Paths Of Glory

This is the original trailer for the first great film Stanley Kubrick ever directed.

Often, it gets lost in the parade of other great films he made. Also, it was made before Kubrick really became an A List director, with Spartacus.

That film's star, Kirk Douglas, also starred in this film, made when Kubrick was an independent filmmaker. He gives a hell of a performance

Perhaps my favorite moment comes when one of the doomed soldiers is bemoaning the unfairness of life when he sees an insect that will be alive the next day when he won't be. Another prisoner swats the insect dead and tells him at least he's one up on the bug.

Yet, despite its neglect, this film may be Kubrick's best. It's certainly one of the five best war films made. Was Dr. Strangelove really better? Funnier, but, as Woody Allen says, drama is sitting at the grownups table. 2001, of course, is great, but it's so cosmic that it's almost antipodal to this gritty film. A Clockwork Orange is great, but, again, so different from this that a comparison is inapt. It's certainly better than The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket is half a great film, and half a very good one, while this is great from start to finish.

And, while I was amongst the first to argue for Eyes Wide Shut's greatness, a position that a decade later, can now be seen as prescient, after the initial mindshits of most critics, it is , again, so different a film that it is an inapt comparison.

This guy asks the same questions I just did.

Oh, and here's a famed scene from the film's end: