PATHS OF GLORY

Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Starring Kirk Douglas

(1957) WWI colonel Kirk Douglas gets the order to take “The Anthill,” as icily smiling chateau-bound generals Adolphe Menjou and George Macready play the General Staff office politics two-step. But, after the ensuing bloodbath, it’s time for heads to roll. Shot in Belgium after French authorities nixed it – the original novel was based on the officially “mythical” mass mutinies of 1917 – this is one of the most ruthlessly anti-war films ever made, with Kubrick’s telephoto-lensed, side-tracking shooting of the assault perhaps the screen’s most authentic treatment of trench warfare. 35mm. Approx. 86 mins.
12:30, 4:00

“One of the most powerful movies ever made…Could not be more timely.”
– A. O. Scott

“The film by which Stanley Kubrick entered the ranks of great directors, never to leave them.”
– Roger Ebert

“The truest movie about war ever made.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“A brilliant tale of macabre futility and horror in the trenches. It is arguably the best film about the first world war, and still has a reasonable claim to being Stanley Kubrick’s best film.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

THE KILLING

Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Starring Sterling Hayden

(1956) As Art Gilmore narrates, giving often-needed time and place, back-from-the-pen Sterling Hayden puts together a team for a race track robbery, though letting each know only his own role: crooked cop Ted de Corsia (The Naked City), betting window teller Elisha Cook Jr. (with no-good Marie Windsor as his wife), actual chess-playing wrestler Kola Kwariani, track bartender Joe Sawyer, and wacko, scenery-devouring sniper Timothy Carey. And then 27-year-old Kubrick eschews classical intercutting and instead scrambles the chronology, re-winding to the start each time a different team member’s particular role begins…with a final, bitterly ironic twist. Screenplay by Kubrick and pulp titan Jim Thompson, from Lionel White’s novel Clean Break. 35mm. Approx. 83 mins.
2:15

“ARGUABLY KUBRICK’S MOST PERFECTLY CONCEIVED AND EXECUTED FILM!”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“Far more satisfying than most of Kubrick’s later work…What is remarkable about the movie, besides the excellent performance of an archetypal noir cast and Lucien Ballard’s steely photography, is the time structure, employing a complex series of flashbacks both to introduce and explain characters and to create a synchronous view of simultaneous events.”
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)

“With its jagged time structure and doubling back over past events, like a proto – and pulp – Last Year At Marienbad…Also predicts the important bridge that Kubrick would define between the studio genre picture and the European art film.”
– Hayden Guest

Ted Hicks analyzes The Killing at Films etc.