SOURCE: “Admiring the Unpredictable Mr. Kubrick,” in NYT, June 21, 1987, pp. 34, 36.

In the following essay, Babe reflects on Kubrick's career and anticipates the release of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.

It was about eight months ago when I first heard that Stanley Kubrick was making a film dealing with Vietnam, called Full Metal Jacket. Holding Mr. Kubrick's work in the high esteem that I do—and having attempted to write about the war in a number of ways and from a number of angles—I was immediately intrigued. The fact that Michael Herr, who had written Dispatches, an amazing book about the war, was involved only increased my interest. The person to whom I was speaking said the movie was based on a novel, The Short-Timers, by Gustav Hasford, and that it contained one of the scariest scenes my friend had ever read. It sounded like this material was right...