Film Noir File: ‘Paths of Glory’ seduces you with its beauty, shatters you with its horror

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir from the schedule of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

PICK OF THE WEEK

Paths of Glory” (1957, Stanley Kubrick). Saturday, July 27: 1:30 p.m. (10:30 a.m.)

In 1957, Stanley Kubrick, still in his 20s – with “Dr. Strangelove,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” still in his future – made one of the greatest of all anti-war movies: his grim, stylish and incredibly moving adaptation of Humphrey Cobb’s World War I novel, “Paths of Glory.”

Kubrick may not have known war first hand. But, in that film, he created an indelible image of war’s inhumanity and horror. “Paths of Glory” is a compelling, wrenching nightmare of a movie with a brilliant (and very noir) cast including Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker, George Macready and (at his best, or worst) Timothy Carey.

Based on a real-life episode, the movie was made on location in Bavaria and is set in the French trenches, where the infantry soldiers eat and sleep in the cold, dirt, and mud – and from which they charge forth to fight and die. It’s also set in an elegant chateau, far from the battlefield, where rich, ambitious generals plot the sometimes-insane strategies that will get their men killed.

Michael Douglas plays Dax, the regiment’s idealistic commanding officer.

When one ill-advised attack against the Germans fails, Macready, as the vainglorious Gen. Mireau, flies into a murderous rage and demands that his own men be executed for cowardice. His superior, the wily Gen. Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), argues the number of the condemned down to three soldiers: Meeker, Carey and Joe Turkel. Defending them is Colonel Dax, the regiment’s courageous and idealistic commanding officer (played by Douglas, one of the leading Hollywood liberals of the ’50s and ’60s). Outraged by the mad injustice of the trumped-up court-martial , Dax – a famous criminal lawyer in civilian life – argues eloquently and fearlessly for the lives of those three guiltless men.

What a great movie this is! “Paths of Glory” is a film to see when you’re young and more innocent, like the three soldiers. And to see again when you’re stronger, more mature and full of fiery ideals, like Dax. And finally to watch yet again when you’re even older and have witnessed a lifetime of the awful compromises and vile injustices that “Paths of Glory” paints with such absolute lucidity, such deadly, inexorable narrative force.

Timothy Carey had worked with Kubrick in 1956’s “The Killing.”

By the time he directed and co-wrote “Paths of Glory,” Kubrick, 29, had three features already under his belt (including the classic 1956 film noir, “The Killing”). His partner on “The Killing,” James B. Harris, produced “Paths of Glory.” Douglas – then at the height of his Hollywood stardom and power – made it happen.

Two great American novelists collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay: Oklahoma-born noir ace Jim Thompson (author of the crime classics “The Killer Inside Me,” “The Grifters” and “The Getaway”) and the acidly funny Southern novelist Calder Willingham (“End as a Man,” “Eternal Fire”) Probably thanks to those two, “Paths of Glory” has one of the darkest visions, some of the richest characters and some of the most pungent dialogue of any American movie of that era.

Kubrick’s masterpiece of war’s injustice seduces you with its beauty, shatters you with its horror. The battle scenes are shot with a black and white grit and shock reminiscent of Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” but also with the Max Ophuls-like grace and romanticism that Kubrick loved and that ironically permeates his film.

War is hell. It’s also noir.

Paths of Glory” is available in DVD on Criterion. [Read more…]

Kubrick creates his defining template with ‘The Killing’

The Killing/1956/United Artists/85 min.

A DVD copy of “The Killing” from Criterion is this month’s Film Noir Blonde reader giveaway. Newly digitally restored, the two-disc set contains many extras, including Kubrick’s 1955 noir, “Killer’s Kiss,” also reviewed below.

By Michael Wilmington

It takes guts and brains to pull the perfect heist. Or to shoot the perfect heist movie.

In 1956, at the age of 28, Stanley Kubrick, a New Yorker who grew up in the Bronx, traveled to Hollywood and San Francisco to direct the movie that would not only make his reputation but would provide the template – the clockwork nightmare with humans caught in the machinery – that defines most of the films he made from then on.

A Kubrick self-portrait, 1950

Those later films include acknowledged masterpieces: “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964), “2001: a Space Odyssey” (1968), “A Clockwork Orange” (1971). But none of them is more brilliantly designed or more perfectly executed than that inexpensive film, “The Killing.”

Kubrick and nonpareil pulp novelist Jim Thompson (“The Killer Inside Me”) wrote the script, based on Lionel White’s neatly plotted crime novel “Clean Break.” The great cinematographer Lucien Ballard (“The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond”) photographed the film.

