SOURCE: “Kubrick: A Sadness,” in The New Republic, Vol. 413, No. 4, August 16, 1999, pp. 30-1.

In the following negative assessment, Kauffmann deems Eyes Wide Shut “a catastrophe—in both the popular sense and the classical sense of the end of a tragedy.”

In the spring, of 1967, Robert Brustein, then dean of the Yale School of Drama, asked me to do a film course in the following academic year. I was to co-teach: I would meet the class one afternoon a week to deal with history and style, and on another day they would meet a filmmaker who would explore techniques. Brustein and I, both keen on the relatively recent Dr. Strangelove, decided to aim high and invite Stanley Kubrick for the filmmaking post. I agreed to approach Kubrick because I knew him slightly.

I had lunched with Kubrick in New York two years earlier. (One remark lingers. I praised Peter...