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THE SHELF
ALL THIRTEEN, IN ORDER, WITH THE CLERK'S NOTES

1953	FEAR AND DESIRE Soldiers lost behind the lines in a war with no name. He was twenty-four. Later he called it amateur and did his best to keep anyone from seeing it, and honestly, he was right. Only for completists. We don't carry it.
1955	KILLER'S KISS A boxer, a dancer, a bad man, New York at night. Barely over an hour long. Worth it for the fight at the end in a warehouse full of mannequins, which is exactly as creepy as it sounds.
1956	THE KILLING Sterling Hayden and a racetrack robbery, told out of order, jumping back and forth in time. Every guy who's made a heist movie since has watched this one. You can tell which ones.
1957	PATHS OF GLORY Kirk Douglas, the French army in the First World War, and three soldiers put on trial after an attack that could never have worked. The angriest film he ever made. The young German woman who sings at the very end became his wife, and stayed his wife for forty-one years. Don't let anybody tell you he wasn't a romantic.
1960	SPARTACUS Kirk Douglas again, and this time Kirk was also the producer. Kubrick took over after the first director left in the first weeks. It's the one film that wasn't really his, and he never pretended otherwise. Still a great big Saturday afternoon of a movie. Rent both tapes.
1962	LOLITA From the Nabokov novel, with James Mason, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon, and Peter Sellers walking off with every scene he's in. The first one made in England. Grown-ups only, and not the book, but smarter than you'd expect.
1964	DR. STRANGELOVE Full title: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Sellers plays three parts, George C. Scott chews up the War Room, and Slim Pickens takes the ride of his life. A comedy about nuclear war, made in 1964, and it's still the funniest thing on my shelf.
1968	2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY Written with Arthur C. Clarke. Apes, a black slab, a space station turning to "The Blue Danube," and a computer named HAL with the calmest voice in the history of film. The cut from the bone to the satellite is the best edit anybody ever made, and I'll arm-wrestle you over it. His one Oscar.
1971	A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Malcolm McDowell, from the Anthony Burgess novel. Brilliant and hard to sit through, on purpose. He pulled it out of British theaters himself a couple of years after it came out, and to this day you can't see it there. I don't rent it to kids no matter whose card they're using.
1975	BARRY LYNDON Ryan O'Neal, a Thackeray novel, eighteenth-century Europe. Three hours. He shot the candlelit scenes by real candlelight, with camera lenses originally made for NASA. It won the Oscar for cinematography, and every frame shows why. My personal favorite. Most people's least favorite. We're both right.
1980	THE SHINING Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, a snowed-in hotel, and a little boy on a Big Wheel rolling down those hallways, with the Steadicam gliding right behind him. Stephen King famously doesn't care for it. The outside of the hotel is a real lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. I've driven past it. I did not stop.
1987	FULL METAL JACKET Vietnam, from Gustav Hasford's novel, and all of it shot in England, with an old gasworks in London standing in for the city of Hue. The first half is boot camp with R. Lee Ermey, who had been a real Marine drill instructor, and you will sit up straighter the whole time. The second half is the war.
1999	EYES WIDE SHUT Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, from a novella by Arthur Schnitzler. Set in New York, shot almost all in England, and filmed for well over a year. Still in theaters as I type this, so it isn't on our shelf yet. When it comes in, there will be a space next to it where the fourteenth one would have gone. I'm going to leave the space.

And the ones we'll never see: he spent years in the late sixties researching a film about Napoleon, and had the whole thing planned down to the costumes, and it never got made. Everybody who writes about it sounds heartbroken, and I get it. I like to think the whole thing is still in a filing cabinet somewhere in England, and I'd give a lot for one afternoon with it.

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Last updated September 19, 1999