as a major director. However, its embattled production convinced Kubrick to find ways of working with Hollywood financing while remaining independent of its production system, which he called "film by fiat, film by frenzy."
Spartacus is the only Stanley Kubrick film in which Kubrick had no hand in the screenplay, no final cut, no producing credit, or any say in the casting. It was largely Kirk Douglas' project.
Spartacus would go on to win 4 Oscars with one going to Peter Ustinov, for his turn as the slave dealer Batiatus, the only actor to win one under Kubrick's direction.
In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film Lolita, and he would live there for the rest of his life. The original motivation was to film Lolita in a country with laxer censorship laws. However, Kubrick had to remain in England to film Dr. Strangelove since Peter Sellers was not permitted to leave England at the time as he was involved in divorce proceedings, and the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey required the large capacity of the sound stages of Shepperton Studios, which were not available in America. It was after filming the first two of these films in England and in the early planning stages of 2001 that Kubrick decided to settle in England permanently.
Lolita was Kubrick's first film to generate major controversy. The book, by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, dealt with an affair between a middle-aged man named Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, and was already notorious as an "obscene" novel and a when Kubrick embarked on the project. The difficult subject matter was mocked in the film's famous tagline, "How did they ever make a film of Lolita?" Kubrick originally engaged Nabokov to adapt his own novel for the screen. The writer first produced a 400-page screenplay, which he then reduced to 200. The final screenplay was written by Kubrick himself, and Nabokov himself estimated that only 20% of his work made it into the film. Nabokov's original draft was later published under the title Lolita: A Screenplay.
Prior to its release, Kubrick realized that to get a Production Code seal, the screenplay would have to downplay the book's provocativeness, treading lightly with its theme. Kubrick tried to make some elements more acceptable by omitting all material referring to Humbert's lifelong infatuation with "nymphets" and possibly ensuring Lolita looked like a teenager. James Harris, Kubrick's co-producer and uncredited co-screenwriter of Lolita decided with Kubrick to raise Lolita's age. Nonetheless, Kubrick had liaised with the censors during production and it was only "slightly edited", in particular removing the eroticism between Lolita and Humbert. As a result, the novel's more sensual aspects were toned down in the final cut, leaving much to the viewer's imagination. Kubrick would later say that had he known the severity of the censorship he would face, he probably would not have made the film.
Lolita was the first of two times Kubrick worked with British comic actor Peter Sellers, the second being Dr. Strangelove (1964). Sellers plays Clare Quilty, a second older man (unknown to Humbert) who is involved with Lolita, serving dramatically as Humbert's darker doppelganger. In the novel, Quilty is behind the scenes for most of the story, but Kubrick brings him to the foreground, which resulted in an expansion of his role (although it is only about thirty minutes of screen time). Kubrick exercises his dramatic license, and has Quilty pretend to be multiple characters in the film, allowing Sellers to employ his gift for mock accents.
Critical reception of the film was mixed; many praised it for its daring subject matter, while others were surprised by the lack of intimacy between Lolita and Humbert. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Sue Lyon, who played the title role, won a Golden Globe for Best Newcomer.
Film critic Gene Youngblood holds that stylistically Lolita is a transitional film for Kubrick, "marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema...to the surrealism of the later films." in multiple roles, he was relatively unknown in America where many viewers of Dr. Strangelove did not initially realize that Kubrick had cast him in three roles, all with distinctively different appearances and accents.]] Kubrick's next film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), became a cult film and is now considered a classic. Roger Ebert wrote that it is the best satirical film ever made. The screenplay—based upon the novel Red Alert, by ex-RAF flight lieutenant Peter George (writing as Peter Bryant)—was co-written by Kubrick and George, with contributions by American satirist Terry Southern. Red Alert is a serious, cautionary tale of accidental atomic war. However, Kubrick found the conditions leading to nuclear war so absurd that the story became a sinister macabre comedy. Once re-conceived, Kubrick recruited Terry Southern to polish the final screenplay.
The story centers on an unauthorized American nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, initiated by renegade U.S.A.F. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden; the character's name is a reference to Jack the Ripper). When Ripper gives his orders, the bombers are all at fail-safe points, before which passing they cannot arm their warheads, and past which, they cannot proceed without direct orders. Once past this point, the planes will only return with a prearranged recall code. The film intercuts between three locales: Ripper's Air Force Base, where RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Sellers) tries to stop the mad Gen. Ripper by obtaining the codes; the Pentagon War Room, where the President of the United States (Sellers) and U.S.A.F. Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) try to develop a strategy with the Soviets to stop Gen. Ripper's B-52 bombers from dropping nuclear bombs on Russia; and Major Kong's (Slim Pickens) B-52 bomber, where he and his crew of airmen (never knowing their orders are false) doggedly try to complete their mission. It soon becomes clear that the bombers may reach Russia, since only Gen. Ripper knows the recall codes. At this point, the character of Dr. Strangelove (Sellers' third role) is introduced. His Nazi-style plans for ensuring the survival of the fittest of the human race in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust are the black-comedy highlight of the film.
Peter Sellers, who had played a pivotal part in Lolita, was hired to play four roles in Dr. Strangelove. He eventually played three, due to an injured leg and his difficulty in mastering bomber pilot Major "King" Kong's Texas accent. Kubrick later called Sellers "amazing", but lamented the fact that the actor's manic energy rarely lasted beyond two or three takes. To overcome this problem, Kubrick ran two cameras simultaneously and let Sellers improvise.
The film prefigured the antiwar sentiments which would become explosive only a few years after its release. It was highly irreverent toward war policies of the U.S., which were largely considered sacrosanct up to that time. Eight months after the release of Strangelove, the straight thriller Fail-Safe with a plot remarkably similar to that of Dr. Strangelove was released. Strangelove earned four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director) and the New York Film Critics' Best Director award.
Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, (1968). The film was conceived as a Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70. Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, expanding on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". Kubrick reportedly told Clarke that his intention was to make "the proverbial great science fiction film."
2001 begins four million years ago with an encounter between a group of apes and a mysterious black monolith, which seems to trigger in them the ability to use a bone as both a tool and a weapon. This new knowledge allows them to reclaim a water hole from another group of apes, who have no tool-wielding ability. A victorious ape tosses his bone into the air, at which point the film makes a celebrated match-cut to an orbiting satellite, circa 2000. At this time, a group of Americans at their moon base dig up a monolith similar to that encountered by the apes, which sends a radio signal to Jupiter. Eighteen months later, a group of astronauts aboard the spaceship Discovery are sent to explore Jupiter, their true purpose of investigating the signal is initially concealed from them. During the flight, the ship's sentient HAL 9000 computer, aware of the truth about the mission, malfunctions but resists disconnection. Believing its control of the mission to be crucial, the computer terminates life support for most of the crew before it is shut down by the surviving astronaut, David Bowman (Keir Dullea). Using a space pod, Bowman explores another monolith in orbit around Jupiter, whereupon he is hurled into a portal in space at high speed, witnessing many strange cosmological phenomena. His interstellar journey ends with his transformation into a fetus-like new being enclosed in an orb of light, last seen gazing at Earth from space.
The $10,000,000 (U.S.) film was a massive production for its time. The groundbreaking visual effects were overseen by Kubrick and were engineered by a team that included a young Douglas Trumbull, who would become famous in his own right for his work on the films Silent Running and Blade Runner. Kubrick extensively used traveling matte photography to film space flight, a technique also used nine years later by George Lucas in making , although that film also used motion-control effects that were unavailable to Kubrick at the time. Kubrick made innovative use of slit-scan photography to film the Stargate sequence. The film's striking cinematography was the work of legendary British director of photography Geoffrey Unsworth, who would later photograph classic films such as Cabaret and Superman. Manufacturing companies were consulted as to what the design of both special-purpose and everyday objects would look like in the future. At the time of the movie's release, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that a generation of engineers would design real spacecraft based upon 2001 "…even if it isn't the best way to do it." The film also is a rare instance of portraying space travel realistically, with complete silence in the vacuum of space and a realistic representation of weightlessness.
The film is famous for using classical music in place of an original score. Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube waltz became indelibly associated with the film for a while, especially the former, as it was not well-known to the public prior to the film. Kubrick also used music by contemporary avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti, although some of the pieces were altered without Ligeti's consent. The appearance of Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem on the 2001 soundtrack was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. This use of "program" music was not originally planned. Kubrick had commissioned composer Alex North to write a full-length score for the film, but Kubrick became so attached to the temporary soundtrack he had constructed during editing that he dropped the idea of an original score entirely.
Although it eventually became an enormous success, the film was not an immediate hit. Initial critical reaction was extremely hostile, with critics attacking the film's lack of dialogue, slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. One of the film's few defenders was Penelope Gilliatt, who called it (in The New Yorker) "some kind of a great film". Word of mouth among young audiences—especially the 1960s counterculture audience, who loved the movie's "Star Gate" sequence, a seemingly psychedelic journey to the infinite reaches of the cosmos—made the film a hit. Despite nominations in the directing, writing, and producing categories, the only Academy Award Kubrick ever received was for supervising the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today, however, many consider it the greatest sci-fi film ever made, and it is a staple on All Time Top 10 lists.
Artistically, 2001 was a radical departure from Kubrick's previous films. It contains only 45 minutes of spoken dialogue, over a running time of two hours and twenty minutes. The fairly mundane dialogue is mostly superfluous to the images and music. The film's most memorable dialogue belongs to the computer HAL in HAL's exchanges with Dave Bowman. Some argue that Kubrick is portraying a future humanity largely dissociated from a sterile and antiseptic machine-driven environment. The film's ambiguous, perplexing ending continues to fascinate contemporary audiences and critics. After this film, Kubrick would never experiment so radically with special effects or narrative form; however, his subsequent films would still maintain some level of ambiguity.
Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey are numerous and diverse. Despite having been released in 1968, it still prompts debate today. When critic Joseph Gelmis asked Kubrick about the meaning of the film, Kubrick replied:
They are the areas I prefer not to discuss, because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.
2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps Kubrick's most famous and influential film. Steven Spielberg called it his generation's big bang, focusing attention upon the space race. It was a precursor to the explosion of the science fiction film market nine years later, which began with the release of and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The story takes place in a futuristic version of Great Britain that is both authoritarian and chaotic. The central character is a teenage hooligan named Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), who, along with his companion "droogs", gleefully torments, beats, robs, tortures, and rapes without conscience or remorse. His brutal beating and murder of an older woman finally lands Alex in prison. Alex undergoes an experimental medical aversion treatment, known as the Ludovico Technique, that inhibits his violent tendencies, though he has no real free moral choice. At the public demonstration of the success of the technique, Alex is treated cruelly but does not fight back; the treatment has made him less than human. He has been conditioned against classical music, his love of which was his one human feature, and apparently all of his sex drive is gone. We further see hints that the promotion of the treatment is politically motivated. After being freed, he is found by his former partners in crime who had betrayed him and who are now policemen, and they beat him mercilessly.
He then comes to the home of a political writer who disdains "the modern age" and is initially sympathetic to Alex's plight until he recognizes Alex as the young man who brutally raped his wife and paralyzed him a few years before. Alex then becomes a pawn in a political game.
The society was sometimes perceived as Communist (as Michel Ciment pointed out in an interview with Kubrick, although he himself didn't feel that way) due to its slight ties to Russian culture. The teenage slang has a heavily Russian vocabulary, which can be attributed to Burgess. There is some evidence to suggest that the society is a socialist one, or perhaps a society moving out of a failed, Leftist socialism and into a Rightist, or fascist, society. In the novel, streets have paintings of working men in the style of Russian socialist art, and in the film, there is a mural of socialist artwork with obscenities drawn on it. As Malcolm McDowell points out on the DVD commentary, Alex's residence was shot on failed Labour Party architecture, and the name "Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North" alludes to socialist-style housing. Later in the film, when the new right-wing government takes power, the atmosphere is certainly more authoritarian than the anarchist air of the beginning. Kubrick's response to Ciment's question remained ambiguous as to exactly what kind of society it is. He held that the film held comparisons between both the left and right end of the political spectrum and that there is little difference between the two. Kubrick stated, "The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure of the Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left. ...They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable."
Kubrick photographed A Clockwork Orange quickly and almost entirely on location in and around London. Despite the low-tech nature of the film as compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick showed his talent for innovation; at one point, he threw "an old Newman Sinclair clockwork mechanism camera" off a rooftop in order to achieve the effect he wanted. For the score, Kubrick enlisted electronic music composer Wendy Carlos—at the time, known as Walter Carlos (Switched-On Bach)—to adapt famous classical works (such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) for the Moog synthesizer.
It is pivotal to the plot that the lead character, Alex, is fond of classical music, and that the brainwashing Ludovico treatment accidentally conditions him against classical music. As such, it was natural for Kubrick to continue the tradition begun in 2001: A Space Odyssey of using a great deal of classical music in the score. However, in this film, classical music accompanies scenes of violent mayhem and coercive sexuality rather than of graceful space flight and mysterious alien presences. Both Pauline Kael (who generally disliked Kubrick) and Roger Ebert (who often praises Kubrick) found Kubrick's use of juxtaposing classical music and violence in this film unpleasant, Ebert calling it a "cute, cheap, dead-end dimension," and Kael, "self-important." Burgess, in his introduction to his own stage adaptation of the novel, held that ultimately, classical music is what will finally redeem Alex.
The film was extremely controversial because of its explicit depiction of teenage gang rape and violence. It was released in the same year as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, and the three films sparked a ferocious debate in the media about the social effects of cinematic violence. The controversy was exacerbated when copycat crimes were committed in England by criminals wearing the same costumes as characters in A Clockwork Orange. British readers of the novel noted that Kubrick had omitted the final chapter (also omitted from American editions of the book) in which Alex finds redemption and sanity.
After receiving death threats to himself and his family as a result of the controversy, Kubrick took the unusual step of removing the film from circulation in Britain. It was unavailable in the United Kingdom until its re-release in 2000, a year after Kubrick's death, although it could be seen in continental Europe. The Scala cinema in London's Kings Cross showed the film in the early 1990s, and at Kubrick's insistence, the cinema was sued and put out of business, thus depriving London of one of its very few independent cinemas. It is now the Scala club. In early 1973, Kubrick re-released A Clockwork Orange to cinemas in the United States with footage modified so that it could get its rating reduced to an R. This enabled many more newspapers to advertise it, since in 1972 many newspapers had stopped carrying any advertising for X-rated films due to the new association of that rating with pornography.
