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Home , A Gunfight, A Hell of a Woman, Bryna Productions, Calder Willingham, Cimarron Strip, Commandos Strike at Dawn

February 21, 2012 (XXIV:6) , (1957, 88 min.)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, and Based on the novel by Humphrey Cobb (1937) Produced by James B. Harris and Original Music by Cinematography by Film Editing by Eva Kroll Art Direction by Ludwig Reiber Costume Design by Ilse Dubois Military adviser Baron von Waldenfels

Kirk Douglas...Col. Dax ...Cpl. Philippe Paris ...Gen. George Broulard ...Gen. Paul Mireau Wayne Morris...Lt. Roget ...Maj. Saint-Auban Joe Turkel...Pvt. Pierre Arnaud (as Joseph Turkel) ...German Singer (as Susanne Christian) Jerry Hausner...Proprietor of Cafe CALDER WILLINGHAM (December 23, 1922 in Atlanta, ...Narrator of Opening Sequence / Chief Judge of – February 21, 1995, Laconia, New Hampshire) is a novelist who Court also has 12 screenwriting credits: 1991 Rambling Rose (book / Emile Meyer...Father Dupree screenplay), 1978 “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery”, 1974 Bert Freed...Sgt. Boulanger Thieves Like Us, 1970 Little Big Man, 1967 , 1965 Kem Dibbs...Pvt. Lejeune Son of the Mountains, 1961 One-Eyed Jacks, 1960 Spartacus, ...Pvt. Maurice Ferol 1958 The Vikings, 1957 Paths of Glory, 1957 The Strange One (novel / play "End as a Man" / screenplay), and 1948 “The Selected for the , 1992 Philco-Goodyear Playhouse”.

STANLEY KUBRICK (July 26, 1928, City, New York JIM THOMPSON (b. James Myers Thompson, September 27, – March 7, 1999, Harpenden, , England) won only 1906, Anadarko, Oklahoma – April 7, 1977, , one Oscar—for Special Visual Effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey ) is best known as a novelist, though several of his (1968). He directed 16 films, wrote or co-wrote 12 of them, and novels and stories have also been made into films, among them produced 11 of them. His director credits are 1999 Eyes Wide 2010 The Killer Inside Me (novel), 1997 This World, Then the Shut, 1987 , 1980 The Shining, 1975 Barry Fireworks (story), 1996 Hit Me (novel "A Swell-Looking Lyndon, 1971 A Clockwork Orange, 1968 2001: A Space Babe"), 1994 (novel), 1993 “Fallen Angels”, 1990 Odyssey, 1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop (novel), 1990 After Dark, My Sweet (novel), 1989 Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1962 , 1960 Spartacus, 1957 The Kill-Off (novel), 1981 (novel "Pop. 1280"), Paths of Glory, 1956 The Killing, 1955 Killer's Kiss, 1953 The 1979 Série noire (novel ""), 1976 The Killer Seafarers (short), 1953 , 1951 Inside Me (novel), 1972 The Getaway (novel), 1965 “Convoy”, (documentary short), and 1951 : An RKO-Pathe 1965 “Dr. Kildare”, 1961 “Cain's Hundred”, 1959 “Mackenzie's Screenliner (documentary short). Raiders”, 1957 Paths of Glory, and 1956 The Killing. Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—2

JAMES B. HARRIS (August 3, 1928, New World, 1971 , 1968 The York City, New York) has 9 producer Brotherhood, 1966 Grand Prix, 1960 credits, three of them with Stanley Spartacus, and 1959 “. Kubrick: 1962 Lolita, 1957 Paths of Glory, As an actor he appeared in 92 titles, some of and 1956 The Killing. which are 2008 “Empire State Building Murders”, 2004 Illusion, 2003 It Runs in the GERALD FRIED (February 13, 1928, New Family, 1999 Diamonds, 1994 “Take Me York City, New York) has 120 composer Home Again”, 1991 “Tales from the Crypt”, credits, some of which are 2004 “ 1988 “Inherit the Wind”, 1982 The Man New Voyages: Phase II”, 1988 “: The from Snowy River, 1980 The Final Gift”, 1988 “Drop-Out Mother”, 1983- Countdown, 1980 Saturn 3, 1978 The Fury, 1984 “Dynasty”, 1984 “Australia's Animal 1976 “Victory at Entebbe”, 1975 Once Is Mysteries”, 1983 “Casablanca”, 1983 “The Not Enough, 1973 Scalawag, 1973 “Dr. Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, 1971 To Catch a Spy, Fifteen Years Later Affair”, 1981 “The 1971 , 1971 The Light at the Edge Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island”, of the World, 1970 There Was a Crooked 1980 “Flamingo Road”, 1980 “The Ordeal Man..., 1969 The Arrangement, 1968 The of Dr. Mudd”, 1979 “Breaking Up Is Hard Brotherhood, 1967 , 1967 to Do”, 1978-1979 “Emergency!”, 1979 The Way West, 1966 Is Paris Burning?, “The Castaways on Gilligan's Island”, 1966 , 1965 The 1979 “The Chisholms”, 1979 The Bell Jar, Heroes of Telemark, 1965 In Harm's Way, 1979 “Roots: The Next Generations” (7 episodes), 1978 “The 1964 , 1963 The List of Adrian Messenger, Immigrants”, 1978 “Rescue from Gilligan's Island”, 1978 1962 Two Weeks in Another Town, 1962 , “Roots: One Year Later”, 1977 “Roots”, 1976 “Francis Gary 1961 The Last Sunset, 1961 Town Without Pity, 1960 Spartacus, Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident”, 1976 Survive!, 1960 Strangers When We Meet, 1959 The Devil's Disciple, 1959 1975 “I Will Fight No More Forever”, 1974 “Police Woman”, , 1958 The Vikings, 1957 Paths of 1969 (Mannix), 1966-1969 Mission: Impossible (6 episodes), Glory, 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1957 Top Secret Affair, 1968 The Killing of Sister George, 1967 “Lost in Space”, 1966- 1956 Lust for Life, 1955 , 1955 Man Without 1967 “Star Trek”, 1965-1967 “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (45 a Star, 1955 The Racers, 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, episodes), 1967 “”, 1965-1967 “Gilligan's 1954 Ulysses, 1953 The Juggler, 1953 , Island” (39 episodes), 1966 One of Our Spies Is Missing, 1965 1952 The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952 The Big Sky, 1951 “”, 1960-1961 “Riverboat” (15 episodes), 1958 The Detective Story, 1951 Ace in the Hole, 1951 Along the Great Lost Missile, 1958 “M Squad”, 1958 Machine-Gun Kelly, 1958 Divide, 1950 The Glass Menagerie, 1950 Young Man with a The Return of Dracula, 1957 Paths of Glory, 1957 Dino, 1956 Horn, 1949 Champion, 1949 , 1948 My The Killing, 1955 Killer's Kiss, and 1953 Fear and Desire . Dear Secretary, 1948 The Walls of Jericho, 1948 , 1947 Mourning Becomes Electra, 1947 , 1946 The GEORG KRAUSE (April 15, 1901, , – January 3, Strange Love of Martha Ivers 1986, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany) has 137 cinematographer credits, among them 1967 “Das RALPH MEEKER...Cpl. Philippe Paris (b. Ralph Rathgeber, Kriminalmuseum”, 1964 Time of the Innocent, 1962 Escape from November 21, 1920, , – August 5, 1988, East Berlin, 1960 The Fair, 1960 Body in the Web, 1960 Satan Woodland Hills, , California) has acted in 108 films Tempts with Love, 1959 She Walks by Night, 1959 The Black and TV series, including 1980 Without Warning, 1979 “CHiPs”, Chapel, 1959 The Head, 1959 Court Martial, 1958 The Doctor 1979 Winter Kills, 1975 “Harry O”, 1973-1975 “Police Story”, of Stalingrad, 1957 Paths of Glory, 1957 Vater macht Karriere, 1975 “”, 1975 “Cannon”, 1975 “The Dead Don't 1956 I'll See You at Lake Constance, 1953 The Comedian, 1953 Die”, 1968-1974 “Ironside”, 1974 “”, 1972 “The Night Man on a Tightrope, 1948 The Berliner, 1944 Music in Salzburg, Stalker”, 1966-1971 “The F.B.I.”, 1970 “The Virginian”, 1967 1942 Diesel, 1939 D III 88: The New German Air Force Attacks, The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, 1967 , 1964 1938 The Stars Shine, 1938 Cat Walk, 1937 The Beaver Coat, “The Defenders”, 1963 “The Outer Limits”, 1963 Wall of Noise, 1937 The Ways of Love Are Strange, 1936 Port Arthur, 1936 1962-1963 “Route 66”, 1962 “”, 1961 Something Dissatisfied Woman, 1936 Dinner Is Served, 1936 Moral, 1936 Wild, 1961 Ada, 1961 “Tallahassee 7000”, 1959-1960 “Not for Girl Kidnappers, 1935 His Late Excellency, 1935 All for the Hire” (39 episodes), 1960 “Dillinger” (TV movie), 1955-1959 Dog's Sake, 1935 Every Day Isn't Sunday, 1934 The Two Seals, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, 1957-1958 “Climax!”, 1957 Paths 1934 Das alte Recht, 1932 L'amour en vitesse, 1932 Kavaliere of Glory, 1957 The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown, 1957 Run of the vom Kurfürstendamm, 1929 Hanba, 1927 Heads Up, Charley, Arrow, 1952-1956 “Goodyear Playhouse”, 1955-1956 “Studio and 1923 Downfall One in Hollywood”, 1955 , 1955 Big House, U.S.A., 1953 , 1952 Somebody Loves Me, 1952 KIRK DOUGLAS…Col. Dax (b. Issur Danielovitch Demsky, Shadow in the Sky, and 1951 Four in a Jeep. December 9, 1916, Amsterdam, New York) was an uncredited producer on this film. He has 8 other producer credits: 1975 ADOLPHE MENJOU...Gen. George Broulard (b. Adolphe Jean Posse, 1971 A Gunfight, 1971 The Light at the Edge of the Menjou, February 18, 1890, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – October Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—3

