The Great Movies III

At the end of the day, to save face and protect his promotion, Mireau orders that three men, one from each company, must be executed for cowardice. One is chosen by lot. One because he is "socially undesirable." One because he was an eyewitness to the cowardice of a superior officer, who abandoned a comrade on a reconnaissance mission. Dax is outraged and asks to act as defense counsel before the military tribunal, which is, as we expect, a farce. When Dax argues for the defense that any further advance was "impossible," the prosecutor snaps, "If it was impossible, the only proof of that would be their dead bodies at the bottom of the trenches."The survivors are obviously cowards, then, because they are alive.

That night, the condemned men share the same cell. "Do you see that cockroach?" one says. "Tomorrow morning I'll be dead, and it will be alive." The film until this point has been bitter and unromantic, but we think we glimpse a turn in the plot. Dax learns of Mireau's order to fire French artillery at French troops. He finds General Broulard at a fancy ball and informs him of Mireau's artillery order. In any conventional war movie, in a film made by ninety-nine directors out of one hundred, there would be an eleventh-hour reprieve, the condemned men would be spared, and the stupid and treacherous Mireau would be publicly humiliated.

Not here. Kubrick finds a way to draw all his story threads tight without compromising his harsh and unforgiving theme. The plot is resolved, yes, but cruelty and duplicity survive, and private soldiers are still meaningless pawns. Broulard believes the executions will be "a perfect tonic" for the army: "One way to maintain discipline is to shoot a man now and then."

Paths of Glory was the film by which Stanley Kubrick entered the ranks of great directors, never to leave them. When I interviewed Kirk Douglas in 1969, he recalled it as the summit of his acting career: "There's a picture that will always be good, years from now. I don't have to wait fifty years to know that; I know it now." It has an economy of expression that is almost brutal; it is one of the few narrative films in which you sense the anger in the telling. Samuel Fuller, who fought all the way through World War II, remembered it in The Big Red One with nostalgia for the camaraderie of his outfit. There is no nostalgia in Paths of Glory. Only nightmare.

Kubrick and his cinematographer, George Krause, use sharp and deep focus for every shot. There is not a single shot composed only for beauty; the movie's visual style is to look, and look hard. Kirk Douglas, a star whose intelligence and ambition sometimes pulled him away from the comfortable path mapped by the system, contains most of the emotion of his character. When he is angry, we know it, but he stays just within the edge of going too far. He remains an officer. He does his duty. He finds a way to define his duty more deeply than his superiors would have wished, but in a way, they cannot condemn.

And then that final song. It is sung by a young actress named Christiane Harlan, who soon after married Stanley Kubrick. One day in the summer of 2000, I visited her on their farm outside London, and we walked through the garden to the boulder engraved with Kubrick's name, under which he rests. I wanted to tell her how special and powerful that scene was, how it came out of nowhere to provide a heartbreaking coda, how by cutting away from his main story Kubrick cut right into the heart of it. But it didn't seem like the moment for film criticism, and I was sure she already knew whatever I could tell her.

t has always been a question whether The Phantom of the Opera (1925) is a great film, or only a great spectacle. Carl Sandburg, one of the original reviewers, underwent a change of heart between his first Chicago Daily News review (he waited for the Phantom's unmasking "terribly fascinated, aching with suspense") and a reconsideration written a month later ("strictly among the novelties of the season"). It was not, he added, on the level of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Greed, mentioning two of the greatest films of all time.

He was right about that, and could have added the greatest of all silent horror films, Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), whose vampire may have influenced Lon Chaney's performance as the Phantom. But as an exercise in lurid sensationalism, straining against technical limitations in its eagerness to overwhelm, the first of the many Phantom films has a creepy, undeniable power.

The story is simply told-too simply, perhaps, so that all of the adaptations, including the famous Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, have been much ado about relatively little. In the cellars of the Paris Opera House lives a disfigured masked man who becomes obsessed with the young singer Christine. He commands the management to give her leading roles, and when they refuse, he exacts a terrible revenge, causing a great chandelier to crash down on the audience.