Stuff

While reminding myself of these Kubrick films, I re-watched The Killing with a friend. “Oh, it’s so hard to follow”, she said, “it keeps jumping back and forward in time.”

Well, it does do a little of that, to make it easier to follow. But it’s not hard, and scenes are repeated to show how the bits link up.

This is a 1950s black and white B movie, a robbery at a race track. You know it’s a B movie from the budget, running time (80 minutes or so) and familiar faces in the cast (Elisha Cook Jr., Timothy Carey, Ted de Corsia and so on).

The story rattles on, and it doesn’t end well. And it features a narration.

For us, this is the first of Kubrick’s film that bears repeated watching.

It’s another war film, a Cold War comedy about a possibly mad and definitely sex obsessed USA Brigadier General who manages to launch an attack on the USSR.

There’s a typical narration, a Kubrick favourite bathroom scene or two and some fine performances by George C Scott and Slim Pickens.

Peter Sellers is here again, doing the silly voices and strange characters, but they are in keeping with the mood of the film. The original ending, the pie fight, was cut before the film was released.

It’s a film that bears repeat watching. Parts are laugh out loud funny, at least the first time you see them.

A recent stage presentation highlighted just how good Sellers was here. It may seem a bit dated, but, the state of the world being as it is right now, perhaps not.

A classic.

Kubrick was intrigued by war and made many films on the subject.

Paths Of Glory is sometimes described as “anti-war”, but it’s hard to say that any Kubrick war films are explicitly anti.

Paths Of Glory highlights a true (ish) story from World War I. Having reached a stalemate on the front line, the generals order an attack that is doomed to failure. In the aftermath, when no progress has been made and lives have been lost, three soldiers are chosen to be executed as an incentive for the rest to, er, try harder in the future.

There’s more to the story, of course, but we just don’t want any spoilers.

Kirk Douglas plays Dax, who volunteers to defend the three men, even though he knows it is a lost cause.

Douglas is Douglas. There are some other familiar faces in the cast, and some memorable scenes. We always think that Kubrick would have loved a Steadicam as he took his camera through the trenches.