29, 1963, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California) appeared in The Kid from Kokomo, 1938 Brother Rat, 1938 The Kid Comes 149 titles, including 1961 “The DuPont Show with June Back, 1937 Kid Galahad, 1936 Here Comes Carter, and 1936 Allyson”, 1960 Pollyanna, 1958 “Target”, 1957 Paths of Glory, China Clipper. 1957 The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown, 1955 “Science Fiction Theatre”, 1955 Timberjack, 1953-1954 “Your Favorite Story” (7 RICHARD ANDERSON...Maj. Saint-Auban (Richard Norman episodes), 1953 Man on a Tightrope, 1951 Across the Wide Anderson, August 8, 1926, Long Branch, New Jersey) appeared Missouri, 1948 State of the Union, 1947 The Hucksters, 1942 in 185 films and TV series, but he is probably best known for his Roxie Hart, 1941 Road Show, 1940 A Bill of Divorcement, 1940 155 appearances in the two 1970s bionic series. Some of his Turnabout, 1937 One Hundred Men and a Girl, 1936 One in a credits are 1998 “Unhappily Ever After”, 1993-1997 “Kung Fu: Million, 1936 The Milky Way, 1935 Gold Diggers of 1935, 1934 The Legend Continues” (82 episodes), 1996 In the Lake of the Little Miss Marker, 1934 The Trumpet Blows, 1933 Morning Woods (TV movie), 1993 Gettysburg, 1989 “Murder, She Glory, 1932 A Farewell to Arms, 1932 Prestige, 1931 Friends Wrote”, 1987 “The Return of the Six-Million-Dollar Man and the and Lovers, 1931 The Great Lover, 1931 , 1930 Bionic Woman”, 1986-1987 “Dynasty” (9 episodes), 1985 “The Morocco, 1928 His Private Life, 1928 His Tiger Wife, 1928/I A A-Team”, 1984-1985 “Cover Up” (11 episodes), 1981 “Charlie's Night of Mystery, 1927 A Gentleman of Paris, 1927 Blonde or Angels”, 1976-1978 “The Bionic Woman” (57 episodes), 1974- Brunette, 1926 The Sorrows of Satan, 1926 The Ace of Cads, 1978 “The Six Million Dollar Man” (98 episodes), 1967-1975 1926 A Social Celebrity, 1926 The Grand Duchess and the “Ironside”, 1964-1974 “Gunsmoke”, 1973 “The Six Million Waiter, 1925 The King on Main Dollar Man: Wine, Women Street, 1925 Lost: A Wife, 1924 and War”, 1966-1973 “The Forbidden Paradise, 1924 The F.B.I.” (7 episodes), 1973 Fast Set, 1924 Barriers, “The Night Strangler”, 1972 1924 Broadway After Dark, 1924 Play It As It Lays, 1971 The Marriage Cheat, 1923 A “Columbo”, 1970-1971 “Dan Woman of Paris: A Drama of August” (11 episodes), 1970 Fate, 1922 Singed Wings, 1922 Tora! Tora! Tora!, 1968 Clarence, 1922 Pink Gods, 1921 “Mannix”, 1968 “The Wild The Sheik, 1921 The Three Wild West”, 1967 “”, Musketeers, 1917 The Valentine 1964-1967 “The Fugitive” (6 Girl, 1916 The Reward of episodes), 1966 “12 O'Clock Patience, 1916 The Crucial Test, High”, 1966 “I Spy”, 1964- 1916 Nearly a King, and 1916 A 1966 “The Man from Parisian Romance. U.N.C.L.E.”, 1966 Seconds, 1964-1966 “Perry Mason” (25 GEORGE MACREADY...Gen. episodes), 1964 Seven Days in Paul Mireau (b. George Peabody May, 1963 Johnny Cool, 1963 Macready Jr., August 29, 1899, Providence, Rhode Island – July “The Virginian”, 1959-1963 “” (6 episodes), 1961- 2, 1973, Los Angeles, California) has 141 acting credits, among 1962 “Bus Stop” (7 episodes), 1961 “”, 1961 “Hong them 1971 The Return of Count Yorga, 1970 Tora! Tora! Tora!, Kong”, 1960-1961 “Wanted: Dead or Alive”, 1960 The Wackiest 1965-1968 “Peyton Place” (164 episodes), 1965 The Great Race, Ship in the Army, 1960 “Checkmate”, 1960 “Thriller”, 1960 “The 1964 Seven Days in May, 1962 Taras Bulba, 1962 Two Weeks in Untouchables”, 1960 “Law of the Plainsman”< 1960 Another Town, 1960 “Have Gun - Will Travel”, 1959 “Bonanza”, “Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse”, 1959 The Gunfight at Dodge 1958 “Gunsmoke”, 1956 A Kiss Before Dying, 1954 Duffy of San City, 1959 Compulsion, 1959 “Wagon Train”, 1958-1959 Quentin, 1952 The Gauntlet, 1951 Detective Story, 1951 The “Zorro”, 1957-1958 “Zane Grey Theater”, 1958 The Long, Hot Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, 1951 Tarzan's Peril, 1949 The Summer, 1958 “”, 1957 Paths of Glory, 1957 The Doolins of Oklahoma, 1949 Knock on Any Door, 1948 The Big Buster Keaton Story, 1956 Three Brave Men, 1956 The Search Clock, 1946 The Bandit of Sherwood Forest, 1946 , 1945 A for Bridey Murphy, 1956 A Cry in the Night, 1956 Forbidden Song to Remember, 1944 The Seventh Cross, and 1942 Planet, 1955 It's a Dog's Life, 1954 Betrayed, 1954 The Student . Prince, 1953 , 1952 Scaramouche, 1951 Across the Wide Missouri, 1951 The People Against O'Hara, WAYNE MORRIS...Lt. Roget (b. Bert DeWayne Morris, 1951 No Questions Asked, 1951 Go for Broke!, 1951 Grounds February 17, 1914, Los Angeles, California – September 14, for Marriage, 1950 The Magnificent Yankee, 1950 The Vanishing 1959, Oakland, California) has 83 acting credits, including 1961 Westerner, and 1947 La perla. Buffalo Gun, 1959 “Bourbon Street Beat”, 1959 “Bronco”, 1959 “The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen”, 1959 “Bat JOE TURKEL...Pvt. Pierre Arnaud (July 15, 1927, , Masterson”, 1959 “Wanted: Dead or Alive”, 1958 “Maverick”, New York) appeared in 133 titles, including 1998 “Boy Meets 1958 “Gunsmoke”, 1957 Paths of Glory, 1957 The Crooked Sky, World”, 1990 The Dark Side of the Moon, 1988 “Miami Vice”, 1956 “The Adventures of the Big Man” (16 episodes), 1955 Lord 1985 “Tales from the Darkside”, 1982 Blade Runner, 1980 of the Jungle, 1953 The Fighting Lawman, 1953 The Marksman, “Fantasy Island”, 1980 The Shining, 1977 Which Way Is Up?, 1953 Star of , 1949 John Loves Mary, 1948 The Big Punch, 1977 “Kojak”, 1976 “Police Story”, 1976 The Commitment, 1975 1947 The Voice of the Turtle, 1941 Bad Men of Missouri, 1939 The Hindenburg, 1972 Wild in the Sky, 1969 The Devil's 8, 1968 Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—4