In the mid-1990s, a documentary entitled Forbidden Fruit, about the censorship controversy, was released in Britain. Kubrick was unable to prevent the documentary makers from including footage from A Clockwork Orange in their film.
Kubrick's next film, released in 1975, was an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, also known as Barry Lyndon, a picaresque novel about the adventures and misadventures of an 18th-century Irish gambler and social climber. After serving in the Prussian army, Lyndon slowly insinuates himself into English high society, eventually marrying the Countess of Lyndon. The world of the aristocracy turns out to be a hollow paradise, dull and decaying. Lyndon is ultimately unable to maintain his good standing there and falls from grace after a series of persecutions.
Reviewers such as Pauline Kael, who had been critical of Kubrick's previous work,
As with most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndon's reputation has grown through the years, particularly among other filmmakers. Director Martin Scorsese has cited it as his favorite Kubrick film. Steven Spielberg has praised its "impeccable technique", though, when younger, he famously described it "like going through the Prado without lunch."
As in his other films, Kubrick's cinematography and lighting techniques were highly innovative. Most famously, interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA. This allowed many scenes to be lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings.
Like its two predecessors, the film does not have an original score. Irish traditional songs (performed by The Chieftains) are combined with works such as Antonio Vivaldi's Cello Concerto in B, a Johann Sebastian Bach Double Concerto, George Frideric Handel's Sarabande from the Keyboard Suite in D minor (HWV 448, HG II/ii/4), and Franz Schubert's German Dance No. 1 in C major, Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat, and Impromptu No. 1 in C minor. The music was conducted and adapted by Leonard Rosenman, for which he won an Oscar.
In 1976, production designer Ken Adam, who had worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon, asked Kubrick to visit the recently completed 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios to provide advice on how to light the enormous soundstage, which had been built and prepared for the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. Kubrick agreed to consult when it was promised that nobody would ever know of his involvement. This was honored until after his death in 1999, when in 2000 the fact was revealed by Adam in the documentary on the making of The Spy Who Loved Me on the special edition DVD release of the movie.
As winter takes hold, the family's isolation deepens, and the demons and ghosts of the Overlook Hotel's dark past begin to awake, displaying horrible, phantasmagoric images to Danny, and driving his father Jack into a homicidal psychosis.
The film was shot entirely on London soundstages, with the exception of second-unit exterior footage, which was filmed in Colorado, Montana, and Oregon. In order to convey the claustrophobic oppression of the haunted hotel, Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which allowed for smooth camera movement in enclosed spaces.
More than any of his other films, The Shining gave rise to the legend of Kubrick as a megalomaniac perfectionist. Reportedly, he demanded hundreds of takes of certain scenes (approximately 1.3 million feet of film was shot). This process was particularly difficult for actress Shelley Duvall, who was used to the faster, improvisational style of director Robert Altman.
Stephen King disliked the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks too much and feels too little." In 1997, King collaborated with Mick Garris to create a television miniseries version of the novel that was more faithful to King's original.
The film opened to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial success. As with most Kubrick films, subsequent critical reaction has treated the film more favorably. Among horror movie fans, The Shining is a cult classic, often appearing at the top of best horror film lists alongside Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), and other horror classics. Much of its imagery, such as the elevator shaft disgorging blood and the ghost girls in the hallway are among the most recognizable and widely known images from any Stanley Kubrick film, as are the lines "Redrum" and "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". The financial success of The Shining renewed Warner Brothers' faith in Kubrick's ability to make artistically satisfying and profitable films after the commercial failure of Barry Lyndon in the United States.
Seven years later, Kubrick made his next film, Full Metal Jacket (1987), an adaptation of Gustav Hasford's Vietnam War novel The Short-Timers, starring Matthew Modine as Joker, Adam Baldwin as Animal Mother, R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and Vincent D'Onofrio as Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence. Kubrick said to film critic Steven Hall that his attraction to Gustav Hasford's book was because it was "neither antiwar or prowar", held "no moral or political position", and was primarily concerned with "the way things are."
The film begins at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, U.S., where Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman relentlessly pushes his recruits through basic training in order to transform them from worthless "maggots" into motivated and disciplined killing machines. Private Lawrence, an overweight, slow-witted recruit who Hartman has nicknamed "Gomer Pyle", is unable to cope with the program and slowly cracks under the strain. On the eve of graduation, he has a psychotic breakdown and murders Hartman before killing himself.
In characteristic Kubrick style, the second half of the film jumps abruptly to Vietnam, following Joker, since promoted to sergeant. As a reporter for the United States military's newspaper, Stars and Stripes, Joker occupies war's middle ground, using wit and sarcasm to detach himself from the carnage around him. Though a Marine at war, he is also a reporter and is thus compelled to abide by the ethics of his profession. The film then follows an infantry platoon's advance on and through Hue City, decimated by the Tet Offensive. The film climaxes in a battle between Joker's platoon and a sniper hiding in the rubble, who is revealed to be a young girl. She almost kills Joker until his reporter partner shoots and severely injures her. Joker then kills her to put her out of her misery.
Filming a Vietnam War film in England was a considerable challenge for Kubrick and his production team. Much of the filming was done in the Docklands area of London, with the ruined-city set created by production designer Anton Furst. As a result, the film is visually very different from other Vietnam War films such as Platoon and Hamburger Hill, most of which were shot in the Far East. Instead of a tropical, Southeast-Asian jungle, the second half of the story unfolds in a city, illuminating the urban warfare aspect of a war generally portrayed (and thus perceived) as jungle warfare, notwithstanding significant urban skirmishes like the Tet offensive. Reviewers and commentators thought this contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film. During the making of the film, Kubrick was also helped by R. Lee Ermey, who acted and worked as technical adviser.
Full Metal Jacket received mixed critical reviews on release but also found a reasonably large audience, despite being overshadowed by Oliver Stone's Platoon and Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge. Like Kubrick's other films, its critical status has increased immensely since its initial release.
The story of Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler's Freudian novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story in English), although the story has been moved from Vienna in the 1920s to New York City in the 1990s. It follows Dr. William Harford's journey into the sexual underworld of New York City, after his wife, Alice, has shattered his faith in her fidelity by confessing to having fantasized about giving him and their daughter up for one night with another man. Until then, Harford had presumed women are more naturally faithful than men. This new revelation generates doubt and despair, and he begins to roam the streets of New York, acting blindly on his jealousy.
After trespassing upon the rituals of a sinister, mysterious sexual cult, Dr. Harford thinks twice before seeking sexual revenge against his wife. Upon returning home, his wife now gives an anguished confession she has had a dream about making love to several men at once. After his own dangerous escapades, Dr. Harford has no high moral ground over her. The couple begin to patch their relationship.
The film was in production for more than two years, and two of the main members of the cast, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh, were replaced in the course of the filming. Although it is set in New York City, the film was mostly shot on London soundstages, with little location shooting. Shots of Manhattan itself were pickup shots filmed in New York City by a second-unit crew. Because of Kubrick's secrecy about the film, mostly inaccurate rumors abounded about its plot and content. Most especially, the story's sexual content provoked speculation, some journalists writing that it would be "the sexiest film ever made." The casting of then celebrity-actor supercouple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a husband-wife couple in the film increased the pre-release journalistic hyperbole.
Eyes Wide Shut, like Lolita and A Clockwork Orange before it, faced censorship before release. In the United States and Canada, digitally manufactured silhouette figures were strategically placed to mask explicit copulation scenes so as to secure an R rating from the MPAA. In Europe, and the rest of the world, the film has been released uncut, in its original form. The October 2007 DVD reissue contains the uncut version, making it available to North American audiences for the first time.
Kubrick had earlier been interested in adapting another Calder Willingham novel (Natural Child), but quickly realized it could not be done within the Production Code.
Later that year, Kubrick was announced as director of Gun's Up, the working title for the production. Shortly after this announcement, the name of the film was changed to One-Eyed Jacks and Pina Pellicer was announced as "the unanimous choice of Brando, Rosenberg, and Kubrick" to play the female lead.
On November 20, 1958, Kubrick quit as director of One-Eyed Jacks, stating that he had the utmost respect for Marlon Brando as one of "the world's foremost artists" but had recently acquired the rights to Nabokov's Lolita and wanted to begin production work immediately in light of this wonderful opportunity. The film was completed with directorial credit given to Marlon Brando.
Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Steven Spielberg regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one point stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities than his. In 1999, following Kubrick's death, Spielberg took the various drafts and notes left by Kubrick and his writers and composed a new screenplay and, in association with what remained of Kubrick's production unit, made the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, and William Hurt. The film was released in June 2001.
The film contains a posthumous producing credit for Stanley Kubrick at the beginning and the brief dedication "For Stanley Kubrick" at the end. The film contains many recurrent Kubrick motifs, such as an omniscient narrator, an extreme form of the three-act structure, the themes of humanity and inhumanity, and a sardonic view of Freudian psychology. In addition, John Williams' score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.
Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum, but Eco declined because of his dissatisfaction with the filming of his earlier novel The Name of the Rose and Kubrick's unwillingness to allow him to write the screenplay himself; after Kubrick died, Eco would admit he regretted his decision.
Before moving onto 2001, Terry Southern suggested that Kubrick should make a high-budget pornographic film called Blue Movie in an attempt to take the genre and reinvent it. He decided not to do it, believing that he did not have the temperament for pornographic cinema and didn't think he could successfully reinvent the genre enough to truly elevate it. At this time, Southern started work on a novel that would not be published until 1970, also entitled Blue Movie, about a highly regarded art film director named Boris Adrian who attempts just such a film (the book is dedicated to Kubrick).
When J. R. R. Tolkien sold the film rights of The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1969, the Beatles considered making a film of it, and approached Kubrick as a possible director, but Kubrick told John Lennon he thought the novel was unfilmable due to its immensity. Rings director Peter Jackson states a major factor killing the project was Tolkien's opposition to the Beatles' participation.
Kubrick also toyed with the idea of adapting Perfume by Patrick Süskind, a book he greatly enjoyed, though nothing came of it. It would later be adapted for the screen by Tom Tykwer as .
One of Kubrick's longest collaborations was with Leon Vitali, who, after playing the older Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, became Kubrick's personal assistant, working as the casting director on his following films, and supervising film-to-video transfers for Kubrick. He also appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, playing the ominous Red Cloak, who confronts Tom Cruise during the infamous orgy scene. Since Kubrick's death, Vitali has overseen the restoration of both picture and sound elements for most of Kubrick's films. He has also collaborated frequently with Eyes Wide Shut co-star Todd Field on his pictures.
Kubrick paid close attention to the releases of his films in other countries. Not only did he have complete control of the dubbing cast, but sometimes alternative material was shot for international releases—in The Shining, the text on the typewriter pages was re-shot for the countries in which the film was released; in Eyes Wide Shut, the newspaper headlines and paper notes were re-shot for different languages. Since Kubrick's death, no new voice translations are allowed to be produced for any of the films he had control of; in countries where no authorized dubs exist, only subtitles are allowed for translation. Kubrick also closely supervised the actual translation of the script into foreign languages.
Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey, all of his films except Full Metal Jacket used mostly pre-recorded classical music, in two cases electronically altered by Wendy Carlos. He also often used merry-sounding pop music in an ironic way during scenes depicting devastation and destruction, especially in the closing credits or end sequences of a film.
In his review of Full Metal Jacket, Roger Ebert noted that many Kubrick films have a facial closeup of an unraveling character in which the character's head is tilted down and his eyes are tilted up. Kubrick also extensively employed wide angle shots, character tracking shots, zoom shots, and shots down tall parallel walls.
Many of Kubrick's films have back-references to previous Kubrick films. The best-known examples of this are the appearance of the soundtrack album for 2001: A Space Odyssey appearing in the record store in A Clockwork Orange and Quilty's joke about Spartacus in Lolita. Less obvious is the reference to a painter named Ludovico in Barry Lyndon, Ludovico being the name of the conditioning treatment in A Clockwork Orange.
Almost all Stanley Kubrick movies have a scene in or just outside a bathroom. (Oddly, the most cited example of this in 2001 is Dr. Floyd's becoming stymied by the Zero-Gravity Toilet en route to the moon, but not David Bowman's exploration [while still wearing his spacesuit] of the bathroom adjacent to his celestial bedroom after his journey through the Star Gate.)
Kubrick's initial involvement with home video mastering of his films was a result of television screenings of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Because the film was shot in 65 mm, the composition of each shot was compromised by the pan-and-scan method of transferring a wide-screen image to fit a 1.33:1 television set.
Kubrick's final five films were shot "flat"—the full 1.37:1 area is exposed in the camera, but with appropriate markings on the viewfinder, the picture was composed for and cropped to the 1.85:1 aspect ratio in a theater's projector.
The first mastering of these five films was in 2000 as part of the "Stanley Kubrick Collection", consisting of Lolita, Dr. Strangelove (in association with Sony Pictures), 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick oversaw the video masters in 1989 for Warner Home Video, and approved of 1.33:1 transfers for all of the films except for 2001, which was letterboxed.
Kubrick never approved a 1.85:1 video transfer of any of his films; when he died in 1999, DVDs and the 16:9 format were only beginning to become popular in the US. Most people were accustomed to seeing movies fill their television screen; in July 2007, less than 10% of US households had High-definition television (HDTV) (16:9 ready) sets. Warner Home Video chose to release these films with the transfers that Kubrick had explicitly approved.
In 2007, Warner Home Video remastered 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut in High-Definition, releasing the titles on DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray Disc. All were released in 16:9 anamorphic transfers, preserving the theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratios for all of the flat films except A Clockwork Orange, which was transferred at the aspect ratio of 1.66:1.
In regards to the Warner Bros. titles, there is little studio documentation that is public about them other than instructions given to projectionists on initial release; however, Kubrick's storyboards for The Shining do prove that he composed the film for wide-screen. In instructions given to photographer John Alcott in one panel, Kubrick writes: THE FRAME IS EXACTLY 1.85-1. Obviously you compose for that but protect the full 1.33-1 area.
