Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on May 31, 2015

Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick) — World War I

Thirty years before his half-brilliant Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket, the 28-year-old Kubrick made this most merciless and clinical of antiwar war movies. It details a suicide mission concocted by the ruthless French General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou): his soldiers must storm a German “anthill” with little hope of taking it and placing all their lives in jeopardy. When the botched plan fails, enlisted men must pay for the general’s blunders. Three are chosen at random and condemned to death, with a principled colonel (Kirk Douglas) as their only advocate. As commanding officers move troops across a battlefield like toys that can be replaced when they break, so Dax and Broulard debate the fate of the doomed soldiers. Working from Humphrey Cobb‘s 1935 novel and a screenplay by two other novelists (sensitive Calder Willingham and hard-boiled Jim Thompson), Kubrick sends his camera tracking briskly through the trenches during the ramp-up to battle, then confines the viewer in closeups with the three condemned men — most notably the weeping, groveling Private Ferol, played by the Method madman Timothy Carey. In the equally insane rules of war, the men must prove their worth by dying for a general’s arrogant stupidity. The road to the firing squad is their path of glory.

– Richard Corliss, “Top 10 War Movies”; Time, 2010

Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on October 21, 2012

GL: So you had a lot of trouble with other actors.

TC: A few of them didn’t like what I was doing, yeah. I did a show with Bob Ryan once – he was great, but he wouldn’t allow a lot of takes. “This is it,” he’d say. Adolphe Menjou didn’t care much for me, either. He was a man of the old school, and when we were in Munich shooting Paths of Glory, he thought I’d disgraced the company with my behavior. I had a toy monkey with me, and I was walking around with holes in my shoes.

GL: James Harris, the producer, told me you embarrassed the crew, that the Germans wanted to throw the whole company out of the country.

TC: Harris fired me. He made sure I’d done all my scenes, then fired me the next day. Emile Meyer, the guy playing the priest when we are being executed, also didn’t like me. He wanted to punch me because in my death scene I was biting his arm, saying, “I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die” [laughs]. Kubrick pulled me aside and said [menacing whisper], “Make it good, Tim. Kirk doesn’t like it.” When he fired me, Harris said, “You’ve already stolen all the scenes!”

– Grover Lewis, “Cracked Actor”, Film Comment Jan/Feb 2004; interview conducted in 1992

Video of the Week: “Paths of Glory” trial scene

Posted by Marisa on October 17, 2012

This week’s video puts Timothy front and center, literally. It features the questioning of Pvt. Ferol during the court-martial in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). Also in the scene are Richard Anderson, Kirk Douglas, and Adolphe Menjou.