That cast – a Who’s Who of noir types – includes Sterling Hayden (“The Asphalt Jungle”), Coleen Gray (“Kiss of Death”), Elisha Cook, Jr. (“The Maltese Falcon”), Marie Windsor (“The Narrow Margin”), Ted De Corsia (“The Naked City”), Timothy Carey (“Crime Wave”), James Edwards (“The Phenix City Story”), Joe Sawyer (“Deadline at Dawn”), Vince Edwards (“Murder by Contract”), Jay Adler (“Sweet Smell of Success”) and Jay C. Flippen (“They Live By Night”).

Perhaps inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 art-house classic “Rashomon,” Kubrick’s movie repeatedly circles back to the fictional Lansdowne race track (actually the Bay Meadows in San Francisco) during a fictional race. It’s a “jumbled jigsaw puzzle,” as one character calls it, that will supposedly end with a $2 million score of Lansdowne’s Saturday gambling receipts.

Immaculately orchestrated by a brusque criminal mastermind named Johnny Clay (Hayden), the heist kicks off when crack rifleman Nikki Arcane (Carey), shoots the favorite, Red Lightning, from a parking lot outside the track, at one of the turns. Thanks to Johnny, the robbery has been cleverly designed and planned to the last detail with each of the participants keenly aware of his part, executing it with precision and together getting away with the cash.

But like almost all great movie heists, like the robberies in “Rififi” and “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Le Cercle Rouge,” the one in “The Killing” has to unravel. And it does. The flaw in this system is the dysfunctional marriage between mousy cashier George (Cook, Jr., in his archetypal role) and George’s lazily sexy, unfaithful wife Sherry (Windsor, in hers).

Vince Edwards and Marie Windsor as the lovers.

George, desperate to keep his wayward wife interested, hints at an upcoming windfall. Sherry shares the leak with loverboy Val Cannon (Vince Edwards) – that has to be one of the great adulterous boyfriend movie names – and we can feel doom coming up fast on the outside.

The show clicked. It conquered audiences, especially critics. “The Killing” was immediately hailed by many as a classic of its kind, the very model of a high-style, low-budget thriller. “Kubrick is a giant,” said Orson Welles and it was the young Welles, of “Citizen Kane,” to whom the young Kubrick was most often compared.

If anything, his third feature’s reputation has grown over the years, as has the stature of the type of movie it embodies: the lean, swift, shadowy, cynical, hard-boiled crime genre we call film noir.

Also includes: “Killer’s Kiss”/1955/United Artists/67 min. This was Kubrick’s second feature and his first collaboration with producer James Harris. One of the most gorgeous-looking B movies ever, Kubrick shot in a style that effortlessly mixes the street-scene poetic realism of movies like “Little Fugitive” and “On the Waterfront” with film noir expressionism.

Jamie Smith plays a boxer in "Killer's Kiss."

But Kubrick’s script is subpar, mostly in the dialogue. It creaks, while his cinematography soars. A nearly washed-up boxer (Jamie Smith) falls in love with the woman across the courtyard (Irene Kane, aka Chris Chase), a dance hall girl who’s tyrannized by her obsessively smitten gangster boss (Frank Silvera).

The story sounds trite and that’s how it plays. But Silvera is good and the classy visuals give “Killer’s Kiss” a power that holds you. All Kubrick needed was a writer and a cast, and in “The Killing,” he got them.

Stanley Kubrick photo from Vanity Fair, courtesy of the Look Magazine Photograph Collection/The Library of Congress.

Free stuff: Win ‘The Killing’ and try Cafecito Organico

The winner of the August reader giveaway has been selected. For September, I am giving away a copy of Criterion’s new DVD release of “The Killing” (1956).

Stanley Kubrick directed this racetrack-robbery noir; pulp novelist Jim Thompson wrote dialogue. The impressive cast includes Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr., and Marie Windsor.

Criterion’s new digital restoration features a slew of great special features, namely:

*a new interview with producer James B. Harris

*excerpted interviews with Hayden from the French TV series “Cinéma cinemas”

*a new interview with author Robert Polito about Thompson

*restored high-definition digital transfer of Kubrick’s 1955 noir feature “Killer’s Kiss” and a video appreciation of “Killer’s Kiss” featuring film critic Geoffrey O’Brien

*trailers and a booklet featuring an essay by film historian Haden Guest as well as a reprinted interview with Windsor.

Additionally, I am giving away a T-shirt and 12-ounce bag of Espresso Clandestino from Los Angeles-based Cafecito Organico. Their coffee is sustainably grown and locally roasted, which results in a rich, robust flavor that’s also uncommonly smooth – there’s no trace of bitterness or harsh acidity.

Perfecting summing up how many noir denizens feel first thing in the morning, Cafecito’s motto is Café o Muerte (Coffee or Death).

To enter the September giveaway, just leave a comment on any FNB post from Sept. 1-30. The winner will be randomly selected at the end of the month and announced in early October. Include your email address in your comment so that I can notify you if you win. Your email will not be shared. Good luck!