More confusion results regarding Kubrick's non-Warner distributed titles. During the days of laserdisc, The Criterion Collection released six Kubrick films. Spartacus and 2001 were both native 70 mm releases (exhibited in their roadshow engagements at a ratio of 2.20:1) at the same ratio as their subsequent DVD releases, and The Killing and Paths of Glory were both transferred at 1.33:1, despite the latter being hard matted extensively. Both pictures were theatrically projected at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1.
Dr. Strangelove and Lolita were also transferred at 1.33:1, although Strangelove exhibits a number of hard mattes at a ratio of 1.66:1 in second-unit footage. This is sometimes falsely attributed to the use of stock footage in Strangelove. Both films were presented theatrically at ratios of 1.85:1.
The DVD versions of The Killing and Paths of Glory released by MGM Home Entertainment retained the same 1.33:1 aspect ratio as the laserdisc versions. The Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray editions of Paths of Glory feature a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. The initial DVD releases of Strangelove maintained the 1.33:1, Kubrick-approved transfer, but for the most recent DVD and Blu-ray editions, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment replaced it with a new, digitally remastered anamorphic transfer with an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. All DVD releases of Lolita to date have been at a uniform 1.66:1 aspect ratio, and the expectation is that future releases will retain this aspect ratio.
Laserdisc releases of 2001 were presented in a slightly different aspect ratio than the original film. The film was shot in 65 mm, which has a ratio of 2.20:1, but many theaters could only show it in 35 mm reduction prints, which were presented at a ratio of 2.35:1. Thus, the picture was slightly modified for the 35 mm prints. The laserdisc releases maintained the 2.20:1 ratio, but the source material was an already cropped 35 mm print; thus, the edges were slightly cropped and the top and bottom of the image slightly opened up. This seems to have been corrected with the most recent DVD release, which was newly remastered from a 70 mm print.
Manor in Hertfordshire, England]] Kubrick's famous reclusive nature is largely a myth, and may have resulted from his aversion to air travel. Despite once holding a pilot's license, Kubrick had a fear of flying and refused to take airplane trips. As a result, he rarely left England in the last forty years of his life. In addition, Kubrick shunned the Hollywood system and its publicity machine, resulting in little media coverage of him as a personality. Upon purchasing the Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England, Kubrick set up his life so that family and business were one. He purchased top-of-the-line film editing equipment and owned a number of cameras, which he sometimes used on his own movies. Children and animals would frequently come in and out of the room as he worked on a script or met with an actor. His appearance was not well-known in his later years, to the extent that a British man named Alan Conway successfully impersonated Kubrick in order to meet several well-known actors and get into fancy clubs. Conway is the subject of the film Colour Me Kubrick (2005), written by Kubrick's assistant Anthony Frewin and directed by Brian Cook, Kubrick's First Assistant Director for 25 years.
Despite his aversion to international travel, Kubrick was in constant contact with family members and business associates, often by telephone, and called his collaborators at all hours of the day and night for conversations that lasted from under a minute to several hours. Many of Kubrick's admirers and friends spoke of these telephone conversations with great affection and nostalgia after his death, especially Michael Herr and Steven Spielberg. In his memoir of Kubrick, Herr stated that dozens of people have claimed to have spoken to Kubrick on the day of his death and remarked that "I believe all of them." Kubrick also frequently invited people to his house, ranging from actors to close friends, admired film directors, writers, and intellectuals.
Since his death, efforts by his friends and family have been made to attempt to reverse the popular image of him as a recluse. However he was known to rarely travel, by car or train, outside his estate. Moreover, his obsessive, perfectionistic style, and specific, intense interests have led some researchers to speculate he may have had Asperger's Syndrome.
It was little-known by the public during Kubrick's life that he was also an animal lover. He owned many dogs and cats, and showed an extraordinary affection for them. He is reported to have owned dogs his whole life and Kubrick's widow, Christiane, in her book version of Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures, wrote that Kubrick brought his cats onto film sets and editing rooms with him in order to spend more time with them. Matthew Modine remembers Kubrick's being deeply upset when a family of rabbits was accidentally killed during the making of Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick was so beside himself that he cancelled shooting for the rest of the day. Philip Kaplan, one of Kubrick's lawyers and friends, told the story that Stanley once cancelled, at the last moment, a meeting with him and another lawyer who had flown to London from the United States because he had sat up all night with a dying cat and was in no shape to participate. Also, according to Kaplan, the huge kitchen table at Kubrick's home in Harpenden (Hertfordshire, United Kingdom) was supported by an undulating base with interior spaces, and housed within each curved space was a dog, most of whom were of no recognizable breed, and some not notably friendly to strangers.
Kubrick had a reputation for being tactless and rude to those he worked with. Some of Kubrick's collaborators complained that his personality was cold and that he lacked sympathy for the feelings of other people. Although Kubrick became close friends with Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell during filming, Kubrick abruptly terminated the friendship soon after the film was complete. McDowell was deeply hurt by this, and the schism between the two men lasted until Kubrick's death. Science fiction writer Brian Aldiss was fired from Kubrick's never-completed project A.I. for vacationing with his family in violation of his contract, even though Kubrick had put the project on hold at the time. James Earl Jones, despite his admiration for Kubrick on an artistic level, spoke negatively of his experience on Dr. Strangelove, saying that Kubrick was disrespectful to actors, using them as instruments in a grand design rather than allowing them to be creative artists in their own right. George C. Scott, who admired Kubrick in retrospect for reportedly being one of the few people who could routinely beat him at chess, famously resented Kubrick's using Scott's most over-the-top performances for the final cut of Dr. Strangelove after being promised by Kubrick that they were warmups and would not actually be in the movie. Kubrick's employees and crew members have stated that he was notorious for not complimenting anyone, and rarely showed admiration for his coworkers for fear it would make them complacent. Kubrick complimented them on their work only after the movie was finished, unless he felt their work was "genius." The only actors that Kubrick called "genius" were Peter Sellers, James Mason, and Malcolm McDowell.
Michael Herr, in his otherwise positive memoir of his friendship with Kubrick, complained that Kubrick was extremely cheap and very greedy about money. He stated that Kubrick was a "terrible man to do business with" and that the director was upset until the day he died that Jack Nicholson made more money from The Shining than he did. Kirk Douglas often commented on Kubrick's unwillingness to compromise, his out-of-control ego, and his ruthless determination to make a film his own distinct work of art instead of a group effort. However, Douglas has acknowledged that a large part of his dislike for Kubrick was caused by the director's consistently negative statements about Spartacus.
Many of those who worked with Kubrick have spoken kindly of him since his death, including coworkers and friends Jack Nicholson, Diane Johnson, Tom Cruise, Joe Turkel, Con Pederson, Carl Solomon, Ryan O'Neal, Anthony Frewin, Andrew Birkin, Ian Watson, John Milius, Jocelyn Pook, Sydney Pollack, R. Lee Ermey, and others. Michael Herr's memoir of Kubrick, and Matthew Modine's book Full Metal Jacket Diary show a much kinder, saner, and warmer version of Kubrick than the conventional view of him as cold, demanding, and impersonal. In a series of interviews found on the DVD of Eyes Wide Shut, a teary-eyed Tom Cruise remembers Kubrick with great affection; Nicole Kidman shares his sentiments. Shelley Winters, when asked what she thought of him, answered: "A gift." Shelley Duvall, who played Wendy in The Shining, had a rocky relationship with Kubrick, but said in retrospect that it was a great experience that made her smarter—though she'd never want to do it again. Malcolm McDowell acknowledged in retrospect that some of his statements about Kubrick were "unfair" and were a "cry out" to Kubrick to reconnect with him.
Kubrick's immediate family felt that the common perception of him as an eccentric reclusive misanthrope were entirely off-the-mark stereotypes. His stepdaughter Katharina recalls that her sister Anya once stated that "the more she reads about daddy the more she thinks that Howard Hughes was probably a perfectly normal person." When his widow, Christiane, was asked which books on Kubrick were not reliable, she singled out Frederic Raphael's Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick and John Baxter's Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (not to be confused with the identically titled book by Vincent LoBrutto). The posthumous family production of the documentary and book Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (film documentary directed by Jan Harlan, book tie-in written by Christiane Kubrick née Harlan) was partly intended to offset the negative impressions created by these works.
Stanley had views on everything, but I would not exactly call them political... His views on democracy were those of most people I know, neither left or right, not exactly brimming with belief, a noble failed experiment along our evolutionary way, brought low by base instincts, money and self-interest and stupidity... He thought the best system might be under a benign despot, though he had little belief that such a man could be found. He wasn't a cynic, but he could have easily passed for one. He was certainly a capitalist. He believed himself to be a realist.Herr recalls that Kubrick was sometimes akin to a 19th-century liberal-humanist, that he found Irving Kristol's definition of a neoconservative as a "liberal mugged by reality" to be hysterically funny, that he distrusted almost all authority, and that he was a Social Darwinist.
Herr further wrote that Kubrick owned guns and did not think that war was an entirely bad thing. In the documentary , Herr says "…he also accepted that it was perfectly okay to acknowledge that, of all the things war is, it's also very beautiful." The writer said of initial reactions to Full Metal Jacket that "The political left will call Kubrick a fascist." In a 1987 interview with Gene Siskel, called Candidly Kubrick, Kubrick said, "Full Metal Jacket suggests there is more to say about war than it is just bad." He added that everything serious the drill instructor says, such as "A rifle is only a tool, it is a hard heart that kills", is completely true.
Though some have said Kubrick disliked America, Michael Herr says that America was all he talked about and that he often thought of moving back. Herr wrote that Kubrick was sent VHS tapes from American friends of NFL Football, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and other television shows that he could not get in the United Kingdom. Kubrick told Siskel that he was not anti-American and thought that America was a good country, though he did not think that Ronald Reagan was a good President. In the interview, he also predicted an economic meltdown worldwide by pointing out to Siskel that most of the major banks in the United States held dubious foreign bonds as collateral and huge third world loans treated as assets. Kubrick likened this to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about the "Emperor's New Clothes", and felt even during the Cold War, an economic collapse was more worrisome and imminent than nuclear annihilation was. As far as Kubrick's views on welfare and taxation, according to Ian Watson, Kubrick said of the pre-1997 socialist Labour Party that "If the Labourites ever get in, I’ll leave the country." Watson claims that Kubrick was extremely opposed to taxes on the rich and to welfare in general.
Kubrick's earlier work is seen by Pauline Kael as more socially liberal than his later work. The early films embody liberal ideals, and the satire of government and military in Dr. Strangelove seems to point to a liberal political perspective. Similarly, film analyst Glenn Perusek thinks Kubrick's earlier Paths of Glory reflects a Rousseauist vision of man with natural human sympathy crushed by the artifice of society; later Kubrick films abandon that perspective. While Kael viewed Dr. Strangelove as a liberal film, Kagan disagrees, holding that film to be written from the point of view of a detached realist, lacking the overt liberalism of similar anti-war films of the era such as On the Beach or Fail-Safe. Kubrick's more mature works are more pessimistic and suspicious of the so-called innate goodness of mankind, and are critical of stances based on that positive assessment. For example, in A Clockwork Orange, the police are as violent and vulgar as the droogs, and Kubrick depicts both the subversive Leftist writer Mr. Alexander and the authoritarian status quo Minister of the Interior as manipulative and sinister. Kubrick commented regarding A Clockwork Orange:
Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.He went on to say:
The idea that social restraints are all bad is based on a utopian and unrealistic vision of man. But in this movie, you have an example of social institutions gone a bit berserk. Obviously, social institutions faced with the law-and-order problem might choose to become grotesquely oppressive. The movie poses two extremes: it shows Alex in his precivilized state, and society committing a worse evil in attempting to cure him."
When New York Times writer Fred M. Hechinger wrote a piece that declared A Clockwork Orange "fascist", Kubrick responded:
It is quite true that my film's view of man is less flattering than the one Rousseau entertained in a similarly allegorical narrative—but, in order to avoid fascism, does one have to view man as a noble savage rather than an ignoble one? Being a pessimist is not yet enough to qualify one to be regarded as a tyrant (I hope)... The age of the alibi, in which we find ourselves, began with the opening sentence of Rousseau's : 'Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault.' It is based on two misconceptions: that man in his natural state was happy and good, and that primal man had no society... Rousseau's romantic fallacy that it is society which corrupts man, not man who corrupts society, places a flattering gauze between ourselves and reality. This view, to use Mr. Hechinger's frame of reference, is solid box office but, in the end, such a self-inflating illusion leads to despair.
Kubrick quoted extensively from Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis and The Social Contract—not to be confused with Rousseau's—and author Arthur Koestler, who is famous for writing The Ghost in the Machine. Both authors (Koestler through psychology and Ardrey through anthropology) searched for the cause of humanity's capacity for death and destruction, and both, like Kubrick, were suspicious of the liberal belief in the innate goodness of mankind. Ardrey and Kubrick both attribute this to Rousseau, who, in Ardrey's words, "Fathered the romantic fallacy" and Behaviourism, especially what they consider "radical Behaviourism", which they blame primarily on B. F. Skinner. In his interview with The New York Times, Kubrick stated that his view of man was closer to those of Christianity than to humanism or Jewish theology, saying, "I mean, it's essentially Christian theology anyway, that view of man."
Kubrick appeared to believe that freedom is still worth pursuing even if mankind is ultimately ignoble, and that evil on the part of the individual—however undesirable—is still preferable in contrast to the evil of a totalitarian society. Kubrick said in an interview with Gene Siskel:
To restrain man is not to redeem him... I think the danger is not that authority will collapse, but that, finally, in order to preserve itself, it will become very repressive... Law and order is not a phony issue, not just an excuse for the Right to go further right.
Kubrick is often said to have been an atheist. This may or may not be true. In Kubrick's interview with Craig McGregor, he said:
I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.