“Ironside”, 1961-1968 “Bonanza”, 1967 The St. Valentine's Day 1964 Shock Treatment, 1962 Convicts 4, 1962 The World's Massacre, 1966 The Sand Pebbles, 1965 King Rat, 1963 Johnny Greatest Sinner, 1962 Mermaids of Tiburon, 1961 The Second Cool, 1960-1963 “The Untouchables”, 1961 “The Asphalt Time Around, 1961 One-Eyed Jacks, 1960 The Boy and the Jungle”, 1958-1960 “Bat Masterson”, 1959 Warlock, 1958 The Pirates, 1959 “The Untouchables”, 1959 The Gunfight at Dodge Bonnie Parker Story, 1957 “Official Detective”, 1957 Paths of City, 1958 Revolt in the Big House, 1958 “Alcoa Theatre”, 1958 Glory, 1957 House of Numbers, 1957 Jeanne Eagels, 1956 Unwed Mother, 1957 Paths of Glory, 1957 House of Numbers, Friendly Persuasion, 1956 The Killing, 1955 Lucy Gallant, 1955 1957 Bayou, 1957 Chain of Evidence, 1956 Rumble on the The Naked Street, 1955 “The Lone Ranger”, 1954 Duffy of San Docks, 1956 Naked Gun, 1956 Flight to Hong Kong, 1956 Quentin, 1954 “I Led 3 Lives”, 1953 The Glass Wall, 1950 Halls “Sheriff of Cochise”, 1956 The Last Wagon, 1956 Francis in the of Montezuma, 1949 Johnny Stool Pigeon, and 1949 City Across Haunted House, 1956 The Killing, 1955 I'll Cry Tomorrow, 1955 the River. Francis in the Navy, 1955 Finger Man, 1955 East of Eden, 1954 “Hopalong Cassidy”, 1954 Alaska Seas, 1954 Crime Wave, 1953 The Wild One, 1953 White Witch Doctor, 1952-1953 “Cowboy G-Men” (6 episodes), 1952 Bloodhounds of Broadway, 1952 Hellgate, 1952 “Racket Squad”, and 1951 Across the Wide Missouri.

from Conversations with Wilder. Cameron Crowe. Knopf, NY, 1999: “He [Kubrick] has never made a bad picture. Each picture he trumps the trump.”

from World Film Directors V. II. Ed. John Wakeman. The H.H. Wilson Co. NY 1988, entry by Adrian Turner

