Devils in the Streets
Stanley Kubrick at the Museum of the City of New York
Think about the kind of guy who’d call you a doll and compliment your figure, your stems, your racy midi-skirt. A fella. This fella plays grab-ass with you in seedy bars and worships at the Church of Two-Martini Lunches. He’s bold only because no dame has had the stones to sock him in the eye, and if you lead him on long enough, you may be the privileged first.
Ready your knuckles, it’s going to be a feisty day at Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs, presented by the Museum of the City of New York.
Before he was a filmmaker, Kubrick was a photographer in the ‘40s, capturing all the then-acceptable things that are now the fuel of #metoo. His perfectionism tempered his natural inclination for the provocative and controversial work seen in the exhibition, which features more than 120 images from the museum’s Look Magazine archive.
Kubrick was drawn to shadowy alleys, scaffolding, and nightclubs – the places to which two horny 20-somethings might run for a quickie were his domain, and he made no attempt to feign interest in other areas. The devilish gangsters and pearl-wearing sirens of the ‘50s were perfect sharpeners for his charcoal vision. What else could you possibly expect from the mind that thrust A Clockwork Orange on film?
If New York City gets you hot, if pinup babes are your ultimate muse, or if the idea of roughing up a mid-century chauvinist turns you on, then baby, feast your eyes on this.