In the same interview, he also blames the poor critical reaction to 2001 as follows:
Hmm, tricky. I think he believed in something, if you understand my meaning. He was a bit of a fatalist actually, but he was also very superstitious. Truly a mixture of nature and nurture. I don't know exactly what he believed, he probably would have said that no-one can really ever know for sure, and that it would be rather arrogant to assume that one could know. I asked him once after The Shining, if he believed in ghosts. He said that it would be nice if there "were" ghosts, as that would imply that there is something after death. In fact, I think he said, "Gee I hope so."...He did not have a religious funeral service. He's not buried in consecrated ground. We always celebrated Christmas and had huge Christmas trees.
In Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Jack Nicholson recalls that Kubrick said The Shining is an overall optimistic story because "anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story."
;Awards and recognition Five of Stanley Kubrick's films were nominated for Academy Awards in various categories, including Best Picture for Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon, and Best Director for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon. 2001: A Space Odyssey received numerous technical awards, including a BAFTA award for cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and an Academy Award for best visual effects, which Kubrick (as director of special effects on the film) received.
Most awards for which Kubrick's films were nominated tended to be in the areas of cinematography, art design, screenwriting, and music. However, only four of his films were nominated for their acting performances, notably Lolita, getting three acting nominations from the Golden Globes, and Peter Sellers getting nominated for both an Oscar and a BAFTA for his triple roles in Dr. Strangelove. Of all his movies, only Spartacus rewarded a cast member with an acting award.
All Kubrick films from Paths of Glory to the end of his career were nominated for at least one Golden Globe or Oscar (along with several BAFTA nominations) with the notable exception of The Shining which was actually nominated for the infamous Razzie award. (This was the first year of the Raspberry awards which at the time were voted on only by a few friends of Raspberry founder, John Wilson, not the international committee of several hundred that includes professional critics and industry professionals that it does today.) Ironically, at least two published books, The Wolf at the Door by Jay Cocks and Kubrick, inside a film artist's maze by Thomas Nelson, consider The Shining to be a kind of master key to Kubrick's whole body of work in which all of Kubrick's philosophical preoccupations merge into a grand synthesis.
In 1997, three of Kubrick's films were selected by the American Film Institute for their list of the 100 Greatest Movies in America: at #22, Dr. Strangelove at #26 and A Clockwork Orange at #46. In 2007, the AFI updated their list with 2001 ranked at #15, Dr. Strangelove ranked at #39 and Clockwork Orange ranked at #70; Spartacus was one of the new selections, ranking at #81.
;Reviews from critics Many of Kubrick's films initially received lukewarm reviews, only to be hailed as major and seminal classics decades later. Film critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael were consistently highly dismissive of Kubrick, often considering him as impersonal and misanthropic. Writer Mark Browning has noted that critics seem divided between those that consider him "immensely profound" or "just plain pretentious." Likewise, Tony Mills in the Sunday Times Book review said he is "depending on who you ask either the greatest film director since Orson Welles or...a hypnotically pretentious fake". Initially, Roger Ebert gave a poor review of The Shining which now Ebert has canonized in his series of reviews of great films. It has been argued that this frequent shift in opinion is due to the consistently idiosyncratic and unconventional character of his film-making style, and this also accounts for his enormous influence on the film community. (See the section on "Tributes from filmmakers" below.) Ronnie Lankford notes "It is fascinating, when reflecting upon Kubrick, how many times he made a seminal film." which approached subjects in a new way. In the same essay he writes,
..critical opinion has always lagged behind when it came to Kubrick. Look up 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in the average movie guide. Most call it an innovative masterpiece and forget to mention that a number of critics hated the film when it was released. Kubrick’s films have often been groundbreaking, controversial, and misunderstood. But critics who dare to question his artistry usually have to eat their review.
;Style For Kubrick, written dialogue is one element to be put in balance with mise en scène (set arrangements), music, and especially, editing. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise on film acting, Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing room and often re-direct a film.
As he explained to a journalist,
Everything else [in film] comes from something else. Writing, of course, is writing; acting comes from the theatre; and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
Kubrick's method of operating thus became a quest for an emergent vision in the editing room, when all the elements of a film could be assembled. The price of this method, beginning as early as Spartacus (when he first had an ample budget for film stock), was endless exploratory re-shooting of scenes that was an exhaustive investigation of all possible variations of a scene.This enabled him to walk into the editing room with copious options. John Baxter has written:
Instead of finding the intellectual spine of a film in the script before starting work, Kubrick felt his way towards the final version of a film by shooting each scene from many angles and demanding scores of takes on each line. Then over months... he arranged and rearranged the tens of thousands of scraps of film to fit a vision that really only began to emerge during editing.;Tributes from filmmakers, critics and imitators Leading directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam and Ridley Scott, have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration. On the DVD of Eyes Wide Shut, Steven Spielberg, in an interview, comments on Kubrick that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history" but the way that Kubrick "tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories". Writing in the introduction to a recent edition of Michel Ciment's Kubrick, film director Martin Scorsese has noted that most of Kubrick's films were misunderstood and under-appreciated when first released. Then came a dawning recognition that they were masterful works unlike any other films.
Even today, Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Michael Mann, George A. Romero and Gaspar Noé. Many filmmakers imitate Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing. For example, several of Jonathan Glazer's music videos contain visual references to Kubrick. The Coen Brother's Barton Fink, in which the hotel itself seems malevolent, contains a hotel hallway Steadicam shot as an homage to The Shining. The story telling style of their Hudsucker Proxy was influenced by Doctor Strangelove.
Many more directors have simply cited Kubrick as having made one of their favorite films such as Richard Linklater, Sam Mendes, Joel Schumacher, Taylor Hackford.
On the other hand, others, such as the filmmakers of the remodernist film movement, have been critical of Kubrick's work, described by Jesse Richards as "boring and dishonest". Peter Rinaldi, in his essay on the Remodernist Film Manifesto for Mungbeing, The Shore as Seen from the Deep Sea, defends the manifesto, writing:
I certainly don't share in my friend's opinion of this man's work, but I actually think this is a hugely important part of the manifesto. A lot of us came to be filmmakers because a particular director's (or a number of directors) work inspired us. A friend of mine calls these inspirational figures his "Giants", which I think is a great word for them because sometimes they are built up so much in our minds that we don't think we, or our work, can ever really reach them and theirs. I think, for the most part, the generation that I grew up in had Kubrick as their Giant. His work has a mystical "perfectionism" that is awe-inspiring at times. This perfectionism is anathema to the Remodernist mentality and for many healthy reasons, this giant (or whatever giant towers over your work) must fall in our minds. We must become the giant.Kubrick was both a great fan of The Simpsons and in friendly contact with the show's producers. Analysts of the show argue that The Simpsons contains more references to many films of Stanley Kubrick than any other pop culture phenomenon. References abound not only to 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining but also to Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, and Full Metal Jacket. It has been noted that while references to "fantastic fiction" in The Simpsons are copious, "there are two masters of the genre whose impact on The Simpsons supersedes that of all others: Stanley Kubrick and Edgar Allan Poe." Similarly, it has been observed that
...the show's almost obsessive references to the films of Stanley Kubrick...[make it] as if the show's admittance of these films into the show's pantheon of intertextual allusions finally marked their entry into the deepest subconscious level of the global pop cultural mind.;Studies of Kubrick At least two full-length books on Stanley Kubrick are devoted to frame-by-frame analysis of his visual style: Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis by Alexander Walker, and Stanley Kubrick: Visual Poet 1928–1999 (Basic Film) by Paul Duncan. History professor Geoffrey Cocks notes that Kubrick has what he calls an "open narrative" style that "requires the audience to derive meaning actively rather than being passively instructed, entertained, and manipulated." On the other hand, Cocks believes that Kubrick's preoccupation with sweeping overarching historical themes causes him to frequently sacrifice character development. "His films consistently display a basic taxonomy of violence, systems of control, and inherent human evil. This idée fixe freezes the people in his films into types rather than fully developed characters."
;Social commentary and vision Kubrick has been noted both for his social commentary and for his distinctive visual style. Regarding social commentary, Kubrick has been noted for the recurring theme of concern with the over-mechanization of society which, in its attempt to create a safe environment, creates an artificial sterility that breeds the very evils it tries to exclude. Multiple critics have noted that Kubrick's earlier films have more straightforward linear narrative while the later films are moderately and subtly surreal reflecting a sense of social dislocation and confusion The emotional distance Kubrick maintains from many of his characters have caused critics to see Kubrick as a cold and detached rationalist, while the recurrence of strongly psychopathic characters from Alex DeLarge to Jack Torrance in his films have caused many to view Kubrick's outlook as deeply pessimistic. A frequently recurring observation on the Kubrick film that Steven Spielberg completed A.I is that it uneasily meshes Spielberg's rosy optimistic outlook with Kubrick's pessimistic one, although one reviewer wrote “Spielberg, has done a remarkable job in balancing Kubrick's pessimism with his optimism without having one overcrowd the other”
In spite of Kubrick's own denial that he is a pessimist, the charge is frequently repeated. Newspaper obituaries of Kubrick notably the one in The New York Times by Stephen Holden (as well as that in the San Jose Mercury), the entry on Kubrick in the online edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, and Vincent LoBrutto's full-length biography of Kubrick (which was spoken of approvingly by Kubrick's wife) all characterize Kubrick broadly as pessimistic. (Holden wrote “if Mr. Kubrick's misanthropy prompted some critics to accuse him of coldness and inhumanity, others saw his pessimism as an uncompromisingly Swiftian vision of human absurdity.”) So also did Kubrick's most severe critic, Pauline Kael. The charge was repeated in reviews of the multi-film DVD boxed set of his films in 2007, a New Jersey film critic writing “And yet preserved too -- like an ugly insect trapped in amber -- are some of the artist's most problematic qualities, including a bitter pessimism, a cruel humor and an almost godlike superiority that often viewed other people -- and particularly women -- as little more than impediments." A pessimistic streak was found in essays collected in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, one of which characterizes Eyes Wide Shut as “a kind of Sartrean pessimism about our inevitable dissatisfaction with romantic love.”
Not all critics agree with this assessment. Other essays in the same anthology find Eyes to be very optimistic. James Naremore in On Kubrick characterizes Kubrick as a modernist in the tradition of James Joyce and Franz Kafka with their distrust of mass society. As such, Naremore notes that Kubrick's detachment from his subjects does not make him a dour pessimist, although Kubrick does often dwell on “the failure of scientific reasoning, and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality”. Peter Kramer's study of 2001 argues it is meant to counterweight the pessimism of Kubrick's previous Doctor Strangelove.
Some view Kubrick's pessimism as either at least overstated by others or even more apparent than real, an impression created by Kubrick's refusal of any bland or cheap optimism, refusal to make films that conform to conventional ideas of a spectacle, and a desire to employ films as a wake-up call to humanity to understand its capacity for evil. The editors of The Kubrick Site note that Kubrick avoids cinematically conventional ways of structuring stories. This does indeed create for many viewers a sense of emotionless detachment from the human subjects as noted above. For example, Kubrick often prefers lengthy dialogue scenes shot from one camera angle with no cutting. But the editors of TKS believe this is done in order to establish a life of characters beyond dialogue which "helps to reveal, in the spaces and silences, some of the emotional nature permeating the film's world" as well as a realistic sense of the characters' situatedness in time and society. Kubrick's focus is not just on individual characters but on the larger society around them and how it affects their motivation, often in negative ways. The authors also stress that however bleak Kubrick's outlook (intermittently) is, he is not a misanthrope.
A recent outspoken dissenter from pessimistic readings of Kubrick is author Julian Rice, a scholar of Native American literature. His book Kubrick's Hope argues that although there is a powerful vision of evil in Kubrick, there is vision of redemption and goodness in Kubrick's films stronger than often initially recognized, a vision focused both on family feeling and access to the sublime depths of the subconscious beyond superficial socialization. However, Rice has been alleged to misrepresent the work of prior Kubrick film scholars, particularly with reference to just how pessimistic or misanthropic they actually think Kubrick's films are.
Steven Spielberg, himself a noted cinematic optimist and close personal friend of Kubrick, expressed a similar view of Kubrick. Going against the grain of the view that Kubrick's films are misanthropic and pessimistic, Spielberg in a tribute to Kubrick at the 71st Academy awards said that
He dared us to have the courage of his convictions, and when we take that dare, we're transported directly to his world, and we're inside his vision. And in the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like that vision ever. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy.Perhaps the last word in this debate might be Kubrick's own from a 1968 interview in Playboy
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
Filmography
;Documentary short filmsDay of the Fight (1951) Flying Padre (1951) The Seafarers (1953) ;Feature films
This list includes a list of awards for which Kubrick was personally nominated or won in the area of Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTA, and the notorious Raspberry. Many of Kubrick's films were nominated and won awards from these institutions in areas such as musical score, art direction, and so forth in which the nominee was not Kubrick. For these, see articles on the individual films. Kubrick's only personal win from these institutions was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For many individual films Kubrick was nominated for and won awards from various societies of film critics, film festivals, and both the Writers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America.
Kubrick's lifetime achievement awards were the D.W. Griffith award from the Directors Guild of America, and another from the Director's Guild of Great Britain, and the Career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival. Posthumously, the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" in 2008.
In the science fiction world, Kubrick has thrice won the especially coveted Hugo Award, a prized mainly for print writing and only secondarily for drama production. He also received four nominations (with one win) of the science-fiction-film-oriented Saturn awards from the Academy of Science Fiction for The Shining, an award that did not exist when Kubrick won his three Hugos.
Kubrick received two awards from major film festivals: "Best Director" from the Locarno International Film Festival in 1959 for Killer's Kiss and "Filmcritica Bastone Bianco Award" at the Venice Film Festival in 1999 for "Eyes Wide Shut". He also was nominated for the "Golden Lion" of the Venice Film Festival in 1962 for Lolita. The Venice Film Festival awarded him the "Career Golden Lion" in 1997 and the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" in 2008.
The least honored of Kubrick's films since 1956's The Killing is The Shining, which garnered only the above-mentioned four nominations (with one win) for Saturn awards. In addition, The Shining is the only Stanley Kubrick film ever to be nominated for any of the notorious Razzies. It was nominated for two, Worst Actress (Shelley Duvall) and Worst Director. This was the first year of the Razzies which at that time was run out of one person's home and was voted on by less than 10 people, rather than the large international committee that votes on it today.