American director, producer, and scenarist, was born , New York, the son of Jacques and Gertrude Kubrick. His father was a physician, the son of Polish and Romanian Jews. Kubrick attended the William Howard Taft High School. He was not a successful student but an ardent chess player and photographer. His father, also a photographer, had bought him a 35mm still CHRISTIANE KUBRICK...German Singer (as Susanne camera, and Kubrick’s first break came in April 1945 when a Christian) (b. Christiane Susanne Harlan, May 10, 1932, chance picture of a newsdealer on the day of Roosevelt’s death Brunswick, Germany) appeared or had her paintings in 7 films was bought by Look magazine. At the age of seventeen Kubrick 2006 “3 Minute Wonder”, 1999 , 1957 Mit Rosen was hired by Look as a staff photographer. fängt die Liebe an, 1957 Paths of Glory, 1957 Mazurka der During his four years there, Kubrick received the higher Liebe, 1955 Liebe ist ja nur ein Märchen, and 1953 “Das education he wanted by enrolling as a nonmatriculating student Lächeln der Gioconda.” at Columbia University. As Alexander Walker noted, “Dropping out of school made him into a lifelong student.” At the same TIMOTHY CAREY...Pvt. Maurice Ferol (b. Timothy William time, Kubrick was attending screenings at the Museum of Carey, March 11, 1929, Brooklyn, New York – May 11, 1994, Modern Art: “I was aware that I didn’t know anything about Los Angeles, California) has 86 acting credits, among them 1990 making films, but I believed I couldn’t make them any worse The Devil's Gas (short), 1986 Echo Park, 1986 “Airwolf”, 1984 than the majority of films I was seeing. Bad films gave me the “The New Mike Hammer”, 1983 D.C. Cab, 1981-1982 “The courage to try making a movie.” Greatest American Hero”, 1982 Fast-Walking, 1981 “East of Kubrick’s first effort was Day of the Fight (1951), a Eden”, 1980 “Tenspeed and Brown Shoe”, 1980 “Nightside”, documentary about the boxer Walter Cartier, whom Kubrick had 1980 “CHiPs”, 1979 “Supertrain”, 1975-1978 “”, 1977 photographed for Look. The 16-minute, 35mm film was sold to Speedtrap, 1977 “Charlie's Angels”, 1977 “Starsky and Hutch”, RKO for a tiny profit and an advance on another short, Flying 1976 Chesty Anderson U.S. Navy, 1971-1976 “Columbo”, 1976 Padre (1951), about a priest in who tours his parish “Ellery Queen”, 1976 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976 of 4,000 square miles by small plane. While Flying Padre is Peeper, 1975 “Kung Fu”, 1974 “Toma”, 1973 The Outfit, 1973 conventional program-filler material, Day of the Fight is a very “The Bait”, 1972 Get to Know Your Rabbit, 1972 “McCloud”, striking piece of work, a profile couched in the style of 1971 Minnie and Moskowitz, 1971 What's the Matter with with a highly dramatic commentary (a device Kubrick would Helen?, 1968-1970 “The Name of the Game”, 1968-1970 repeatedly use in his features) and a vivid, nightmarish sense of “Daniel Boone”, 1970 “It Takes a Thief “, 1969 “The Virginian”, entrapment as Cartier waits in his dressing room for the 1969 Change of Habit, 1969 “Mannix”, 1968 Head, 1968 “The evening’s fight, along with his identical twin Vincent, a lawyer Outsider”, 1968 “Cimarron Strip”, 1968 “Cowboy in Africa”, who acts as his manager. Richard Combs, reassessing the film in 1967 “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”, 1967 Waterhole #3, 1967 A 1980, wrote that “the timelock structure of course anticipates— Time for Killing, 1958-1966 “Gunsmoke”, 1966 “The Big and in a way bests—The Killing; the deserted, early morning Valley”, 1965 “Rawhide”, 1965 Beach Blanket Bingo, 1965 streets are as haunted as the similarly used locations in Killer’s “Profiles in Courage”, 1964 Rio Conchos, 1964 , Kiss. But the film’s most extraordinary visual trouvaille is also Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—5 its most mundane. The glum-faced Cartier twins, waking in the Early signs of this talent in Killer’s Kiss did not go same bed in the morning, walking to communion, sharing the unnoticed by contemporary reviewers. “The story is anxieties and (reputedly) the physical pain of the fight….” conventional,” wrote , “but within this After seeing his first films released, Kubrick resigned framework...[Kubrick] has done some interesting things.”... from Look. He made a third short, (1953), about After this, Kubrick joined forces with James B. Harris the Seafarers’ International Union, then embarked on his first to form Harris-Kubrick Productions. Their first film together was feature, Fear and Desire (1953). Kubrick told Joseph Gelmis, “I another genre movie, The Killing (1956), produced by Harris and was the camera operator and director and just about everything distributed by . This time Kubrick had a viable else. The film was shot in 35mm without a soundtrack. The budget of $320,000, which allowed him to hire Lucien Ballard as dubbing was a big mistake on my part; the actual shooting cost his cinematographer and a good cast of Hollywood actors. was $9000, but because I didn’t know what I was doing with the Kubrick’s wife served as art director, and the film was scored by soundtrack it cost me another $30,000. Fear and Desire played Gerald Fried, who had supplied the music for Kubrick’s two the art house circuits, and some of the reviews were amazingly earlier features as well.... good, but it’s not a film I remember with any pride, except for There was nothing unassuming about Paths of Glory the fact it was finished.” (1957), adapted by Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and Jim The script was written by Kubrick’s friend Howard Thompson from Humphrey Cobb’s novel of . As an Sackler (who later wrote The Great White Hope) and resumed indictment of war, it has been compared both with Lewis of “twins” or doubles already adumbrated in Day of Milestone’s All’s Quiet on the Front and Jean Renoir’s the Fight. Two American soldiers, lost in some wilderness, La Grande Illusion. It shows how a suicidal assault on an confront two enemy soldiers who are, however, played by the impregnable German position, the Ant Hill, is ordered by two same actors. The intellectual ruthlessly ambitious French Lieutenant Corby (Kenneth generals (Adolph Menjou and Harp) symbolically destroys George Macready). The attack himself by killing his double; the is a lethal fiasco, and three more primitive Mae (Frank scapegoats are tried and Silvera), drifting downstream on executed to save the generals’ a raft, manages to struggle careers. The film was only through to psychic wholeness. financed by United Artists In a letter to the film’s after Kirk Douglas agreed to distributor, Joseph Burstyn, star as Colonel Dax, the Kubrick described the film thus: humanitarian field commander “Its structure: allegorical. Its appointed to defend the conception: poetic. A drama of scapegoats at their rigged ‘man’ lost in a hostile world, courtmartial. He cannot save seeking his way to an his men but does manage to understanding of himself and life ruin one of the generals. around him. He is further Paths of Glory was imperiled on his odyssey by an released to great critical unseen but deadly enemy that acclaim, but its reputation has surrounds him; but an enemy declined. Robert Phillip Kolker who, upon scrutiny, seems to be in A Cinema of Loneliness calls almost shaped from the same mold. It will, probably, mean many it “a deeply conflicted film. To have taken as strong a stand things to different people, and it ought to.” Kubrick might have against military order as Paths does was itself remarkable for been describing any one of his later films, especially 2001: A 1957—so remarkable that the film was banned in France for Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining, since the letter alludes to years. To have created such an unrelenting narrative (with no his fondness for ambiguity an metaphor, evoking the Kubrickian sexual or romantic interest), structured in such stark and universe of entrapment and immortality: man does not progress demanding images, was, for the time, more remarkable still. But but merely perpetuates ancient, instinctive evils….Fear and with these images to have created a narrative that stops with a Desire was financed privately, as was Kubrick’s next feature, revelation of lives trapped and not go on to suggest how they Killer’s Kiss (1955). Again, Kubrick was a virtual one-man crew might be freed is itself an intellectual gambit typical of the and co-wrote the script with Sackler. The film was bought by decade. This was the period of ‘the end of ideology,’ a political United Artists, the most progressive Hollywood distributor of the dead center which declared useless, if not treasonous, any …. political-cultural structure other than the status quo.” David Beginning his study of Kubrick, Alexander Walker Thompson also attacks the film, which he finds “leaden with wrote that “only a few directors possess a conceptual talent–that righteous indignation. Nothing in the picture seemed conscious is, a talent to crystallize every film they make into a cinematic that the plot was as rigged as the courtmartial.” But Richard concept. It transcends the need to find a good story. An Combs disagrees, suggesting that “the film cuts as bluntly from absorbing story. . . .It is the talent to construct a form that will the officers scheming in their château to the troops suffering in exhibit the maker’s vision in an unexpected way. It is this their trenches that it is hard to complain of metaphorical banality. conceptual talent that most distinguishes Stanley Kubrick.” Paths of Glory has an agitprop directness.” Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—6

For Kubrick himself, the “concept” was entirely visual, Kiss; the human cut-outs used for target practice in The Killing; worked out in terms of camera movement and décor. His camera the reduction of men to dying ants in Paths of Glory…. performs silky parabolas as the generals in their baroque chateau While Spartacus was in production, Kubrick and Harris play number games with real lives and deaths. The attack on Ant were already at work on their next project, an adaptation by Hill is filmed in a series of lateral tracking of his controversial shots—“an animated mural death,” as 1955 novel Lolita, about a university Alexander Walker called it. The professor who marries a widow because executives are shot with the camera static, he is sexually obsessed by her barely as if transfixed by the injustice and horror adolescent daughter Lolita. Because of of the scene. censorship problems and funds locked in “In spite of the tremendous Britain, Kubrick made the film in critical acclaim for Paths of Glory,” wrote London, which has been his base ever Alexander Walker, “Kubrick found his since…. career stalemated by nonevents.” In Kubrick’s next three films, Hollywood, Kubrick and Harris developed made with ever increasing deliberation several projects, none of them realized. and secrecy, comprise a trilogy on Then Kubrick was hired by Marlon humanity in the technological age. It Brando to direct a Western, One-Eyed begins with Dr. Strangelove, or How I Jacks (1961). The script was by the then Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the unknown Sam Peckinpah but Kubrick Bomb (1963), scripted by Kubrick, Terry insisted on rewriting it with Calder Southern, and Peter George from the Willingham, who had worked on Paths of latter’s novel Red Alert. Originally Glory. After six months Kubrick left the conceived as a “serious treatment of the project, leaving Brando to direct himself. problem of accidental war,” like the Shortly afterward Kubrick was contacted by Kirk novel, it modulated into satire when Kubrick found the theme too Douglas, who production of Spartacus (1960) had run into blackly absurd to be treated in any other way. trouble. Accounts differ widely as to how much—and precisely Nuclear catastrophe is unleashed by Air Force General which—footage was shot by the original director, Anthony Jack D. Ripper, who believes that his sexual impotence is due to Mann, who had been hired by Universal against the wishes of a Communist conspiracy to pollute “his precious bodily fluids.” Douglas, the executive producer. Mann was fired from Despite the efforts of a decent but ineffectual President to placate Spartacus, and at the age of thirty-one Kubrick found himself the Russians, despite all the technical fail-safe procedures and directing what was then the most expensive film ever made in mechanisms, lunacy triumphs and Major “King” Kong (Slim America. Pickens) gleefully rides his great phallic bomb to the apocalypse. Spartacus, about the gladiator who led a slaves’ , as the impotent Ripper, rebellion against Roman power in 73 B.C., George C. Scott as the virile Pentagon hawk fits uncomfortably into Kubrick’s oeuvre. Turgidson: they are all mad, and the maddest His most committed admirers have little to of all is Dr. Strangelove himself, a former say about the film, reflecting Kubrick’s Nazi scientist now employed by the own disavowals of it, such as the one he Pentagon, a paraplegic with dark glasses and gave Michel Ciment: “I tried with limited a mechanical arm constantly snapping into success to make the film as real as possible uncontrollable Sieg Heils. He is marvelously but I was up against a pretty dumb script realized by Peter Sellers, who also plays a which was rarely faithful to what was clipped RAF group captain and the President known about Spartacus. If I ever needed of the .... convincing of the limits of persuasion a [The other films in the trilogy about director can have on a film where someone humanity in a technological age were 2001: A else is the producer and he is merely the Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork highest paid member of the crew, Orange (1971).] Spartacus provided proof to last a In the Dawn of Man, the opening lifetime.” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Critics did praise the visual an apeman discovers that the bone he has aspects of the film: Kubrick’s fluid learned to use as a tool can also kill, in a shot handling of the Super-Technirama-70 that, as Walker wrote, “vividly crystallizes format and his depiction of Roman cruelty. Kubrick’s view of man as a risen ape, rather Thomas Allen Nelson writes “the epic panorama of battle and than Rousseau’s sentimental characterization of him as a fallen armies is well done and reflects Kubrick’s skill at showing what angel.” The apeman tosses his killing bone exultantly into the he has referred to as the ‘weird disparity’ between the aesthetics sky, and we follow its four million-year trajectory until, in one of of warfare and its human consequences.” This “disparity” is a the most famous match cuts in cinema, is becomes a spaceship of consistent theme of Kubrick’s: the surreal dummies in Killer’s the twenty-first century. This vehicle is carrying scientists to the moon to investigate a strange slab of black stone discovered Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—7 there—one that closely resembles the monolith which had period rooms at the end. Kubrick himself, in a Playboy interview presided over the apeman’s military breakthrough. (September 1968) said that he had tried to create a visual The third section of 2001 begins aboard another experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeon-holing and spaceship, Discovery, commanded by Dr. David Bowman (Keir directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and Dullea). The only member of the Discovery’s crew who shows philosophic content…, just as music does….You’re free to any real human quirkiness is the computer HAL9000, who alone speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical knows the true purpose of their mission. HAL becomes meaning.” increasingly rebellious and power-hungry and eventually The significance of 2001 goes beyond its own “terminates” the entire crew apart from Bowman, who manages achievements as a film. It confirmed the temporary shift of to dismantle the machine’s deranged intelligence. power from the studios to the directors; it demonstrated how Bowman discovers that the real purpose of the mission formally flexible the commercial film might be; and it showed is to identify the extraterrestrial origin and purpose of the how audiences could discover a film for themselves, in spite of mysterious monolith. Traveling alone in a small pod into deep reviewers. Some regard it as the most significant Hollywood space, he is drawn to follow a similar monolith through a breakthrough since in 1941, and Kubrick has been disorienting galaxy of dazzling special effects. It leads him to an compared with (who in 1964 remarked that elegant suite of rooms furnished like an earth dwelling of the “amongst the younger generation Kubrick is a giant”). Like The eighteenth century. Bowman ages and dies, but is reborn as a Graduate (1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider “Star Child,” ready to journey (1969), the film owed its back to earth to lead a further success primarily to the youth evolutionary phase.Michel market, indicating a major shift Ciment called the film’s final in audience patterns. shot “perhaps the only really Kubrick’s plans for an peaceful image created by an ambitious film about Napoleon artist more at ease in fell victim to the cutbacks of the nightmare.” late 1960s. Instead he turned to 2001 was based on a a novel that had greatly excited short story, “The Sentinel,” by him, Anthony Burgess’ A the scientist and science-fiction Clockwork Orange, and wrote writer Arthur C. Clarke, who his own adaptation….The labored with Kubrick through debate about the film centered many versions of the script. If not so much on the question of Dr. Strangelove used what free will as on Kubrick’s Michel Ciment called “verbal presentation of violence. His delirium” to demonstrate the personal style is here at its most impotence of language, 2001 extreme with wide-angled makes the same point with scarcely any dialogue at all, barring photography and incongruous music—synthesized Beethoven, the exchange of banalities. During four years of preparation and Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie and ’s “Singin’ in production, much of the time taken up with the still unrivaled the Rain” to accompany Alex’s night of rape and special effects, the film became, in Kubrick’s words, “a murder….Walker argued that the film”never sets out to explore nonverbal experience.” As such it bewildered many reviewers the moral issue of violence; this had been a misleading belief that who might have accommodated a nonlinear narrative from a has caused the film to be branded as ‘conscienceless’ by critics Resnais or a Bergman, but not from MGM, nor in . who fail to see where Kubrick’s first principal lies, namely, with Many found the film too long and too slow. For once, however, the moral issue of eradicating free will.” uncomprehending and condescending reviews did not deter (1975), Kubrick’s only real commercial audiences. 2001 became a slow but steady money-earner, and the failure, was regarded by many critics as a deliberate retreat from pace quickened in the early 1970s when the film with its controversy and as an alternative to his long-cherished Napoleon sustained bombardment of visual stimuli established itself as the project.… Another three years elapsed before Kubrick ultimate drug-trip movie. By 1976 this “$10,500,000 announced his next project. It was The Shining, based on a underground film” had grossed $90 million. The critics went modern horror novel by Stephen King. Kubrick had become so back for another look and several, including Joseph Gelmis and reclusive that he decided to recreate the novel’s setting, a Rocky Andrew Sarris, had the grace to revise their opinions. Mountain resort hotel called the Overlook, at near Kubrick’s visual achievements in 2001 were matched London. Shooting on his magnificent Xanadu-like set (and in by his use of existing music—“The Blue Danube to accompany America for the exteriors) took a year, editing another, and then the voyage to the moon, pass ages from Khachaturian and Ligeti The Shining opened in America to poor reviews and erratic and, above all of course, Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach business.... Zarathustra for the “evolutionary” sequences. The soundtrack Kubrick’s latest film, being edited as this article was itself became a best-selling LP. Critics have continued to debate written, is Full Metal Jacket (1987), based on a ferociously the film’s more potent riddles, like the monoliths which are violent Vietnam novel The Short Timers by Gustav Hasford. present in all of its four symphonic movements, nudging men on Seven years separate it from The Shining. Instead of filming in to the next stage of evolution, and the provenance of the suite of Southeast Asia, Kubrick chose to work in Britain, using as Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—8 locations a derelict part of London’s dockland and, according to proto-surrealist Jacques Vache, a soldier in the French army rumor, the grounds of his own country estate.... during World War I. It isn’t surprising that Paths of Glory was Kubrick lives very quietly and privately in rural admired by another surrealist, Luis Buñuel, and was just as England, avoiding personal publicity....He directs his own greatly disliked by the French government, which in 1958 was advertising campaigns, coordinates release patterns, and involved in the Algerian war. Through political pressure, the personally checks every first-run print and foreign-language French managed to have the picture dropped from the Berlin version of each of his films. Since he also writes or coauthors his Film Festival and banned from theatres in France and scripts, and in recent years has been his own producer, he retains Switzerland for two decades. Their reasons were obvious. Like a degree of control over his work that is almost unequalled for a Cobb’s novel, the film involves the French high command’s Hollywood director. As Philip French wrote, “there’s something attempt to achieve a ‘breakthrough’ by attacking a heavily about his pictures that has enabled him to combine the budgets of fortified mound of dirt called the ‘Ant Hill’, (The novel calls it a DeMille with the quirky individuality of a Buñuel... the ‘Pimple’). The attack has no apparent strategic value and is Ciment called him “one of the most demanding, most supervised by a vain general, who has been led to believe it original and most visionary filmmakers of our time.” might result in a promotion. When the charge is stopped in its tracks, the general orders his artillery to fire upon his own troops. When his order is refused, he tries to have a large number of men shot by a firing squad on the grounds that ‘only dead bodies would show the attack was impossible’. Ultimately, he agrees to have three non-commissioned soldiers chosen by their unit officers, tried in summary fashion and shot as examples. After the execution the general and his immediate superior enjoy a breakfast of croissants in a luxurious chateau and congratulate themselves on how wonderfully the men died. In the last shot, the troops are ordered back to the trenches for another senseless battle. Paths of Glory is quite different in tone from the most famous of the previous movies about World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Grand Illusion (1937) take a critical yet humanist approach to the war: the two versions of The Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938) provide spectacular images of aerial combat waged in the spirit of a doomed aristocratic code; On Kubrick. James Naremore. , London, and Sergeant York (1941) offers populist and patriotic 2007. mythologizing. To find something similar, we need to compare Ant Hill Paths of Glory with ’s Attack (1956), which …Besides originating with Kubrick, the completed film concerns World War II, or with Kubrick’s other war films. Here, is everywhere marked by Kubrick’s stylistic and thematic as elsewhere, Kubrick underlines war’s absurdity by making the preoccupations—among them a skillful deployment of wide- two sides virtually indistinguishable from one another, as if he angle tracking shots, an ability to make a realistic world seem were trying to illustrate a famous line from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, a strange, an interest in the grotesque, and a fascination with the 1950s’ comic strip that satirised the McCarthy era: ‘We have met underlying irrationality of orderly, almost glamorous military the enemy and he is us.’ From the beginning of his career until action. World War I is a particularly apt subject for Kubrick the end, on the rare occasions in his war pictures when soldiers because it was generated by a meaningless tangle of nationalist come face to face with someone from behind enemy lines, that alliances and resulted in over 8 million deaths, most of which can person is either a mirror image or a woman. In Fear and Desire be blamed on benighted politicians and incompetent generals, and Full Metal Jacket, the woman is killed in disturbing fashion. who arranged massive bombardments and short, suicidal charges Where Paths of Glory is concerned, the conflict is internecine across open ground. As literary historian Paul Fussel has pointed and the enemy simply unseen, consisting of nothing more than out in The Great War and Modern Memory (1997), one of the lethal gunfire and bombardment emanating from the smoke and war’s grisliest and most symptomatic events, the battle of the darkness at the other side of no man’s land; the film deviates Somme in 1916, known to ordinary troops as ‘The Great Fuck- from Kubrick’s usual pattern only in the sense that, at the Up’ was the largest and in many ways most senseless military conclusion, when the French encounter a female German captive, engagement in human history. It began with a sustained one- she becomes less an object of perverse desire and murderous week shelling of German trenches from over 15,000 guns but, anxiety than a sort of maternal figure, producing a flood of when the shelling stopped and the British charged, the repressed nostalgia and a momentary dissolution of psychic and outmanned Germans simply pulled their machine guns from bodily armour. deep, well-engineered tunnels and mowed them down. On that In certain other ways, however, Paths of Glory is quite single day, 60,000 of the British were killed, and it was almost a atypical of Kubrick-most notably in the sense that, aside from week before 20,000 others who lay mortally wounded in no Spartacus, which also stars Kirk Douglas and which Kubrick man’s land stopped crying out for help. later disowned, it is the only one of his pictures that centres on an André Breton derived the concept of ‘black humour’, admirable character with whom the audience can feel a which is central to Kubrick’s work, from the writings of the comfortable identification. Colonel Dax, as portrayed by Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—9

