The Paths of Glory

For Veterans' Day, what better choice than Paths of Glory (1957)? This moive was the first of Kubrick's anti-war trilogy completed by Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Love the Bomb (1964) and Full Metal Jacket (1987).

Rent it in tandem with All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Kubrick's early but yet to be improved on movie came from a book and then play (both far and away eclipsed by the movie) the title of which comes from the ninth stanza of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard."

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave