"Fear and Desire," a 1953 film "directed, photographed and edited by Stanley Kubrick," is a skeleton in Mr. Kubrick's closet. Or at least that's the way he sees it: Mr. Kubrick recently asked Warner Brothers to issue a letter to call this fledgling effort a "bumbling, amateur film exercise" and "a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious." Nevertheless, "Fear and Desire" opens today for a weeklong run at the Film Forum, together with "Killer's Kiss," Mr. Kubrick's second feature.

Hindsight can be very convenient in a case like this. It would be nice to think that the film maker's first feature, made when in his early 20's on a budget of $40,000 and then described as "a drama of 'man' lost in a hostile world," is a harbinger of things to come. And as a matter of fact, "Fear and Desire" is better than the director now says it is, although his own description is largely fair. Definitely pretentious, and indeed sometimes boring, the 68-minute "Fear and Desire" is still a revealing and in some ways impressive effort. The few viewers who saw it in 1953 - among them the critic James Agee, who offered backhanded praise - must have realized it was a work of great promise.

"Fear and Desire" features a thin, morose, baby-faced Paul Mazursky as one of four soldiers enduring an exercise in high school existentialism. Trapped behind enemy lines in an unspecified war (but actually outdoors in the San Gabriel mountains, thus saving Mr. Kubrick any expenses for scenery), they ponder their fate. The screenplay, by the director's Bronx high school friend Howard Sackler (who later won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Great White Hope"), would not have passed muster with any film maker a day over 25, which may be why Mr. Kubrick chooses to renounce the film now. But its editing is superb, its compositional sense quite striking, and its cinematography uncommonly handsome for a low-budget film by a neophyte. For Kubrick aficionados, this rare and quirky artifact is a must.

"Killer's Kiss" brought the director onto more conventional territory, with a film noir plot about a boxer, a gangster and a dance hall girl. Using Times Square and even the subway as his backdrop, Mr. Kubrick worked in an uncharacteristically naturalistic style despite the genre material, with mixed but still fascinating results. The actress playing the dance hall girl, billed as Irene Kane, is the writer Chris Chase, whose work has frequently appeared in The New York Times. Frank Silvera plays the boxer, whose career is described as "one long promise without fulfillment." In the case of Mr. Kubrick's own career, the fulfillment came later. But here is the promise.