Douglas, is not only given more close-ups and point-of-view Surprisingly, the earliest, pre-Kirk Douglas version of shots than anyone else in the movie, he is also a paragon of the screenplay, which survives in Douglas’s papers at the heroic virtue. A handsome and brave officer, he takes the front- University of Wisconsin, was in at least one respect even more line position in a deadly charge on the Ant Hill, picking his way melodramatic. In his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas through a withering storm of gunfire, waving around massive says that when he and the production crew arrived in , he casualties and returning to the trenches to try and rally a unit of was given what he thought was a new script, revised by Kubrick troops that have remained behind. Before the war, Dax also with the help of Jim Thompson, containing numerous pages of happens to have been ‘perhaps the foremost criminal lawyer in cheap dialogue and ending with a last-minute reprieve of the all France’. When corrupt generals select three innocent soldiers three condemned soldiers. ‘The generals’ car arrives screeching to be executed, he passionately and eloquently comes to the to halt the firing squad and he changes the men’s death sentence men’s defence. Against impossible odds, he’s never afraid to to thirty days in the guardhouse. Then my character, Colonel speak truth to power. Near the beginning of the film, he tells the Dax, goes off with the bad guy he has been fighting all through general in command of the regiment that Samuel Johnson once the movie…to have a drink, and the general puts his arm around described patriotism as ‘the last refuge of scoundrels’ and, at the my shoulder.’ According to Douglas, when he confronted Harris end, he angrily denounces an even more important general in and Kubrick about the revisions, Kubrick calmly replied, ‘I want patented Kirk Douglas style, with the body and face contorted in to make money.’ Douglas threw the script across the room and righteous anger and the voice pitched somewhere between a sob launched into a tirade worthy of his film performances. ‘We’re and a shout: ‘You’re a degenerate, sadistic old man,’ he says, going back to the original script,’ he declared, ‘or we’re not ‘and you can go to hell before I ever apologise to you again!’ making the picture.’ In other words, for all its grimness and horror, Paths of The script that provoked this outburst is undated but Glory is also a star vehicle signed by Kubrick and designed to give its audience the Thompson. It ends very much pleasures of melodrama—a form as Douglas says, but is Kubrick usually avoided or treated somewhat morally ambiguous ironically, in the manner of the in that it makes the villain a film noir or the art film. bit less ruthless and the hero a …Kubrick, a social pessimist by bit more political. The last disposition, disliked it for reasons pages involve a conversation he articulated in an interview with between Colonel Dax, who Michel Ciment: ‘Melodrama,’ he has more or less blackmailed said, ‘uses all the problems of the the corps commander into world, and the difficulties and saving the condemned men, disasters which befell the and General Rousseau, the characters, to demonstrate that the division commander who world is, after all, a benevolent insisted upon the execution and just place’. Paths of Glory and has now been relieved of never goes that far, but it features command (in the released a benevolent hero who battles evil, film this character’s name is who witnesses the positive humanity of ordinary people and who General Mireau)…. survives to fight another day. What Douglas wanted, and what he got, was a film Some critics have argued that Dax is less than a hero based on the second and third drafts of the script, which had because he remains a loyal officer of a corrupt regime. This may undergone revisions by Calder Willingham. Shortly before his be one of the film’s subtle ironies, but neither the Humphrey death in 1995, Willingham claimed that he was the author of Cobb novel nor the theatrical adaptation by give ‘99% of Paths of Glory; the completed script, he said, contained us such an upright and courageous character, and neither offer only two unimportant lines of dialogue by Kubrick and nothing the same emotional consolations. Both earlier versions end by Jim Thompson. Thompson’s biographer, Robert Polito, has abruptly, with the execution of the innocent soldiers (presented argued that Thompson was responsible for at least half of the off-stage in the case of the play), and in neither does Dax play an movie, and the material retained from the early script I’ve quoted especially significant role—at any rate, he doesn’t lead an assault above supports his argument. It should also be noted that a great across no man’s land, and he isn’t the defence attorney at the deal of the film’s dialogue comes straight from Cobb’s novel— courtmartial. Humphrey Cobb’s depiction of the attack on the including most of the big speeches in the trial scene, which Cobb Pimple lacks even a vestige of heroic spectacle; when one of the writes in the form of a play. We may never sort out who officers climbs out of his trench to signal a charge, à la Douglas contributed what to the screenplay, and Kubrick’s reported in the film, he is decapitated by machine-gun fire and his body motives for his attempt to change scripts are not convincing. falls on the man below. By contrast, the film gives Douglas an Polito has offered the shrewd suggestion that Kubrick was opportunity for derring-do and Kubrick the opportunity for playing ‘ego chess’ with Douglas, giving him an early draft in bravura tracking and zooming shots across no man’s land. It also which Dax is a more politically expedient character, in order to creates the impression that the survivors in Douglas’s unit might make sure that the completed film wouldn’t be compromised by have reached the Ant Hill if not for the cowardice of Lieutenant further build-up of the star’s role. Roger (Wayne Morris), who keeps his men in the trenches. Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—10