See also
Stanley Kubrick Archive
Notes
References
(Storyboard for The Shining, Castle, Alison (editor) and Kubrick, Stanley (photographs)) Reprinted in: Philips 2001; extract in The ALT.MOVIES.KUBRICK FAQ
Further reading
Lyons, V and Fitzgerald, M. (2005) ‘’Asperger syndrome : a gift or a curse?’’ New York : Nova Science Publishers. ISBN 1-59454-387-9 Deutsches Filmmuseum (Ed.): Stanley Kubrick ; Kinematograph Nr. 14, Frankfurt/Main, 2004. ISBN 3-88799-069-2 (English edition) ;Documentary
. Documentary film. Dir. Jan Harlan. Warner Home Video, 2001. 142 min.
External links
Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication The Authorized Stanley Kubrick Web Site by Warner Bros. The Kubrick Site Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide Kubrick on Senses of Cinema (In Depth Biography) Multi-media Kubrick archive The Guardian: Citizen Kubrick List of interviews and Look photographs List of all the published Look photographs The Hechinger Debacle Stanley Kubrick Interviews, by Stanley Kubrick, Gene D. Phillips
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| Bgcolour | orange |
|---|---|
| Name | Gracie Fields |
| Caption | Fields on the island of Capri, by Allan Warren, in 1973 |
| Birth date | January 09, 1898 |
| Birth place | Rochdale, Lancashire, England, UK |
| Death date | September 27, 1979 |
| Death place | Il Canzone Del Mare, Capri, Italy}} |
Dame Gracie Fields, DBE (born Grace Stansfield, 9 January 1898 – 27 September 1979), was an English-born, later Italian-based actress, singer and comedienne and star of both cinema and music hall.
She met comedian and impresario Archie Pitt and they began working together. Pitt gave Gracie champagne on her 18th Birthday, and wrote in an autograph book to her that he would make her a star. Pitt would come to serve as her manager and the two married in 1923 at Clapham Registry Office. Their first revue in 1915 was called Yes I think so and the two continued to tour Britain together until 1924 in the revue Mr Tower of London, with other reviews including By Request, It's A Bargain and The Shows The Thing.
Archie Pitt was the brother of Bert Aza founder of the famous Aza agency, who were responsible for many talents of the day including the actor and comedian Stanley Holloway, who was introduced to Bert Aza by Gracie. Gracie and Stanley first worked together on her film "Sing As We Go" in 1934 and remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
One of her most successful productions was at the Alhambra Theatre in 1925. The show, booked by Sir Oswald Stoll, was a major success and toured for ten years. She made the first of ten appearances in Royal Variety Performances in 1928, following a premiere stint at the London Palladium, gaining a devoted following with a mixture of self-deprecating jokes, comic songs and monologues, as well as cheerful "depression-era" songs all presented in a "no-airs-and-graces" Northern, working class style. She recorded her first record for HMV Because I Love You and My Blue Heaven in 1928.
At one point, Gracie was playing three shows a night in London's West End. She appeared in the Pitt production she was working on, with Sir Gerald Du Maurier in the straight play SOS at the Saint James Theatre, with also a cabaret spot at the Cafe De Paris following this.
Fields had a great rapport with her audience, which helped her become one of Britain's highest paid performers, playing to sold out theatres across the country.
Her most famous song, which became her theme, "Sally," was worked into the title of her first film, Sally in Our Alley (1931), which was a major box office hit. She went on to make several films initially in Britain and later in the United States (for which she was paid a record fee of £200,000 for four films). Regardless, she never enjoyed the process of performing without a live audience, and found the process of film-making boring. She tried to opt out of filming, before director Monty Banks persuaded her otherwise, landing her the lucrative Hollywood deal. Gracie demanded that the four films were to be filmed in Britain and not Hollywood, and this was the case.
Ironically, the final few lines of the song "Sally" were written by her husband's mistress, Annie Lipman, and Gracie sang this song at nearly every performance she made from 1931 onwards -claiming in later life that she wanted to "Drown blasted Sally with Walter with the Aspidastra on top!"
She donated her house, "Tower," 20, Frognal Way, Hampstead, London, NW3 6XE (which she had not much cared for and which she had shared with her husband Archie Pitt and his mistress) to a maternity hospital after the marriage broke down. In 1939, she became seriously ill with cervical cancer. The public sent over 250,000 goodwill messages and she retired to her villa on Capri. After she recovered, she recorded a very special 78rpm record simply called Gracie's Thanks, in which she thanks the public for the many cards and letters she received while in hospital. During World War II, she paid for all servicemen/women to travel free on public transport within the boundaries of Rochdale.
Gracie also helped Rochdale football club in the 1930s when they were struggling to pay fees and buy sports equipment.
In the late 1930s, she set up The Gracie Fields Childrens Home and Orphanage at Peacehaven in Sussex for children of those in the theatre profession who could not look after their children. She kept this until the late 1960s, when the home was no longer needed. This was near her own home in Peacehaven, and Gracie often visited with the children all calling her 'Aunty Grace.'
In March 1940, she married Italian-born film director Monty Banks, following her divorce from Pitt, and in May they moved to their home in Santa Monica.
However, because Banks remained an Italian citizen and would have been interned in the United Kingdom, she was forced to leave Britain for North America during the war, at the instruction of Winston Churchill, who told her to "Make American Dollars, not British Pounds," which she did in aid of the Navy League and the Spitfire Fund. She did occasionally return to England to show she was not indeed a traitor, performing in factories and army camps around the country. After their initial argument, Parliament offered her an official apology.
Although she continued to spend much of her time entertaining troops and otherwise supporting the war effort outside Britain, this led to a fall-off in her popularity at home. She performed many times for Allied troops, travelling as far as New Guinea, where she received an enthusiastic response from Australian personnel. Late 1945 saw her tour the South Pacific Islands.
In 1951, Gracie opened the Festival of Britain celebrations. She proved popular once more, though never regaining the status she enjoyed in the 1930s. She continued recording, but made no more films, moving more towards light classical music as popular tastes changed, often adopting a religious theme. She continued into the new medium of LP records, and recorded new takes of her old favourite songs, as well as new and recent tracks to 'liven things up a bit'.
She lived on her beloved Isle of Capri for the remainder of her life, at her home La Canzone Del Mare, a swimming and restaurant complex which Gracie's home overlooked. It was favoured by many Hollywood stars during the 1950s, with regular guests including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo and Noel Coward.
Fields married Boris Alperovici, a Romanian radio repairman two years later. She claimed that he was the love of her life, and that she couldn't wait to propose to him -proposing on Christmas day in front of friends and family. They married at the Church of St Steffano on Capri in a quiet ceremony before Honeymooning in Rome.
In 1956, Fields played Miss Marple in a US TV production of Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced. The production featured Jessica Tandy and Roger Moore, and predates the Margaret Rutherford films by some five years.
She also starred in TV Productions of A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, -for which she won a TV Award for, and Mrs 'Aris Goes to Paris, which was remade years later with Angela Lansbury as Mrs Harris, a charwoman in search of a fur coat. (A Chanel dress in Lansbury's case.)
Gracie was the subject of This Is Your Life in March 1960 when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre.
Gracie regularly performed in TV appearances, being the first entertainer to perform on Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Fields had two Christmas TV specials in 1960 and 1961, singing her old favourites and new songs in front of a studio audience. 1971 saw A Gift For Gracie, another TV special presented by Gracie and Bruce Forsythe. This followed on from her popularity of Jess Yates's Stars on Sunday religious programme, the precursor to Songs of Praise, in which celebrities sang religious hymns and read Bible readings. Gracie was the most requested artist on the show.
In 1968, Gracie headlined a two week Christmas stint at Yorkshire's prestigious Batley Variety Club. "I was born over a fish and chip shop -I never thought I'd be singing in one!" Claimed Gracie during the performance recorded by the BBC.
In 1978, she opened the Gracie Fields Theatre, located next to Oulder Hill Community School, in her native Rochdale, performing a concert there recorded by the BBC to open the show. Gracie appeared in 10 Royal Variety Performances from 1928 onwards, her last being in 1978 at the age of 80 when she appeared as a surprise guest in the finale, in which she appeared and sang her theme song, Sally.
Her final TV appearance came in January 1979 when she appeared in a special octogenarian edition of The Merv Griffin Show in America, in which she sang the song she popularised in America -The Biggest Aspidistra In The World. Gracie was notified whilst in America that she had the invitation to become a Dame Commander of the British Empire, to which she replied: "Yes I'll accept, Yes I can kneel -but I might need help getting back up, and Yes I'll attend -as long as they don't call Boris, Buttons!"
Gracie's health declined in July 1979, when she contracted pneumonia after performing an open air concert on the Royal Yacht which was docked in Capri's Harbour. After a spell in Hospital, Gracie seemed to be recovering, but died in September 1979.
In 2009, Jane Horrocks took the lead in the BBC TV production Gracie!, a drama portraying the life of Fields just before and during World War II and her relationship with Monty Banks (played by Tom Hollander).
Category:1898 births Category:1979 deaths Category:Actresses awarded British damehoods Category:Cancer survivors Category:Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire Category:English Protestants Category:English comedy musicians Category:English comedians Category:English expatriates in the United States Category:English female singers Category:English film actors Category:English television actors Category:Music hall performers Category:People from Rochdale
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Elvis Presley |
|---|---|
| Img alt | A young man dancing, swiveling his hips. He has dark hair, short and slicked up a bit. He wears an unbuttoned band-collared jacket over a shirt with bold black-and-white horizontal stripes. Behind him, on either side, are a pair of barred frames, like prison doors. |
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Elvis Aaron Presley |
| Born | January 08, 1935Tupelo, Mississippi, United States |
| Died | August 16, 1977Memphis, Tennessee, United States |
| Genre | Rock and roll, pop, rockabilly, country, blues, gospel, R&B; |
| Associated acts | The Blue Moon Boys, The Jordanaires, The Imperials |
| Occupation | Musician, actor |
| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, piano |
| Years active | 1954–77 |
| Label | Sun, RCA Victor |
| Url |
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with his family at the age of 13. He began his career there in 1954 when Sun Records owner Sam Phillips, eager to bring the sound of African American music to a wider audience, saw in Presley the means to realize his ambition. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was one of the originators of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country and rhythm and blues. RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage the singer for over two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel", released in January 1956, was a number one hit. He became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll with a series of network television appearances and chart-topping records. His energized interpretations of songs, many from African American sources, and his uninhibited performance style made him enormously popular—and controversial. In November 1956, he made his film debut in Love Me Tender.
Conscripted into military service in 1958, Presley relaunched his recording career two years later with some of his most commercially successful work. He staged few concerts, however, and, guided by Parker, proceeded to devote much of the 1960s to making Hollywood movies and soundtrack albums, most of them critically derided. In 1968, after seven years away from the stage, he returned to live performance in a celebrated comeback television special that led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of profitable tours. In 1973, Presley staged the first concert broadcast globally via satellite, Aloha from Hawaii, seen by approximately 1.5 billion viewers. Prescription drug abuse severely compromised his health, and he died suddenly in 1977 at the age of 42.
Presley is regarded as one of the most important figures of 20th-century popular culture. He had a versatile voice and unusually wide success encompassing many genres, including country, pop ballads, gospel, and blues. He is the best-selling solo artist in the history of popular music. Nominated for 14 competitive Grammys, he won three, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36. He has been inducted into four music halls of fame.
Presley's ancestry was primarily a Western European mix—Scots-Irish, with some French Norman; one of Gladys's great-great-grandmothers was Cherokee. According to a third cousin of Presley's, one of Gladys's great-grandmothers was Jewish. Gladys was regarded by relatives and friends as the dominant member of the small family. Vernon moved from one odd job to the next, evidencing little ambition. The family often relied on help from neighbors and government food assistance. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of altering a check written by the landowner. He was jailed for eight months, and Gladys and Elvis moved in with relatives.
In September 1941, Presley entered first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated, where his instructors regarded him as "average". He was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his schoolteacher with a rendition of Red Foley's country song "Old Shep" during morning prayers. The contest, held at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945, saw his first public performance: dressed as a cowboy, the ten-year-old Presley stood on a chair to reach the microphone and sang "Old Shep". He recalled placing fifth. A few months later, Presley received for his birthday his first guitar. He had hoped for something else—by different accounts, either a bicycle or a rifle. Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his uncles and the new pastor at the family's church. Presley recalled, "I took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it."
Entering a new school, Milam, for sixth grade in September 1946, Presley was regarded as a loner. The following year, he began bringing his guitar in on a daily basis. He would play and sing during lunchtime, and was often teased as a "trashy" kid who played hillbilly music. The family was by then living in a largely African American neighborhood. A devotee of Mississippi Slim's show on the Tupelo radio station WELO, Presley was described as "crazy about music" by Slim's younger brother, a classmate of Presley's, who often took him in to the station. Slim supplemented Presley's guitar tuition by demonstrating chord techniques. When his protégé was 12 years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air performances. Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time, but succeeded in performing the following week.
During his junior year, Presley began to stand out more among his classmates, largely because of his appearance: he grew out his sideburns and styled his hair with rose oil and Vaseline. On his own time, he would head down to Beale Street, the heart of Memphis's thriving blues scene, and gaze longingly at the wild, flashy clothes in the windows of Lansky Brothers. By his senior year, he was wearing them. Overcoming his reticence about performing outside the Courts, he competed in Humes's Annual "Minstrel" show in April 1953. Singing and playing guitar, he opened with "Till I Waltz Again With You", a recent hit for Teresa Brewer. Presley recalled that the performance did much for his reputation: "I wasn't popular in school ... I failed music—only thing I ever failed. And then they entered me in this talent show ... when I came onstage I heard people kind of rumbling and whispering and so forth, 'cause nobody knew I even sang. It was amazing how popular I became after that."
