Stanley's Girlfriend (2006) User Reviews

A nice return to form for director Monte Hellman

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 19 February 2016]

B-movie director Leo (an excellent and engaging performance by Tahmoh Penikett) befriends promising up and coming director Stanley (ably played with quiet assurance and authority by Tygh Runyan). Everything is fine until one day Stanley hooks up with mysterious new girlfriend Nina (a deliciously seductive portrayal by the alluring Amelia Cooke).

Director Monte Hellman not only does a masterful job of crafting a vivid nifty 1950's film noir atmosphere, but also pays wonderfully affectionate tribute to legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Cooke's smoldering and magnetic presence adds a considerable amount of erotic tension. Dennis Bartok's clever script offers a crafty blend of vintage film lore and subtle supernatural horror. Zoran Popovic's gorgeous muted cinematography provides a sumptuously smoky'n'stylish look. John Saxon acquits himself well as an older and more regretful Leo. Well worth a watch.

Mildly sinister episode inspired by early career of Stanley Kubrick

[genet-1 · 5/10 · 2 December 2006]

Hollywood in the 1950s. Leo, a mediocre young director of exploitation pictures, is befriended by Stanley, another newcomer, but already marked for greatness. They meet frequently to play chess, and become close friends, so Leo is startled when loner Stanley suddenly introduces the uninhibited, sensual Nina, to whom Leo is also attracted. When Stanley departs for Europe to shoot "a movie about the First World War", leaving them together, they enjoy some savage sex, after which she unaccountably disappears.

Leo and Stanley never meet again, but when the latter dies after a brilliant career, the aging Leo, still a hack (now played by John Saxon), receives two rolls of film. In one, Stanley reveals that Nina was some sort of immortal succubus who preyed on men, and confesses that he fled to Europe to escape her, throwing Leo in her path. The second film shows Nina acting in a silent Hungarian vampire film from the early 1900s. Driven by obscure motives, Leo shoots himself.

Monte Hellman was the logical director of this piece, the only halfway interesting episode of the otherwise dismal TRAPPED ASHES. He belonged to the circle of young directors and writers,among them Curtis Harrington, Gavin Lambert and Alexander Singer, who knew Kubrick and partner James Harris during his Hollywood period - 1956-1961. The soft-spoken, expressionless Stanley, authentic shadowy Californian interiors, and motif of chess - a life-long Kubrick preoccupation - add verisimilitude, but the lack of any overt horror, aside from some sensual clawing of Leo by Nina, and the diminuendo ending, make it sit ill among its gaudy and grisly companions.

All the same, the story has intriguing parallels to Kubrick's private life. At the time, he was married to Ruth Sobotka, a sensual, flamboyant brunette of European extraction, and their marriage foundered at just this point in his career, apparently over a sexual incident in her past life to which Kubrick took exception. And it was in Germany, while making his "movie about the First World War" , PATHS OF GLORY, that he met Christiane Harlan, who became his third and last wife.

the best part of the otherwise abysmal "Trapped Ashes"

[movieman_kev · 4/10 · 10 February 2009]

Leo (the usually absurdly great John Saxon) gets to tell of him and his friend, Stanley. With parallels to Stanley Kubrick's early career (not the supernatural tinge to it obviously) this was the most interesting of the quintet of stories that comprised the film "Trapped Ashes". But it's a bit on the dry side and doesn't really fit in with the other four stories in that film in the least. Also since this tale can be seen apart from that film in other places, I'd recommend that rather than sitting through that whole film merely for this one part simply because "Trapped Ashes" on a whole was pretty abysmal.

My Grade: C-