KUBRICK’S FIRST FEATURE WILL SURFACE ON HOME VIDEO

Fear and Desire, Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, reportedly made for $10,000 and originally released theatrically in a single New York art house in 1953, has been restored and is due to be released on DVD and Blu-ray by Kino Classics on Oct. 23. Since the 1953 release, it has been seen only by a handful of film buffs. It has now been restored under the auspices of the Library of Congress following the discovery of a negative in a defunct film lab in Puerto Rico. Although Kubrick reportedly hated the film — he had called it “a bumbling amateur film exercise” — and stories have appeared describing how he attempted to destroy every existing print, film historians have dismissed those accounts as part of the “Kubrick myth.” In an interview with Britain’s Empire magazine, Craig Keller, producer of the Masters of Cinema Series, which is releasing the film in the U.K. through Eureka Entertainment, said, “This gorgeous restoration, which can at last be widely circulated, stands as a forceful affirmation of the picture’s qualities and historical importance. All of Kubrick is already present, even in nascent form, in Fear And Desire. Stanley Kubrick’s millions of fans are likely to find it of a piece with his astonishing body of work.”