New York’s leading movie house for independent premieres and repertory programming
A nonprofit cinema since 1970
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New York’s leading movie house for independent premieres and repertory programming
A nonprofit cinema since 1970
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“Kubrick's first full-fledged masterpiece. A peerless insanity-of-war picture, “Kubrick’s Paths of Glory shows how much – and how little – war has changed in a century. Never again would director Stanley Kubrick be so concise as he was in the editing of this stark 86-minute film... The long tracking shots of Douglas, his upper body an inverted triangle of muscle and forward-momentum energy, striding swiftly through the trenches of his troops’ encampment, will give you goose bumps of anticipation.” |
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(1957) “There
are few things more fundamentally stimulating than watching another
man die.” France, 1915. Amid the muddy trenches of World War I’s Western
Front, Kirk Douglas’s
French Colonel Dax gets the dreaded order: have his poilus take the seemingly
impregnable
“Anthill.” While behind the lines, icily smiling generals George
Macready and Adolphe Menjou,
ensconced in their chateau headquarters, play the General Staff office politics
twostep,
the one to get that promotion, the other to get some nice ink in the papers.
But, with the troops trapped in the trenches amid the ensuing bloodbath, Macready
vows that heads — but not his — will roll. And ultimately, three
men — Joe Turkel,
Ralph Meeker (Kiss Me Deadly’s Mike Hammer) and Timothy Carey (the wacko
assassin of The Killing and “a precursor of the hipster druggies of
the 60s” –
Pauline Kael) — become the scapegoats in a game of judicial murder. But
as
Menjou suavely explains, “One way to maintain discipline is to shoot
a man now
and then.” Shot in Germany after French authorities nixed the project
as
defamatory (the film was banned in France until 1975), Paths is one of the
most
ruthlessly anti-war films ever, with Kubrick’s telephoto-lensed, side-tracking
shooting of the assault perhaps the screen’s most authentic treatment of
trench warfare. A crew
of 60 worked around the clock for weeks to re-create the intricate trench systems
and ravaged
terrain of a WWI battleground (although the trenches were built two feet wider
than the
claustrophobic originals to accomodate the riveting backtracking shots of Douglas’s
pre-zero hour
procession); the set for HQ was a building actually damaged by WWII bombs; and
the special effects techies discharged over a ton of explosives in the first
week of
filming alone. With a screenplay by Kubrick, Calder Willingham and cult pulp
novelist Jim Thompson, Paths was named to the National Film Registry in 1992.