Forty years ago last Wednesday (April 2. 1968), 2001: A Space Odyssey had it’s world premiere. At Movie City Indie, Ray Pride has a set of links to, among other things, some of the critical reaction at the time, including this quote from Roger Ebert:

It was e. e. cummings, the poet, who said he’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance. I imagine cummings would not have enjoyed Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which stars dance but birds do not sing. The fascinating thing about this film is that it fails on the human level but succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale.

Beyond that impossibly-labored set-up (Ebert had only been at the Sun Times a year), the most striking thing is that this absolutely seminal film, which has been dissected in film classes and quoted in countless lesser films (There Will Be Blood, anyone?), got some pretty ho-hum reviews when it premiered. I remember seeing it myself for the first time, ten years later, on the big screen at a college campus, and I came away saying “eh . . .” (Looking back, it was perhaps more the presence of quantities of a certain liquid in my system than the quality of the film that produced the reaction).

It brings back the premiere of Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut, which got some pretty so-so reviews. Here’s some copy from Andrew Sarris, in the New York Observer:

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut . . . did not live up to all its advance hoopla at the press screening I attended, but then what could, short of the Second Coming? There was no applause, but there was no booing, either, and this is where the movie stands, halfway between hit and flop, Viennese sausage and chopped liver, ridiculously though intellectually overhyped for the very marginal entertainment, edification and titillation it provides over its somewhat turgid 159-minute running time.

Ouch. I’d hate to see what Sarris thought was an all-the-way flop . . .

When I first saw Eyes Wide Shut, on DVD, I was puzzled by it at first, wondering what it was all about, then when I watched it again I could better appreciate it. It created in me a creepy sense of dread, of something about to happen, that not many films are able to do. Of course, it benefited from some timely casting: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were going through a messy, public divorce at the time.

But, anyway, I wonder: will Kubrick’s last film be, eventually, as revered as 2001? Will it be seen as a fitting end to a true master’s career, or a mediocre coda? Time will tell.

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