Presley, who never received formal music training or learned to read music, studied and played by ear. He frequented record stores with jukeboxes and listening booths. He knew all of Hank Snow's songs and he loved records by other country singers such as Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Ted Daffan, Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmie Davis, and Bob Wills. The Southern Gospel singer Jake Hess, one of his favorite performers, was a significant influence on his ballad-singing style. He was a regular audience member at the monthly All-Night Singings downtown, where many of the white gospel groups that performed reflected the influence of African American spiritual music. He adored the music of black gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Like some of his peers, he may have attended blues venues—of necessity, in the segregated South, only on nights designated for exclusively white audiences. He certainly listened to the regional radio stations that played "race records": spirituals, blues, and the modern, backbeat-heavy sound of rhythm and blues. Many of his future recordings were inspired by local African American musicians such as Arthur Crudup and Rufus Thomas. B.B. King recalled that he knew Presley before he was popular when they both used to frequent Beale Street. By the time he graduated high school in June 1953, Presley had already singled out music as his future.
Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows. He explained to his father, "They told me I couldn't sing." Songfellow Jim Hamill later claimed that he was turned down because he did not demonstrate an ear for harmony at the time. In April, Presley began working for the Crown Electric company as a truck driver. His friend Ronnie Smith, after playing a few local gigs with him, suggested he contact Eddie Bond, leader of Smith's professional band, which had an opening for a vocalist. Bond rejected him after a tryout, advising Presley to stick to truck driving "because you're never going to make it as a singer."
Phillips, meanwhile, was always on the lookout for someone who could bring the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused to a broader audience. As Keisker reported, "Over and over I remember Sam saying, 'If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.'" In June, he acquired a demo recording of a ballad, "Without You", that he thought might suit the teenaged singer. Presley came by the studio, but was unable to do it justice. Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to sing as many numbers as he knew. He was sufficiently affected by what he heard to invite two local musicians, guitarist Winfield "Scotty" Moore and upright bass player Bill Black, to work something up with Presley for a recording session. }} The session, held the evening of July 5, proved entirely unfruitful until late in the night. As they were about to give up and go home, Presley took his guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right". Moore recalled, "All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open ... he stuck his head out and said, 'What are you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again.'" Phillips quickly began taping; this was the sound he had been looking for. Three days later, popular Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played "That's All Right" on his Red, Hot, and Blue show. Listeners began phoning in, eager to find out who the singer was. The interest was such that Phillips played the record repeatedly during the last two hours of his show. Interviewing Presley on-air, Phillips asked him what high school he attended in order to clarify his color for the many callers who had assumed he was black. During the next few days the trio recorded a bluegrass number, Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky", again in a distinctive style and employing a jury-rigged echo effect that Sam Phillips dubbed "slapback". A single was pressed with "That's All Right" on the A side and "Blue Moon of Kentucky" on the reverse.
By early 1955, Presley's regular Hayride appearances, constant touring, and well-received record releases had made him a substantial regional star, from Tennessee to West Texas. In January, Neal signed a formal management contract with Presley and brought the singer to the attention of Colonel Tom Parker, whom he considered the best promoter in the music business. Parker—Dutch-born, though he claimed to be from West Virginia—had acquired an honorary colonel's commission from country singer turned Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis. Having successfully managed top country star Eddy Arnold, he was now working with the new number one country singer, Hank Snow. Parker booked Presley on Snow's February tour. When the tour reached Odessa, Texas, a 19-year-old Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time: "His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing. ... I just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it." Presley made his television debut on March 3 on the KSLA-TV broadcast of Louisiana Hayride. Soon after, he failed an audition for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts on the CBS television network. By August, Sun had released ten sides credited to "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill"; on the latest recordings, the trio were joined by a drummer. Some of the songs, like "That's All Right", were in what one Memphis journalist described as the "R&B; idiom of negro field jazz"; others, like "Blue Moon of Kentucky", were "more in the country field", "but there was a curious blending of the two different musics in both". This blend of styles made it difficult for Presley's music to find radio airplay. According to Neal, many country music disc jockeys would not play it because he sounded too much like a black artist and none of the rhythm and blues stations would touch him because "he sounded too much like a hillbilly." The blend came to be known as rockabilly. At the time, Presley was variously billed as "The King of Western Bop", "The Hillbilly Cat", and "The Memphis Flash".
Presley renewed Neal's management contract in August 1955, simultaneously appointing Parker as his special adviser. The group maintained an extensive touring schedule throughout the second half of the year. Neal recalled, "It was almost frightening, the reaction that came to Elvis from the teenaged boys. So many of them, through some sort of jealousy, would practically hate him. There were occasions in some towns in Texas when we'd have to be sure to have a police guard because somebody'd always try to take a crack at him. They'd get a gang and try to waylay him or something." The trio became a quartet when Hayride drummer Fontana joined as a full member. In mid-October, they played a few shows in support of Bill Haley, whose "Rock Around the Clock" had been a number one hit the previous year. Haley observed that Presley had a natural feel for rhythm, and advised him to sing fewer ballads.
At the Country Disc Jockey Convention in early November, Presley was voted the year's most promising male artist. Several record companies had by now shown interest in signing him. After three major labels made offers of up to $25,000, Parker and Phillips struck a deal with RCA Victor on November 21 to acquire Presley's Sun contract for an unprecedented $40,000. Presley, at 20, was still a minor, so his father signed the contract. Parker arranged with the owners of Hill and Range Publishing, Jean and Julian Aberbach, to create two entities, Elvis Presley Music and Gladys Music, to handle all of the new material recorded by Presley. Songwriters were obliged to forego one third of their customary royalties in exchange for having him perform their compositions. By December, RCA had begun to heavily promote its new singer, and before month's end had reissued many of his Sun recordings.
The second Milton Berle Show appearance came on June 5 at NBC's Hollywood studio, amid another hectic tour. Berle persuaded the singer to leave his guitar backstage, advising, "Let 'em see you, son." During the performance, Presley abruptly halted an uptempo rendition of "Hound Dog" with a wave of his arm and launched into a slow, grinding version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements. Presley's gyrations created a storm of controversy. Television critics were outraged: Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. ... His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. ... His one specialty is an accented movement of the body ... primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway." Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music "has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of one Elvis Presley. ... Elvis, who rotates his pelvis ... gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos". Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation's most popular, declared him "unfit for family viewing". To Presley's displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as "Elvis the Pelvis", which he called "one of the most childish expressions I ever heard, comin' from an adult."
The next day, Presley recorded "Hound Dog", along with "Any Way You Want Me" and "Don't Be Cruel". The Jordanaires sang harmony, as they had on The Steve Allen Show; they would work with Presley through the 1960s. A few days later, the singer made an outdoor concert appearance in Memphis at which he announced, "You know, those people in New York are not gonna change me none. I'm gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight." In August, a judge in Jacksonville, Florida, ordered Presley to tame his act. Throughout the following performance, he largely kept still, except for wiggling his little finger suggestively in mockery of the order. The single pairing "Don't Be Cruel" with "Hound Dog" ruled the top of the charts for 11 weeks—a mark that would not be surpassed for 36 years. Recording sessions for Presley's second album took place in Hollywood during the first week of September. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the writers of "Hound Dog", contributed "Love Me".
Allen's show with Presley had, for the first time, beaten CBS's Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan, despite his June pronouncement, booked the singer for three appearances for an unprecedented $50,000. The first, on September 9, 1956, was seen by approximately 60 million viewers—a record 82.6 percent of the television audience. Actor Charles Laughton hosted the show, filling in while Sullivan recuperated from a car accident. Presley appeared in two segments that night from CBS Television City in Hollywood. According to Elvis legend, Presley was shot only from the waist up. Watching clips of the Allen and Berle shows with his producer, Sullivan had opined that Presley "got some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants–so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. ... I think it's a Coke bottle. ... We just can't have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show!" Sullivan publicly told TV Guide, "As for his gyrations, the whole thing can be controlled with camera shots." In fact, Presley was shown head-to-toe in the first and second shows. Though the camerawork was relatively discreet during his debut, with leg-concealing closeups when he danced, the studio audience reacted in customary style: screaming. Presley's performance of his forthcoming single, the ballad "Love Me Tender", prompted a record-shattering million advance orders. More than any other single event, it was this first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that made Presley a national celebrity of barely precedented proportions.
Accompanying Presley's rise to fame, a cultural shift was taking place that he both helped inspire and came to symbolize. Igniting the "biggest pop craze since Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra ... Presley brought rock'n'roll into the mainstream of popular culture", writes historian Marty Jezer. "As Presley set the artistic pace, other artists followed. ... Presley, more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation—the first in America ever to feel the power of an integrated youth culture."
Presley returned to the Sullivan show, hosted this time by its namesake, on October 28. After the performance, crowds in Nashville and St. Louis burned him in effigy. His first motion picture, Love Me Tender, was released on November 21. Though he was not top billed, the film's original title—The Reno Brothers—was changed to capitalize on his latest number one record: "Love Me Tender" had hit the top of the charts earlier that month. To further take advantage of Presley's popularity, four musical numbers were added to what was originally a straight acting role. The movie was panned by the critics but did very well at the box office. Presley would receive top billing on every subsequent film he made.
On December 4, Presley dropped into Sun Records where Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were recording and jammed with them. Though Phillips no longer had the right to release any Presley material, he made sure the session was captured on tape. The results became legendary as the "Million Dollar Quartet" recordings—Johnny Cash was long thought to have played as well, but he was present only briefly at Phillips' instigation for a photo opportunity. The year ended with a front page story in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Presley merchandise had brought in $22 million on top of his record sales, and Billboards declaration that he had placed more songs in the top 100 than any other artist since records were first charted. In his first full year on RCA, one of the music industry's largest companies, Presley had accounted for over 50 percent of the label's singles sales.
Presley undertook three brief tours during the year, continuing to generate a crazed audience response. A Detroit newspaper suggested that "the trouble with going to see Elvis Presley is that you're liable to get killed." Villanova students pelted him with eggs in Philadelphia, and in Vancouver, the crowd rioted after the end of the show, destroying the stage. Frank Sinatra, who had famously inspired the swooning of teenaged girls in the 1940s, condemned the new musical phenomenon. In a magazine article, he decried rock and roll as "brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious. ... It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phoney and false. It is sung, played and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons. ... This rancid-smelling aphrodisiac I deplore." Asked for a response, Presley said, "I admire the man. He has a right to say what he wants to say. He is a great success and a fine actor, but I think he shouldn't have said it. ... This is a trend, just the same as he faced when he started years ago."
Leiber and Stoller were again in the studio for the recording of Elvis' Christmas Album. Toward the end of the session, they wrote a song on the spot at Presley's request: "Santa Claus Is Back In Town", an innuendo-laden blues. The holiday release stretched Presley's string of number one albums to four and would eventually become the best selling Christmas album of all time. After the session, Moore and Black—drawing only modest weekly salaries, sharing in none of Presley's massive financial success—resigned. Though they were brought back on a per diem basis a few weeks later, it was clear that they had not been part of Presley's inner circle for some time. On December 20, Presley received his draft notice. He was granted a deferment to finish the forthcoming King Creole, in which $350,000 had already been invested by Paramount and producer Hal Wallis. A couple of weeks into the new year, "Don't", another Leiber and Stoller tune, became Presley's tenth number one seller. It had been only 21 months since "Heartbreak Hotel" had brought him to the top for the first time. Recording sessions for the King Creole soundtrack were held in Hollywood mid-January. Leiber and Stoller provided three songs and were again on hand, but it would be the last time they worked closely with Presley. A studio session on February 1 marked another ending: it was the final occasion on which Black was to perform with Presley. He died in 1965.
Soon after Presley had commenced basic training at Fort Hood, he received a visit from Eddie Fadal, a businessman he had met when on tour in Texas. Fadal reported that Presley had become convinced his career was finished—"He firmly believed that." During a two-week leave in early June, Presley cut five sides in Nashville. He returned to training, but in early August his mother was diagnosed with hepatitis and her condition worsened. Presley was granted emergency leave to visit her, arriving in Memphis on August 12. Two days later, she died of heart failure, aged 46. Presley was devastated; their relationship had remained extremely close—even into his adulthood, they would use baby talk with each other and Presley would address her with pet names.
en route to Germany, September 29, 1958]]
After training at Fort Hood, Presley joined the 3rd Armored Division in Friedberg, Germany, on October 1. Introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant while on maneuvers, he became "practically evangelical about their benefits"—not only for energy, but for "strength" and weight loss, as well—and many of his friends in the outfit joined him in indulging. The Army also introduced Presley to karate, which he studied seriously, later including it in his live performances. Fellow soldiers have attested to Presley's wish to be seen as an able, ordinary soldier, despite his fame, and to his generosity while in the service. He donated his Army pay to charity, purchased TV sets for the base, and bought an extra set of fatigues for everyone in his outfit.
While in Friedberg, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. They would eventually marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship. In her autobiography, Priscilla says that despite his worries that it would ruin his career, Parker convinced Presley that to gain popular respect, he should serve his country as a regular soldier rather than in Special Services, where he would have been able to give some musical performances and remain in touch with the public. Media reports echoed Presley's concerns about his career, but RCA producer Steve Sholes and Freddy Bienstock of Hill and Range had carefully prepared for his two-year hiatus. Armed with a substantial amount of unreleased material, they kept up a regular stream of successful releases. Between his induction and discharge, Presley had ten top 40 hits, including "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck", the best-selling "Hard Headed Woman", and "One Night" in 1958, and "(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I" and the number one "A Big Hunk o' Love" in 1959. RCA also managed to generate four albums compiling old material during this period, most successfully Elvis' Golden Records (1958), which hit number three on the LP chart.
Presley returned to television on May 12 as a guest on —ironic for both stars, given Sinatra's not-so-distant excoriation of rock and roll. Also known as Welcome Home Elvis, the show had been taped in late March, the only time all year Presley performed in front of an audience. Parker secured an unheard-of $125,000 fee for eight minutes of singing. The broadcast drew an enormous viewership.
G.I. Blues, the soundtrack to Presley's first film since his return, was a number one album in October. His first LP of sacred material, His Hand in Mine, followed two months later. It reached number 13 on the U.S. pop chart and number 3 in Great Britain, remarkable figures for a gospel album. In February 1961, Presley performed two shows for a benefit event in Memphis, on behalf of 24 local charities. During a luncheon preceding the event, RCA presented him with a plaque certifying worldwide sales of over 75 million records. A 12-hour Nashville session in mid-March yielded nearly all of Presley's next studio album, Something for Everybody. As described by John Robertson, it exemplifies the Nashville sound, the restrained, cosmopolitan style that would define country music in the 1960s. Presaging much of what was to come from Presley himself over the next half-decade, the album is largely "a pleasant, unthreatening pastiche of the music that had once been Elvis's birthright." It would be his sixth number one LP. Another benefit concert, raising money for a Pearl Harbor memorial, was staged on March 25, in Hawaii. It was to be Presley's last public performance for seven years.
