Matthew Martin – Memphis Flyer

The July edition of the Time Warp Drive-In is devoted to a director whose work is more often associated with the art house than the drive-in. On the occasion of what would have been Stanley Kubrick’s 86th birthday, Malco’s Summer Drive-In will host an all-night marathon of the director’s work. Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy, who, along with Black Lodge Video’s Matthew Martin, programs the monthly events, says that Kubrick’s influence stretched far beyond film.

“Kubrick created worlds,” McCarthy says. “A hippie, like David Bowie, could enter the theater, inhabit the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and exit as something else.” The character of David Bowman, the astronaut who ends 2001: A Space Odyssey “lost in space,” inspired Bowie’s first hit, “Space Oddity.” Kubrick’s next film, 1971’s A Clockwork Orange, would similarly inspire the look of Glam rock and the attitude of punk rock.

The evening of films will begin with what is probably Kubrick’s most popular work, 1980’s The Shining, a masterful adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. With Kubrick, who started out as a photographer for Look magazine in 1946, the richness of his images conveys the richness of his ideas. A common criticism of Kubrick’s style is that the performances are flat or cold. But that is a misreading of what the director was trying to do, for it is not the actors who are emoting, but the man behind the camera. The Shining, while filled with luscious images, is an exception. In Jack Nicholson, Kubrick met his artistic match, much as he had 20 years earlier when he did Paths Of Glory and Spartacus with Kirk Douglas.

A Clockwork Orange

The evening continues with another literary adaptation, A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess spoke more favorably of the film than King does of The Shining, but Kubrick made both texts jumping off points for his meticulous, arresting imagery. The near-future dystopia is dominated by Malcolm McDowell as Alex, a middle-class street thug obsessed with classical music whose path to redemption is almost as ethically queasy as his ritualistic ultraviolence.

Even though A Clockwork Orange was initially rated X for violence, its body count pales next to Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In 1961, Kubrick set out to make a serious movie about the dangers of nuclear war. But the more he read about the Cold War doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” the more absurd it seemed. So Kubrick made the radical decision to turn his film into a comedy by bringing onboard writer Terry Southern and comedic super-genius Peter Sellers. Even taken apart from its Cold War context, Dr. Strangelove is a clear triumph and still one of the most important comedies ever made. That the civilization-ending mass killing is, in retrospect, somehow more acceptable than Alex’s mundane street thuggery is just part of the joke.

The last film on the drive-in program is Kubrick’s biggest and most intimidating masterpiece. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not only the greatest science fiction movie ever made, it placed second behind only Ozu’s Tokyo Story in the 2012 Sight & Sound Directors’ poll of the greatest films ever. Every shot is a meticulous work of art in its own right, and taken together, they offer too much to comprehend in one sitting. But the pleasure of returning to unravel works of genius is part of what gives Kubrick’s films their enduring power.

Automotive and film technology came of age at roughly the same time, and cars have always been a particular source of fascination for filmmakers. When the first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey in 1933, it was the beginning of a potent and inevitable synergy between two of America’s favorite cultural forces. Movies sold the dream of freedom, and cars became the most prominent and expensive symbols of that freedom. People would pay to sit in their cars and watch movies about cars.

The theme of the next edition of the popular Time Warp Drive-In series (running the last Saturday of each month through October) is Hell On Wheels, which gave the organizers, filmmaker Mike McCarthy and Black Lodge Video proprietor Matthew Martin, plenty of choices for programming.

The night will kick off with George Lucas’ American Graffiti. The film was Lucas’ first big hit, made after the studio-destroying dystopian sci-fi film THX 1138 had all but ended his career. Few films can claim the deep cultural impact of Lucas’ Star Wars, but American Graffiti comes close. Its meandering, multi-character story structure bears a resemblance to Robert Altman or Richard Linklater’s work but is utterly unlike the Hero’s Journey plots that would come to be associated with Lucas’ later work. Still, Lucas’ techno-fetishism is on full display with the loving beauty shots of classic autos designed in the days before wind tunnels and ubiquitous seat belts.

Even though the film was set in 1962, the chronicle of aimless youth cruising around a sleepy California town kicked off a wave of nostalgia for all things 1950s. The pre-British Invasion rock-and-roll and doo-wop soundtrack became one of the best selling film soundtracks in history, and Ron Howard — who, as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, was himself a bit of TV nostalgia — and Cindy Williams would ride the popularity of American Graffiti into starring roles on Happy Days and its spinoff, Laverene & Shirley. It also marked the big break of a struggling actor and part-time carpenter named Harrison Ford.

The second Hell on Wheels film, Two-Lane Blacktop, is a classic hot rod movie from 1971 starring James Taylor (yes, that James Taylor) and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. If American Graffiti manifested America’s longing for a simpler time before the social upheaval of the 1960s, Two-Lane Blacktop was one of the counterculture’s dying gasps. It’s an Easy Rider-like plot with muscle cars: Two nameless street racers heading east from California challenge a square (Warren Oates) to a cross-country race to Washington, D.C. The dialog is sparse and the performances fairly flat, but the real point of Two-Lane Blacktop is the wide-open vistas of a now-vanished America.

The third film of the night, 1968’s Bullitt, is similarly light on dialog, but it is the opposite of counterculture. Steve McQueen at his sexiest plays a homicide cop trying to solve the murder of a mob informant. McQueen’s Frank Bullitt is the prototype of the “playing by his own rules” cop that would become so familiar in later films, but the movie’s real significance lies in the epic car chase that sees McQueen driving an iconic 1968 fastback Mustang through the streets of San Francisco set to Lalo Schifrin’s swinging jazz score. The oft-imitated but never equaled scene is worth the price of admission for the entire evening.

The program closes with Robert Mitchum playing a Tennessee bootlegger in1953’s legendary Thunder Road. Mitchum co-wrote the screenplay and produced the movie, which tells the story of a Korean War vet’s turbulent return to the violent world of moonshiners and flophouses. The noir-inflected film served as the template for dozens of hot rod exploitation stories, taught greasers to emulate Mitchum’s laconic cool, and even inspired Bruce Springsteen to write a song about it. It’s a fitting capper to a night of burning rubber and tail fins.