A recording of the introduction to PATHS OF GLORY by writer/producer DAVID SIMON, recorded September 20, 2010, at Film Forum

Summary: PATHS OF GLORY: “There are few things more fundamentally stimulating than watching another man die.” France, 1915. Amid the muddy trenches of World War I’s Western Front, Kirk Douglas’s French Colonel Dax gets the dreaded order: have his poilus take the seemingly impregnable “Anthill.” While behind the lines, icily smiling generals George Macready and Adolphe Menjou, ensconced in their chateau headquarters, play the General Staff office politics twostep, the one to get that promotion, the other to get some nice ink in the papers. But, with the troops trapped in the trenches amid the ensuing bloodbath, Macready vows that heads — but not his — will roll. And ultimately, three men — Joe Turkel, Ralph Meeker (Kiss Me Deadly’s Mike Hammer) and Timothy Carey (the wacko assassin of The Killing and “a precursor of the hipster druggies of the 60s” – Pauline Kael) — become the scapegoats in a game of judicial murder. But as Menjou suavely explains, “One way to maintain discipline is to shoot a man now and then.” Shot in Germany after French authorities nixed the project as defamatory (the film was banned in France until 1975), Paths is one of the most ruthlessly anti-war films ever, with Kubrick’s telephoto-lensed, side-tracking shooting of the assault perhaps the screen’s most authentic treatment of trench warfare. A crew of 60 worked around the clock for weeks to re-create the intricate trench systems and ravaged terrain of a WWI battleground (although the trenches were built two feet wider than the claustrophobic originals to accomodate the riveting backtracking shots of Douglas’s pre-zero hour procession); the set for HQ was a building actually damaged by WWII bombs; and the special effects techies discharged over a ton of explosives in the first week of filming alone. With a screenplay by Kubrick, Calder Willingham and cult pulp novelist Jim Thompson, Paths was named to the National Film Registry in 1992. This podcast episode is a recording of the introduction to PATHS OF GLORY by writer/producer DAVID SIMON, recorded September 20, 2010, at Film Forum during a screening of the film.