Celluloid Heroes

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

Legendary French director François Truffaut famously said that it was impossible to make a truly anti-war film, because film inherently glamorizes everything it depicts. That quote is hard to reconcile, however, with the evidence of Stanley Kubrick’s first truly great movie. Of course, it’s possible that Truffaut never had the chance to see Paths of Glory until after he uttered those words, as the French government banned the film until 1975. It is truly ironic that the nation that gave birth to New Wave cinema could take such an iron-fisted approach to films showing its government in a bad light, even forty years after the fact.

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All ahead for attack, Mr. Ware. Maybe we can rip him open in the middle of a waltz.

Often imitated, this movie practically drew the blueprint for the World War II submarine movie. This lean, efficient story of the hunter and the hunted rises above the pack, courtesy of a pair of superb performances in the roles of two crisply drawn antagonists. Some elements of the film seem conspicuously dated, especially the scenes aboard the American destroyer that don’t involve Robert Mitchum hunting the submarine, but when the action is joined, the forced, stilted dialog disappears like it never existed.

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