A KUBRICK ODYSSEY; MAVERICK'S FILM LEGACY LIMITED YET OVERPOWERING.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

The one comforting thought about Stanley Kubrick's death on Sunday is that it probably hasn't robbed the world of too many great films. He only made four features during the last quarter century, including the just-completed erotic thriller ``Eyes Wide Shut,'' which is scheduled for release in July.

And that's the 70-year-old genius' first production in 12 years, so how many more could we reasonably expect?

The loss of even one more Kubrick film, however, is an incalculable tragedy. Kubrick directed only 13 feature films during a 46-year career. But that relatively modest body of work was arguably the most accomplished and influential of any American filmmaker's beside Orson Welles.

Always a technical innovator and more often than not a breathtakingly original conceptualist, Kubrick pioneered - and at the same time perfected - much of what late 20th-century American cinema came to be about.

On the formal front, the photo-realistic special effects of ``2001: A Space Odyssey'' (1968) set the standard for the universe of science-fiction films that followed (though nothing in the genre has come near approximating the film's visual poetry and intelligence). Kubrick integrated music for dramatic emphasis and irony into his movies in a whole new way while MTV directors were still in diapers. And even if the historical satire ``Barry Lyndon'' (1975) was designed on an epic pictorial scale, its groundbreaking use of natural, low light sources paved the way for much of the intimately focused independent filmmaking that followed.

Kubrick was no less canny when it came to subject matter. He found expression for such driving themes as contempt for authority and the fragile, illusory nature of civilization in a kaleidoscopic variety of styles and genres. Each new film was completely fresh and different from the others, yet most of them spoke with a remarkably sharp, often prescient voice to the issues of Kubrick's radically changing times.

After some noirish explorations that culminated in the masterful, multiviewpoint heist caper ``The Killing'' (1956), Kubrick's fourth feature, ``Paths of Glory'' (1957), was an outraged indictment of military mismanagement years before the Vietnam War heated up. In 1964, at the height of America's plunge into that quagmire, Kubrick dropped ``Dr. Strangelove,'' the blackest, funniest and smartest of Cold War comedies.

In between, with the unavoidably self-censored but still ruthlessly witty ``Lolita'' (1962), Kubrick challenged society's self-congratulatory plunge into the sexual revolution, pointing out way ahead of his time that personal freedom had its limits, both morally and emotionally.

With ``2001,'' Kubrick broke all the rules of Hollywood narrative, literally shifting a story through time and space with no effort to explain the connections. Yet the implications he coolly, elliptically touched on were as profound as any film ever has achieved.

More than any other Kubrick film, ``2001'' explored the link between mankind's destructive and creative impulses. It looked at how our minds (represented at the extreme by the mad computer Hal) and our souls (the star child) controlled our destinies - and by doing so became one of the few truly spiritual films ever made.

And it was, as the hippies instantly realized, a trip. Not only did ``2001'' approximate the psychedelic experience better than any film before or since, it established the concept of movie-as-ride, a primarily sensory entertainment. That approach has come to dominate big-budget filmmaking in the decades since; but in all that time and footage, the abstract elegance of Kubrick's original design never has been equaled.

``A Clockwork Orange'' (1971) foresaw the violent disintegration of urban youth culture - and the reactionary social policies that went right along with it. It also predicted the saturation of media, and the sometimes frightening efforts to manipulate it, that has come to define the Information Age.

Many feel ``Clockwork'' was Kubrick's last great film. But the three we've seen since - ``Lyndon,'' ``The Shining'' (1980) and ``Full Metal Jacket'' (1987) - all possess high degrees of design genius and thematic consistency. All three are wisely disillusioned, steeped in the chilling realization that madness is a stronger force than idealism or rationality - especially when, whether in the guise of 18th-century aristocrats, Jack Nicholson's father figure or a pathological drill sergeant, the insanity rests in figures we invest with power.

``Eyes Wide Shut,'' if stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and the few Warner Bros. executives who've seen it are to be believed, could be Kubrick's crowning statement on the subject. From what little we know, it's about psychiatrists succumbing to their own obsessions - a story Kubrick hadn't previously made a movie about, but a subject he certainly understood intimately.

As controlling a perfectionist as he was a dyed-in-the-wool maverick (the New York-bred director moved to England in the 1960s in order to remain as far away as possible from studio interference), Kubrick oversaw every aspect of his productions from inception to marketing campaign. He kept his sets closed and his artistic strategies to himself and the few collaborators he needed to help realize them. He was known for driving actors mad with upward of 100 takes, sometimes of the simplest shots. Indeed, the shooting schedule for ``Eyes Wide Shut'' is believed to have been the longest in movie history.

Some have noted rather ghoulishly that Kubrick died within days of completing the first (and now, last) ``Eyes'' cut he felt was worth showing to anybody - as if the effort required all the life left in the aging artist. That's a little too cozy a connection, especially in regard to a tough-minded individualist like Kubrick.

There is some hard irony, though, in the thought that Kubrick died a year shy of the millennium, never to see the 2001 he so unforgettably imagined decades earlier. That vision will inspire filmmakers and audiences well into the next century, perhaps beyond.

If anybody was a filmmaker for the ages, it was Stanley Kubrick.

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1) Director Stanley Kubrick, pictured in 1975, died Sunday. His last film, the just-completed ``Eyes Wide Shut,'' is scheduled for release in July.

Associated Press 

(2--4) Stanley Kubrick's films included, clockwise, from top, ``A Clockwork Orange'' (1971), with Malcolm McDowell; ``The Shining'' (1980), with Jack Nicholson; and ``Full Metal Jacket'' (1987), with Lee Ermey.