One thing is clear: the making of Paths of Glory Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961). The coincidence involved a struggle between director and star. Douglas, who in is especially interesting if one thinks of the Marienbad-like print has called Kubrick ‘a talented shit’, portrays himself as the qualities of Kubrick’s The Shining, which uses a Steadicam to guardian of the film’s integrity. But Douglas also made sure that explore the haunted corridors of a vast hotel. All three films the film would be a proper vehicle for his stardom—even to the explore upper-class intrigues amid the architecture of a decadent point of the unwritten rule that virtually every one of his pictures past—huge buildings made up of echoing spaces, luxurious after his breakthrough role in Champion had to contain a scene in furnishings and fascinating geometrical patterns. Where Paths of which he takes off his shirt. Sure enough, in his first scene in Glory is concerned, Kubrick was to some degree influenced by Paths of Glory, which has no equivalent in either the novel or the the elegant, fin de siècle settings in the films of Max Ophuls…. play, he is shown naked to the waist, washing his face from a [His] notes demonstrate Kubrick’s close attention to basin of water in his underground bunker. Nearly all the major social class. Alexander Walker has even gone so far as to argue differences between the novel and the film can be accounted for that Kubrick was making a movie about ‘war as the continuation by a need to build up Douglas’s role, giving him plenty of of class struggle’. It should be pointed out, however, that the film melodramatic actions to perform. The emotionally shattering is more liberal than revolutionary in its political spirit: Dax, the execution is one of the few places where his character is a most heroic and morally upright figure, is a member of the marginal figure, witnessing a horror from the sidelines. After the officer class and Corporal Paris, the most capable of the three execution, the film departs from the novel by creating two condemned soldiers attended the same school, and has the same additional scenes—both written by Calder Willingham and used, background and the lieutenant who selects him for execution. To according to Willingham, despite Kubrick’s initial reservations— be sure, class divisions are everywhere apparent, and the film’s that give evidence of Colonel Dax’s moral authority and of the satire is aimed directly at the military hierarchy…. innate goodness of humanity (neither of these scenes is in the The spectacular background helps to reinforce the final draft of the script). central irony of Henry Cobb’s novel, which takes its title from a Willingham claimed that during the production he line in ’s ‘Elegy in a County Churchyard’: ‘The argued with Kubrick that ‘the stark brutality if ending the film paths of glory lead but to the grave.’ But when the killing with the execution of the soldiers would be intolerable to an happens, Kubrick gives the audience nowhere to look except at audience and philosophically an empty statement as well’. the executed men; capital punishment in all its remorseless Kubrick ultimately agreed, even though the book and the play efficiency and crude brutality is faced square on, without distant derived from the book had ended with the execution. In the first architecture or picturesque embellishment…. of Willingham’s added scenes, Genral Broulard calls Dax to the The absurd war goes on and the film ends with the chateau and allows him to witness General Mireau’s humiliation. survivors returning to their original roles. I suspect that what Mireau draws himself up to attention. ‘So that’s it!’ he says. most people remember about the picture as a whole is not so ‘You’re making me the goat—the only completely innocent man much the heroism of Colonel Dax as the brilliant photographic in this whole affair!’ He marches off in a huff, and Broulard grisalle of , the execution of three soldiers in the offers the regimental commander’s job to Dax, who abandons name of patriotic honour, and the brief interlude of nostalgia decorum and calls Broulard a degenerate. In the next scene, Dax before the barbaric system asserts itself again, This may have stand at the window of a roadside café and witnesses his men as been the director’s plan from the beginning and the reason why they first ogle and hoot at a captured German girl (Susanne critics have given relatively little attention to the film’s Christian, later Christine Kubrick) and then tearfully join her in production history, its relationship to a relatively unknown novel singing ‘Das Lied vom treuen Husaren’. and its underlying political tensions. In the last analysis, it might be said that the authorship of Paths of Glory has something to do with the tension between Kubrick, a dark satirist, and Douglas, a star whose flamboyant acting style and personal worldview were dependent upon melodramatic effects. Both men wanted to be the star, and in this case the clash between the auteur and the actor was reasonably productive. I should be remembered that Douglas was a sincere liberal whose films tend not only to highlight his stardom but also to communicate his social convictions. Champion, which gave him stardom, was a left-wing project whose producer was later blacklisted; Douglas helped to break the blacklist by crediting Dalton Trumbo for Spartacus; and Douglas’s personal favorite of all his was another liberal allegory, Lonely Are the Brave (1962), also scripted by Trumbo. From the scripts of Paths of Glory, he and Kubrick fashioned a dark, in some ways melodramatic film that allows Douglas to function as the voice of liberal reason and humanism, a character who tempers Kubrick’s harsh, traumatic view of European history. … The Schleissheim Palace just outside Munich where much of Paths of Glory was photographed is also a setting in David Eherenstein, Paths of Glory (Criterion notes) Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—11

