PATHS OF GLORY

Sunday, November 21st at 1:00 p.m.
and Tuesday, November 23rd at 7:00 p.m.
FREE ADMISSION
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ESSENTIAL CINEMA is The Loft's FREE monthly series of classic art films on the big screen. See old favorites, hidden gems and exciting re-discoveries the way they were meant to be seen - with an audience and on the big screen in glorious 35 mm!

“One of the most powerful movies ever made… It could not be more timely.” — A.O. Scott, THE NEW YORK TIMES

“A STUNNER! Kubrick's first full-fledged masterpiece is a peerless insanity-of-war picture, with trenchbound tracking shots that have influenced everybody from Gilliam to Spielberg ... Deservedly launched Kubrick to the highest level of prestige." – TIME OUT NEW YORK

“Kubrick’s elegant yet blunt PATHS OF GLORY shows how much—and how little—war has changed in a century… - Ken Tucker, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

“There are few things more fundamentally stimulating than watching another man die.”
Stanley Kubrick had already made his talent known with the outstanding 1956 racetrack heist thriller THE KILLING, but it was the 1957 masterpiece PATHS OF GLORY that catapulted the young director to international acclaim.
Based on the novel by Humphrey Cobb, the film was initiated by star Kirk Douglas, who chose the Kubrick to direct what would become one of history's most powerful films about the insanity of war. In one of his most riveting performances, Douglas plays Colonel Dax, commander of a battle-worn regiment of the French army operating along the muddy trenches of WWI's Western Front. Held in their trenches under the threat of German artillery, the regiment is ordered on a suicidal mission to capture an enemy stronghold. When the mission inevitably fails, French generals vow that heads - but not theirs - will roll. Ultimately, they order the selection of three soldiers - Joe Turkel (THE SAND PEBBLES), Ralph Meeker (KISS ME DEADLY's Mike Hammer) and Timothy Carey (the wacko assassin of THE KILLING) - to be tried and executed on the charge of cowardice. Dax is appointed as defense attorney for the chosen scapegoats, and what follows is a mind-blowing travesty of justice that has lost none of its relevance or power over the ensuing decades since the film's initial release.
Shot in Germany after French authorities nixed the project as defamatory (the film was banned in France until 1975), PATHS OF GLORY is one of the most ruthlessly anti-war films ever made, with Kubrick brilliantly exploring the political machinations and selfish personal ambitions that result in battlefield slaughter and senseless executions. The film is also visually stunning, and Kubrick’s telephoto-lensed, side-tracking shooting of the assault remains perhaps the screen’s most authentic treatment of trench warfare. With a scathing screenplay by Kubrick, Calder Willingham and cult pulp novelist Jim Thompson (The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me), PATHS was named to the National Film Registry in 1992.