Of Presley's films in the 1960s, 15 were accompanied by soundtrack albums and another 5 by soundtrack EPs. The movies' rapid production and release schedules—he frequently starred in three a year—affected his music. According to Jerry Leiber, the soundtrack formula was already evident before Presley left for the Army: "three ballads, one medium-tempo [number], one up-tempo, and one break blues boogie". As the decade wore on, the quality of the soundtrack songs grew "progressively worse". Julie Parrish, who appeared in Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), says that he hated many of the songs chosen for his films. The Jordanaires' Gordon Stoker describes how Presley would retreat from the studio microphone: "The material was so bad that he felt like he couldn't sing it." Most of the movie albums featured a song or two from respected writers such as the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. But by and large, according to biographer Jerry Hopkins, the numbers seemed to be "written on order by men who never really understood Elvis or rock and roll." Regardless of the songs' quality, it has been argued that Presley generally sang them well, with commitment. Critic Dave Marsh heard the opposite: "Presley isn't trying, probably the wisest course in the face of material like 'No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car' and 'Rock-a-Hula Baby.'"
In the first half of the decade, three of Presley's soundtrack albums hit number one on the pop charts, and a few of his most popular songs came from his films, such as "Can't Help Falling in Love" (1961) and "Return to Sender" (1962). ("Viva Las Vegas", the title track to the 1964 film, was a minor hit as a B-side, and became truly popular only later.) But, as with artistic merit, the commercial returns steadily diminished. During a five-year span—1964 through 1968—Presley had only one top ten hit: "Crying in the Chapel" (1965), a gospel number recorded back in 1960. As for non-movie albums, between the June 1962 release of Pot Luck and the November 1968 release of the soundtrack to the television special that signaled his comeback, only one LP of new material by Presley was issued: the gospel album How Great Thou Art (1967). It won him his first Grammy Award, for Best Sacred Performance. As described in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, Presley was "arguably the greatest white gospel singer of his time [and] really the last rock & roll artist to make gospel as vital a component of his musical personality as his secular songs."
Shortly before Christmas 1966, more than seven years since they first met, Presley proposed to Priscilla Beaulieu. They were married on May 1, 1967, in a brief ceremony in their suite at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. The flow of formulaic movies and assembly-line soundtracks rolled on. It was not until October 1967, when the Clambake soundtrack LP registered record low sales for a new Presley album, that RCA executives recognized a problem. "By then, of course, the damage had been done", as historians Connie Kirchberg and Marc Hendrickx put it. "Elvis was viewed as a joke by serious music lovers and a has-been to all but his most loyal fans."
Recorded in late June, the special, called simply Elvis, aired on December 3, 1968. Later known as the '68 Comeback Special, the show featured lavishly staged studio productions as well as songs performed with a band in front of a small audience—Presley's first live performances since 1961. The live segments saw Presley clad in tight black leather, singing and playing guitar in an uninhibited style reminiscent of his early rock and roll days. Director and coproducer Steve Binder had worked hard to reassure the nervous singer and to produce a show that was far from the hour of Christmas songs Parker had originally planned. The show, NBC's highest rated that season, captured 42 percent of the total viewing audience. Jon Landau of Eye magazine remarked, "There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home. He sang with the kind of power people no longer expect of rock 'n' roll singers. He moved his body with a lack of pretension and effort that must have made Jim Morrison green with envy." The New Rolling Stone Album Guide calls the performance one of "emotional grandeur and historical resonance."
By January 1969, the single "If I Can Dream", written for the special, reached number 12. The soundtrack album broke into the top ten. According to friend Jerry Schilling, the special reminded Presley of what "he had not been able to do for years, being able to choose the people; being able to choose what songs and not being told what had to be on the soundtrack. ... He was out of prison, man." Binder said of Presley's reaction, "I played Elvis the 60-minute show, and he told me in the screening room, 'Steve, it's the greatest thing I've ever done in my life. I give you my word I will never sing a song I don't believe in.'"
Presley was keen to resume regular live performing. Following the success of the Comeback Special, offers came in from around the world. The London Palladium offered Parker $28,000 for a one-week engagement. He responded, "That's fine for me, now how much can you get for Elvis?" In May, the brand new International Hotel in Las Vegas, boasting the largest showroom in the city, announced that it had booked Presley. He was scheduled to perform 57 shows over four weeks beginning July 31. Moore, Fontana, and the Jordanaires declined to participate, afraid of losing the lucrative session work they had in Nashville. Presley assembled new, top-notch accompaniment, led by guitarist James Burton and including two gospel groups, The Imperials and Sweet Inspirations. Nonetheless, he was nervous: his only previous Las Vegas engagement, in 1956, had been dismal. Parker, who intended to make Presley's return the show business event of the year, oversaw a major promotional push. For his part, hotel owner Kirk Kerkorian arranged to send his own plane to New York to fly in rock journalists for the debut performance.
Presley took to the stage without introduction. The audience of 2,200, including many celebrities, gave him a standing ovation before he sang a note and another after his performance. A third followed his encore, "Can't Help Falling in Love" (a song that would be his closing number for much of the 1970s). At a press conference after the show, when a journalist referred to him as "The King", Presley gestured toward Fats Domino, who was taking in the scene. "No," Presley said, "that's the real king of rock and roll." The next day, Parker's negotiations with the hotel resulted in a five-year contract for Presley to play each February and August, at an annual salary of $1 million. Newsweek commented, "There are several unbelievable things about Elvis, but the most incredible is his staying power in a world where meteoric careers fade like shooting stars." Rolling Stone called Presley "supernatural, his own resurrection." In November, Presley's final non-concert movie, Change of Habit, opened. The double album From Memphis To Vegas/From Vegas To Memphis came out the same month; the first LP consisted of live performances from the International, the second of more cuts from the American Sound sessions. "Suspicious Minds" reached the top of the charts—Presley's first U.S. pop number one in over seven years, and his last.
Cassandra Peterson, later television's Elvira, met Presley during this period in Las Vegas, where she was working as showgirl. She recalls of their encounter, "He was so anti-drug when I met him. I mentioned to him that I smoked marijuana, and he was just appalled. He said, 'Don't ever do that again.'" Presley was not only deeply opposed to recreational drugs, he also rarely drank. Several of his family members had been alcoholics, a fate he intended to avoid.
The album That's the Way It Is, produced to accompany the documentary and featuring both studio and live recordings, marked a stylistic shift. As music historian John Robertson notes, "The authority of Presley's singing helped disguise the fact that the album stepped decisively away from the American-roots inspiration of the Memphis sessions towards a more middle-of-the-road sound. With country put on the back burner, and soul and R&B; left in Memphis, what was left was very classy, very clean white pop—perfect for the Las Vegas crowd, but a definite retrograde step for Elvis." After the end of his International engagement on September 7, Presley embarked on a week-long concert tour, largely of the South, his first since 1958. Another week-long tour, of the West Coast, followed in November.
in the White House Oval Office, December 21, 1970]] On December 21, 1970, Presley engineered a bizarre meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House, where he expressed his patriotism and his contempt for the hippie drug culture. He asked Nixon for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge, to add to similar items he had begun collecting and to signify official sanction of his patriotic efforts. Nixon, who apparently found the encounter awkward, expressed a belief that Presley could send a positive message to young people and that it was therefore important he "retain his credibility". Presley told Nixon that The Beatles, whose songs he regularly performed in concert during the era, exemplified what he saw as a trend of anti-Americanism and drug abuse in popular culture. (Presley and his friends had had a four-hour get-together with The Beatles five years earlier.) On hearing reports of the meeting, Paul McCartney later said that he "felt a bit betrayed. ... The great joke was that we were taking [illegal] drugs, and look what happened to him", a reference to Presley's death, hastened by prescription drug abuse.
The U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named Presley one of its annual Ten Most Outstanding Young Men of the Nation on January 16, 1971. Not long after, the City of Memphis named the stretch of Highway 51 South on which Graceland is located "Elvis Presley Boulevard". The same year, Presley became the first rock and roll singer to be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award (then known as the Bing Crosby Award) by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Grammy Award organization. Three new, non-movie Presley studio albums were released in 1971, as many as had come out over the previous eight years. Best received by critics was Elvis Country, a concept record that focused on genre standards. The biggest seller was Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas, "the truest statement of all", according to Greil Marcus. "In the midst of ten painfully genteel Christmas songs, every one sung with appalling sincerity and humility, one could find Elvis tom-catting his way through six blazing minutes of 'Merry Christmas, Baby,' a raunchy old Charles Brown blues. ... If [Presley's] sin was his lifelessness, it was his sinfulness that brought him to life".
Presley and his wife, meanwhile, had become increasingly distant, barely cohabiting. In 1971, an affair he had with Joyce Bova resulted—unbeknownst to him—in her pregnancy and an abortion. He often raised the possibility of her moving in to Graceland, saying that he was likely to leave Priscilla. The Presleys separated on February 23, 1972, after Priscilla disclosed her relationship with Mike Stone, a karate instructor Presley had recommended to her. Priscilla relates that when she told him, Presley "grabbed ... and forcefully made love to" her, declaring, "This is how a real man makes love to his woman." Five months later, Presley's new girlfriend, Linda Thompson, a songwriter and one-time Memphis beauty queen, moved in with him. Presley and his wife filed for divorce on August 18.
In January 1973, Presley performed two benefit concerts for the Kui Lee Cancer Fund in connection with a groundbreaking TV special, Aloha from Hawaii. The first show served as a practice run and backup should technical problems affect the live broadcast two days later. Aired as scheduled on January 14, Aloha from Hawaii was the first global concert satellite broadcast, reaching approximately 1.5 billion viewers live and on tape delay. Presley's costume became the most recognized example of the elaborate concert garb with which his latter-day persona became closely associated. As described by Bobbie Ann Mason, "At the end of the show, when he spreads out his American Eagle cape, with the full stretched wings of the eagle studded on the back, he becomes a god figure." The , released in February, went to number one and eventually sold over 5 million copies in the United States. It proved to be Presley's last U.S. number one pop album during his lifetime.
At a midnight show the same month, four men rushed onto the stage in an apparent attack. Security men leapt to Presley's defense, and the singer's karate instinct took over as he ejected one invader from the stage himself. Following the show, he became obsessed with the idea that the men had been sent by Stone to kill him. Though they were shown to have been only overexuberant fans, he raged, "There's too much pain in me ... Stone [must] die." His outbursts continued with such intensity that a physician was unable to calm him, despite administering large doses of medication. After another two full days of raging, Red West, his friend and bodyguard, felt compelled to get a price for a contract killing and was relieved when Presley decided, "Aw hell, let's just leave it for now. Maybe it's a bit heavy."
Presley's condition declined precipitously in September. Keyboardist Tony Brown remembers the singer's arrival at a University of Maryland concert: "He fell out of the limousine, to his knees. People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, 'Don't help me.' He walked on stage and held onto the mike for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody's looking at each other like, Is the tour gonna happen?" Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, "He was all gut. He was slurring. He was so fucked up. ... It was obvious he was drugged. It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible. ... I remember crying. He could barely get through the introductions". Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, "I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move. So often I thought, 'Boss, why don't you just cancel this tour and take a year off...?' I mentioned something once in a guarded moment. He patted me on the back and said, 'It'll be all right. Don't you worry about it.'" Presley continued to play to sellout crowds. As cultural critic Marjorie Garber describes, he was now widely seen as a garish pop crooner: "in effect he had become Liberace. Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers."
On July 13, 1976, Vernon Presley—who had become deeply involved in his son's financial affairs—fired "Memphis Mafia" bodyguards Red West (Presley's friend since the 1950s), Sonny West, and David Hebler, citing the need to "cut back on expenses". Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggest the singer was too cowardly to face the three himself. Another associate of Presley's, John O'Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped because their rough treatment of fans had prompted too many lawsuits. However, Presley's stepbrother David Stanley has claimed that the bodyguards were fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley's drug dependency. Presley and Linda Thompson split in November, and he took up with a new girlfriend, Ginger Alden. He proposed to Alden and gave her an engagement ring two months later, though several of his friends later claimed that he had no serious intention of marrying again.
RCA, which had enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley for over a decade, grew anxious as his interest in spending time in the studio waned. After a December 1973 session that produced 18 songs, enough for almost two albums, he did not enter the studio in 1974. Parker sold RCA on another concert record, . Recorded on March 20, it included a version of "How Great Thou Art" that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award. (All three of his competitive Grammy wins—out of 14 total nominations—were for gospel recordings.) Presley returned to the studio in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker's attempts to arrange another session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful. In 1976, RCA sent a mobile studio to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley's home. Even in that comfortable context, the recording process was now a struggle for him.
}} For all the concerns of his label and manager, in studio sessions between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the entire contents of six albums. Though he was no longer a major presence on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land (1975), From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody Blue (1977). The story was similar with his singles—there were no major pop hits, but Presley was a significant force in not just the country market, but on adult contemporary radio as well. Eight studio singles from this period released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both charts, four in 1974 alone. "My Boy" was a number one AC hit in 1975, and "Moody Blue" topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the AC in 1976. Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came that year, with what Greil Marcus described as his "apocalyptic attack" on the soul classic "Hurt". "If he felt the way he sounded", Dave Marsh wrote of Presley's performance, "the wonder isn't that he had only a year left to live but that he managed to survive that long."
The book Elvis: What Happened?, cowritten by the three bodyguards fired the previous year, was published on August 1. It was the first exposé to detail Presley's years of drug misuse. He was devastated by the book and tried unsuccessfully to halt its release by offering money to the publishers. By this point, he suffered from multiple ailments—glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, each aggravated, and possibly caused, by drug abuse.
Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis on the evening of August 16, 1977, to begin another tour. That afternoon, Alden discovered him unresponsive on his bathroom floor. Attempts to revive him failed, and death was officially pronounced at 3:30 pm at Baptist Memorial Hospital.