With Paths of Glory (1958), director Stanley Kubrick established Carey are brilliant as the doomed soldiers. Wayne Morris as a himself not simply as the leading commercial filmmaker of his truly cowardly lieutenant, Emile Meyer as a priest, and Susanne generation, but a world-class talent as well. Based on a novel by Christian (later Mrs. Stanley Kubrick) as a captured German girl Humphrey Cobb, this tragic tale of World War I was offer incisive smaller performances. immediately compared on its release to such classics as The Big Kubrick would go on to detail the workings of warfare Parade and All Quiet on the Western Front. But there’s an in other more complex ways (Dr. Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, enormous difference between those films’ stories of innocents Full Metal Jacket). Still, despite the passing of some thirty years, unstrung by the horrors of war and this outwardly cool/inwardly Paths of Glory remains one of his most lucid, powerful passionate protest drama about a disastrous French army achievements. maneuver and the courtmartial held in its wake. Unlike any other of its kind, Paths of Glory divides its attention equally among officers and enlisted men, constructing a complex picture of a war fought not only on open battlefields, but in boardrooms as well. A thoroughgoing investigation of the terms “bravery” and “cowardice,” Paths of Glory offers far more than a mere “anti-war” statement, paring with almost surgical precision to the heart of the fear, hubris and mendacity that keep the war machine going. The plot couldn’t be simpler. Preening, ambitious General Mireau (George Macready) is informed by his superior General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) that the army’s top brass has elected to take action against a seemingly impregnable German stronghold. If Mireau’s troops triumph, a top promotion will be his. Ignoring advice that it would be utterly suicidal, Mireau orders an all-out advance by his forces on the German “ant-hill.” It is an utter disaster. Enraged by his failure, Mireau demands a court-martial for “cowardice” to take place the very The novel’s background (from Wikipedia): next day. One man from each squadron is chosen by lot to stand Cobb's novel had no title when it was finished, so the publisher trial. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), one of the officers leading the held a contest. The winning entry came from the ninth stanza of attack, sympathetic to the hopeless situation faced by his men, the famous Thomas Gray poem "Elegy Written in a Country asks to defend them at the proceedings. A skilled lawyer in Churchyard". civilian life, Dax eloquently defends the soldiers, but he cannot "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, prevent an outcome that was planned from the start. The men go And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, to their deaths—though Dax happens across an important piece Awaits alike th'inevitable hour. of information that undoes Mireau at the last moment. The paths of glory lead but to the grave." Kubrick makes it abundantly clear that Dax is the hero The book was a minor success when published in 1935, of the film, with Douglas—in a wonderfully disciplined retelling the true-life affair of four French soldiers who were performance—railing against injustice. But at the same time executed to set an example to the rest of the troops. The novel Kubrick adds an element of doubt. Is Dax, the passionate, was adapted to stage the same year by Sidney Howard, where it sincere, “good” officer, at heart all that different from the “evil played on Broadway as Paths of Glory. The play was a flop old men” he despises? Brave and forthright as he may be, isn’t because of its harsh anti-war scenes that alienated the audience; Dax more than a little foolish in thinking some semblance of Howard was a WWI veteran and wanted to show the horrors of “truth” or “justice” might be wrested from the organized insanity war. Nonetheless, convinced that the novel should be made into a of war? film, Howard wrote, “It seems to me that our motion picture The workings of that insanity are made clear in every industry must feel something of a sacred obligation to make the one of Kubrick’s cool, crisp images, some giving off an almost picture.” Fulfilling Howard's "sacred obligation", Stanley newsreel-like sense of authenticity. The sequence in which the Kubrick decided to adapt it to the screen after he remembered camera tracks dramatically through the trenches is justly famous. reading the book when he was younger. Kubrick and his partners Kubrick’s staging of the attack itself is comparable to the finest purchased the film rights from Cobb's widow for $10,000. work of Welles (Chimes at Midnight), Kurosawa (Ran) and Paths of Glory is based loosely on the true story of four Eisenstein (Alexander Nevsky). Its mud-encrusted horror French soldiers during World War I, under General Géraud contrasts sharply with the elegant surrounding of the chateau in Réveilhac, executed for mutiny in Souain, France; their families which the courtmartial is staged. But as Kubrick shows, both sued, and while the executions were ruled unfair, two of the settings—one “savage,” the other “civilized”—are at heart the families received one franc each, while the others received same. nothing. The novel is about the French execution of innocent Douglas’s performance, central as it is to the workings men to strengthen others' resolve to fight. The French Army did of the film, is not the whole show. Veteran character actors carry out military executions for cowardice, as did all the other George Macready and Adolphe Menjou crown their long careers major participants. However, a significant point in the film is the with brilliant portrayals of the martinet Mireau and his devious practice of selecting individuals at random and executing them as adversary Broulard. Ralph Meeker, Joseph Turkel, and Timothy a punishment for the sins of the whole group. This is similar to Kubrick—PATHS OF GLORY—12 the Roman practice of decimation, which was rarely used by the French Army in World War I.

SPRING 2012 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXIV Feb 28 , 12 Angry Men 1957 Mar 6 Satiyajit Ray, The Music Room 1958 Mar 13 spring break Mar 20 , The Outlaw Josey Wales 1975 Mar 27 John Woo, The Killer 1989 Apr 3 Krzysztof Kieslowki, Kieslowski, Red 1994 Apr 10 Terrence Malick, Thin Red Line 1998 Apr 17 Fernando Meirelles, City of God, 2003 Apr 24 Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight 2008

PLEASE TURN OFF CELLPHONES DURING SCREENINGS.

CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: [email protected]…email Bruce Jackson [email protected] ….for the series schedule, annotations, links, handouts (in color) and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com ...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send either of us an email with add to BFS list in the subject line.

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo With support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News

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MIDNIGHT BEACON: A FILM SERIES FOR THE SENSES Friday Midnights February 10th—April 13th Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre (639 Main St.) Gen. $9/ Students $7/ Seniors $6.50 Contact: Jake Mikler (716)668-6095 [email protected]

Midnight Beacon is a new midnight movie series harking back to the golden age of art houses, when cinema was a vessel for exploration and audiences were transfixed by a diverse platter of celluloid equally jarring and dismembering the mind. The films are linked by a commonality of genre, themes or origin, showcasing New German Cinema, the death of the sixties, oddities, Road Movies, and Plastic Surgery Nightmares.

Feb. 24- Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1969) March 2- Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971) March 9- Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jires, 1970) March 16- Possession (Andrej Zulawski, 1981) March 23- Two Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) March 30- Radio on (Chris Petit, 1980) April 6 Seconds- (, 1966) April 13- The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)