President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that credited Presley with having "permanently changed the face of American popular culture". Thousands of people gathered outside Graceland to view the open casket. One of Presley's cousins, Billy Mann, accepted $18,000 to secretly photograph the corpse; the picture appeared on the cover of the National Enquirers biggest-selling issue ever. Alden struck a $105,000 deal with the Enquirer for her story, but settled for less when she broke her exclusivity agreement. Presley left her nothing in his will.
Presley's funeral was held at Graceland, on Thursday, August 18. Outside the gates, a car plowed into a group of fans, killing two women and critically injuring a third. Approximately 80,000 people lined the processional route to Forest Hill Cemetery, where Presley was buried next to his mother. Within a few days, "Way Down" topped the country and UK pop charts. Following an attempt to steal the singer's body in late August, the remains of both Elvis Presley and his mother were reburied in Graceland's Meditation Garden on October 2.
Presley has been inducted into four music halls of fame: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986), the Country Music Hall of Fame (1998), the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2001), and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame (2007). In 1984, he received the W. C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation and the Academy of Country Music's first Golden Hat Award. In 1987, he received the American Music Awards' Award of Merit.
A Junkie XL remix of Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" (credited as "Elvis Vs JXL") was used in a Nike advertising campaign during the 2002 FIFA World Cup. It topped the charts in over 20 countries, and was included in a compilation of Presley's number one hits, ELV1S, that was also an international success. In 2003, a remix of "Rubberneckin'", a 1969 recording of Presley's, topped the U.S. sales chart, as did a 50th-anniversary re-release of "That's All Right" the following year. The latter was an outright hit in Great Britain, reaching number three on the pop chart.
In 2005, another three reissued singles, "Jailhouse Rock", "One Night"/"I Got Stung", and "It's Now or Never", went to number one in Great Britain. A total of 17 Presley singles were reissued during the year—all made the British top five. For the fifth straight year, Forbes named Presley the top-earning deceased celebrity, with a gross income of $45 million. In 2009, he was ranked fourth. The following year, Viva Elvis: The Album was released, setting his voice to newly recorded instrumental tracks.
Presley holds the records for most songs charting in Billboards top 40 and top 100: chart statistician Joel Whitburn calculates the respective totals as 104 and 151; Presley historian Adam Victor gives 114 and 138. Presley's rankings for top ten and number one hits vary depending on how the double-sided "Hound Dog/Don't Be Cruel" and "Don't/I Beg of You" singles, which precede the inception of Billboards unified Hot 100 chart, are analyzed. According to Whitburn, Presley holds the record for most top ten hits with 38; per Billboards current assessment, he ranks second with 36 behind Madonna's 37. Whitburn and Billboard concur that The Beatles hold the record for most number one hits with 20 and that Mariah Carey is second with 18. Whitburn has Presley also with 18 and thus tied for second; Billboard has him third with 17. Presley retains the record for cumulative weeks at number one: alone at 80, according to Whitburn and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; tied with Carey at 79, according to Billboard. He holds the records for most British number one hits, with 21, and top ten hits, with 76.
At RCA, Presley's rock and roll sound grew distinct from rockabilly with group chorus vocals, more heavily amplified electric guitars and a tougher, more intense manner. While he was known for taking songs from various sources and giving them a rockabilly/rock and roll treatment, he also recorded songs in other genres from early in his career, from the pop standard "Blue Moon" at Sun to the country ballad "How's the World Treating You?" on his second LP to the blues of "Santa Claus Is Back In Town". In 1957, his first gospel record was released, the four-song EP Peace in the Valley. Certified as a million seller, it became the top-selling gospel EP in recording history. Presley would record gospel periodically for the rest of his life. }} After his return from military service in 1960, Presley continued to perform rock and roll, but the characteristic style was substantially toned down. His first post-Army single, the number one hit "Stuck on You", is typical of this shift. RCA publicity materials referred to its "mild rock beat"; discographer Ernst Jorgensen calls it "upbeat pop". The modern blues/R&B; sound captured so successfully on Elvis Is Back! was essentially abandoned for six years until such 1966–67 recordings as "Down in the Alley" and "Hi-Heel Sneakers". The singer's output during most of the 1960s emphasized pop music, often in the form of ballads such as "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", a number one in 1960. While that was a dramatic number, most of what Presley recorded for his movie soundtracks was in a much lighter vein.
While Presley performed several of his classic ballads for the '68 Comeback Special, the sound of the show was dominated by aggressive rock and roll. He would record few new straight-ahead rock and roll songs thereafter; as he explained, they were "hard to find". A significant exception was "Burning Love", his last major hit on the pop charts. Like his work of the 1950s, Presley's subsequent recordings reworked pop and country songs, but in markedly different permutations. His stylistic range now began to embrace a more contemporary rock sound as well as soul and funk. Much of Elvis In Memphis, as well as "Suspicious Minds", cut at the same sessions, reflected his new rock and soul fusion. In the mid-1970s, many of his singles found a home on country radio, the field where he first became a star.
The competence and ethics of two of the centrally involved medical professionals were seriously questioned. Before the autopsy was complete and toxicology results known, Medical Examiner Dr. Jerry Francisco declared the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, a condition that can be determined only in someone who is still alive. Allegations of a cover-up were widespread. While Presley's main physician, Dr. Nichopoulos, was exonerated of criminal liability for the singer's death, the facts were startling: "In the first eight months of 1977 alone, he had [prescribed] more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics: all in Elvis's name." His license was suspended for three months. It was permanently revoked in the 1990s after the Tennessee Medical Board brought new charges of over-prescription.
In 1994, the Presley autopsy was reopened. Coroner Dr. Joseph Davis declared, "There is nothing in any of the data that supports a death from drugs. In fact, everything points to a sudden, violent heart attack." Whether or not combined drug intoxication was in fact the cause, there is little doubt that polypharmacy contributed significantly to Presley's premature death.
Despite the largely positive view of Presley held by African Americans, a rumor spread in mid-1957 that he had at some point announced, "The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." A journalist with the national African American weekly Jet, Louie Robinson, pursued the story. On the set of Jailhouse Rock, Presley granted him an interview, though he was no longer dealing with the mainstream press. He denied making such a statement or holding in any way to its racist view. Robinson found no evidence that the remark had ever been made, and on the contrary elicited testimony from many individuals indicating that Presley was anything but racist. Blues singer Ivory Joe Hunter, who had heard the rumor before he visited Graceland one evening, reported of Presley, "He showed me every courtesy, and I think he's one of the greatest." Though the rumored remark was wholly discredited at the time, it was still being used against Presley decades later. The identification of Presley with racism—either personally or symbolically—was expressed most famously in the lyrics of the 1989 rap hit "Fight the Power", by Public Enemy: "Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me / Straight-up racist that sucker was / Simple and plain."
The persistence of such attitudes was fueled by resentment over the fact that Presley, whose musical and visual performance idiom owed much to African American sources, achieved the cultural acknowledgment and commercial success largely denied his black peers. Into the 21st century, the notion that Presley had "stolen" black music still found adherents. Notable among African American entertainers expressly rejecting this view was Jackie Wilson, who argued, "A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man's music, when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis." And throughout his career, Presley plainly acknowledged his debt. Addressing his '68 Comeback Special audience, he said, "Rock 'n' roll music is basically gospel or rhythm and blues, or it sprang from that. People have been adding to it, adding instruments to it, experimenting with it, but it all boils down to [that]." Nine years earlier, he had said, "Rock 'n' roll has been around for many years. It used to be called rhythm and blues."
By 1967, Parker had contracts with Presley that gave him 50 percent of most of the singer's earnings on recordings, films, and merchandise. Beginning in February 1972, he took a third of the profit from live appearances; a January 1976 agreement entitled him to half of that as well. Priscilla Presley noted that "Elvis detested the business side of his career. He would sign a contract without even reading it." Presley's friend Marty Lacker regarded Parker as a "hustler and a con artist. He was only interested in 'now money'—get the buck and get gone."
Lacker was instrumental in convincing Presley to record with Memphis producer Chips Moman and his handpicked musicians at American Sound Studio in early 1969. The American Sound sessions represented a significant departure from the control customarily exerted by Hill and Range. Moman still had to deal with the publisher's staff on site, whose song suggestions he regarded as unacceptable. He was on the verge of quitting, until Presley ordered the Hill and Range personnel out of the studio. Although RCA executive Joan Deary was later full of praise for the producer's song choices and the quality of the recordings, Moman, to his fury, received neither credit on the records nor royalties for his work.
Throughout his entire career, Presley performed in only three venues outside the United States—all of them in Canada, during brief tours there in 1957. Rumors that he would play overseas for the first time were fueled in 1974 by a million-dollar bid for an Australian tour. Parker was uncharacteristically reluctant, prompting those close to Presley to speculate about the manager's past and the reasons for his apparent unwillingness to apply for a passport. Parker ultimately squelched any notions Presley had of working abroad, claiming that foreign security was poor and venues unsuitable for a star of his magnitude.
Parker arguably exercised tightest control over Presley's movie career. In 1957, Robert Mitchum asked Presley to costar with him in Thunder Road, on which Mitchum was both writer and producer. According to George Klein, one of his oldest friends, Presley was offered starring roles in West Side Story and Midnight Cowboy. In 1974, Barbra Streisand approached Presley to star with her in the remake of A Star is Born. In each case, any ambitions the singer may have had to play such parts were thwarted by his manager's negotiating demands or flat refusals. In Lacker's description, "The only thing that kept Elvis going after the early years was a new challenge. But Parker kept running everything into the ground." The operative attitude may have been summed up best by the response Leiber and Stoller received when they brought a serious film project for Presley to Parker and the Hill and Range owners for their consideration. In Leiber's telling, Jean Aberbach warned them to never again "try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the process known as Elvis Presley".
Larry Geller became Presley's hairdresser in 1964. Unlike others in the Memphis Mafia, he was interested in spiritual questions and recalls how, from their first conversation, Presley revealed his secret thoughts and anxieties: "I mean there has to be a purpose...there's got to be a reason...why I was chosen to be Elvis Presley. ... I swear to God, no one knows how lonely I get. And how empty I really feel." Thereafter, Geller supplied him with books on religion and mysticism, which the singer read voraciously. Presley would be preoccupied by such matters for much of his life, taking trunkloads of books with him on tour.
While Presley was marketed as an icon of heterosexuality, some cultural critics have argued that his image was ambiguous. In 1959, Sight and Sounds Peter John Dyer described his onscreen persona as "aggressively bisexual in appeal". Brett Farmer places the "orgasmic gyrations" of the title dance sequence in Jailhouse Rock within a lineage of cinematic musical numbers that offer a "spectacular eroticization, if not homoeroticization, of the male image". In the analysis of Yvonne Tasker, "Elvis was an ambivalent figure who articulated a peculiar feminised, objectifying version of white working-class masculinity as aggressive sexual display."
Reinforcing Presley's image as a sex symbol were the reports of his dalliances with various Hollywood stars and starlets, from Natalie Wood in the 1950s to Connie Stevens and Ann-Margret in the 1960s to Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd in the 1970s. June Juanico of Memphis, one of Presley's early girlfriends, later blamed Parker for encouraging him to choose his dating partners with publicity in mind. Presley, however, never grew comfortable with the Hollywood scene, and most of these relationships were insubstantial.
Presley's rise to national attention in 1956 transformed the field of popular music and had a huge effect on the broader scope of popular culture. As the catalyst for the cultural revolution that was rock and roll, he was central not only to defining it as a musical genre but in making it a touchstone of youth culture and rebellious attitude. With its racially mixed origins—repeatedly affirmed by Presley—rock and roll's occupation of a central position in mainstream American culture facilitated a new acceptance and appreciation of black culture. In this regard, Little Richard said of Presley, "He was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn't let black music through. He opened the door for black music." Al Green agreed: "He broke the ice for all of us." Presley also heralded the vastly expanded reach of celebrity in the era of mass communication: at the age of 21, within a year of his first appearance on American network television, he was one of the most famous people in the world. in 1988]]
Presley's name, image, and voice are instantly recognizable around the globe. He has inspired a legion of impersonators. In polls and surveys, he is recognized as one of the most important popular music artists and influential Americans. "Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century", said composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. "He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything—music, language, clothes. It's a whole new social revolution—the sixties came from it." Bob Dylan described the sensation of first hearing Presley as "like busting out of jail".
A New York Times editorial on the 25th anniversary of Presley's death observed, "All the talentless impersonators and appalling black velvet paintings on display can make him seem little more than a perverse and distant memory. But before Elvis was camp, he was its opposite: a genuine cultural force. ... Elvis's breakthroughs are underappreciated because in this rock-and-roll age, his hard-rocking music and sultry style have triumphed so completely." Not only Presley's achievements, but his failings as well, are seen by some cultural observers as adding to the power of his legacy, as in this description by Greil Marcus:
Elvis Presley is a supreme figure in American life, one whose presence, no matter how banal or predictable, brooks no real comparisons. ... The cultural range of his music has expanded to the point where it includes not only the hits of the day, but also patriotic recitals, pure country gospel, and really dirty blues. ... Elvis has emerged as a great artist, a great rocker, a great purveyor of schlock, a great heart throb, a great bore, a great symbol of potency, a great ham, a great nice person, and, yes, a great American.
A vast number of recordings have been issued under Presley's name. The total number of his original master recordings has been variously calculated as 665 and 711. His career began and he was most successful during an era when singles were the primary commercial medium for pop music. In the case of his albums, the distinction between "official" studio records and other forms is often blurred. In addition, for most of the 1960s, his recording career focused on soundtrack albums. In the 1970s, his most heavily promoted and best-selling LP releases tended to be concert albums. This summary discography lists only the albums and singles that reached the top of one or more of the following charts: the main U.S. Billboard pop chart; the Billboard country chart, the genre chart with which he was most identified (there was no country album chart before 1964); and the official British pop chart. In the United States, Presley also had five or six number one R&B; singles and seven number one adult contemporary singles; in 1964, his "Blue Christmas" topped the Christmas singles chart during a period when Billboard did not rank holiday singles in its primary pop chart. He had number one hits in many countries beside the United States and United Kingdom, as well.
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