The Complete Kubrick: The Killing, Paths of Glory, and Spartacus

In celebration of Criterion’s The Complete Kubrick, we’re publishing a season of features dedicated to the filmmaker’s oeuvre and beyond, going through Criterion’s box set era by era and disc by disc—plus a couple of surprises from the archives. Explore more here and read part two below.

The Killing (1956)

Kubrick’s first studio film is also his first unqualified artistic success: a swift, lean and biting noir that (despite a few key low-angle closeups and ominous tracking shots) trades the grandiose visual and musical experimentation most commonly identified as “Kubrickian” for equally groundbreaking experimentation with narrative structure.

Dissecting the perfect crime, the nonlinear, multi-perspective ensemble heist film follows a conspiracy of workaday men and women, led by future Jack D. Ripper Sterling Hayden as a cocky ex-con methodically plotting his masterpiece, in a complex and audacious scheme to rob a Chicago racetrack mid-race. Based on the pulp novel Clean Break by Lionel White and utilizing the jagged, crunchy mock-stained-glass prose of Kubrick’s favorite hardboiled writer Jim Thompson to bring the scheming dialogues to life, each of the film’s stock viewpoint characters is the protagonist of their own story: Jay C. Flippen as the heist’s cautious bankroller, revealed late in the film to be motivated by concern for his sickly wife; Elisha Cook Jr. as the diminutive teller, desperate to prove his masculinity; Marie Windsor as his unsatisfied wife, a sassy fork-tongued manipulator with designs of her own; Timothy Carey as the hissing, strutting, puppy-loving sniper who never misses his mark; Kola Kwariani as the Russian chessmaster, dissident intellectual and wrestler who, in a perfect Kubrickian irony, is hired as the dumb muscle of the operation.

Rather than dwell on or empathize with any one player, Kubrick’s relentlessly-paced film instead likens them to racehorses, chess pieces and puzzle pieces, continually shuffling perspectives as the clock jumps forward and backward, restaging the same scenes from overlapping viewpoints as the baroque grand design gradually comes into view for the audience. Each piece is maneuvered into the correct place at the correct time to outwit and burgle the inflexible system of state-condoned racetrack security. This player is to execute the feint here, so that one can penetrate the system’s defenses there, so the next one can receive the handoff during the designated window at the designated spot and move on before the mark knows what hit ‘em. The tropes of the heist movie, already established in John Huston’s 1950 The Asphalt Jungle, are combined with Kubrick’s distinct passions for chess, philosophy and tragicomic absurdism to crackerjack effect: each individual fancies themselves the master strategist of their world, but is only privy to a limited piece of the bigger picture. Even the perfect scheme struggles to survive contact with the frailties of the human heart—lust, hatred, and one-sided love—combined with the vicissitudes of chance in a world of individuals one has never even met.

One of his less-seen films today, Kubrick’s breakout hit has nevertheless proven as seminal to generations of American crime cinema as his later masterpieces would be to science fiction, horror and war films. Without the chilly ironies and subversive chronology of The Killing, the outputs of David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and Rian Johnson—to name a few—would be unrecognizable. Amusingly though, for his trouble constructing a bleeding-cool auteurist pulp pastiche that reveals the small-minded artifice of traditional Hollywood forms by scrambling their structure, Kubrick was initially written off as a poseur by Cahiers du cinéma critic Jean-Luc Godard. A more senior film artist, on the other hand, had a different view: The Killing inspired one Orson Welles to promptly declare Kubrick the greatest director of his generation. Given his own output, it’s not hard to imagine what enchanted Welles: The Killing isn’t just a successful Hollywood entertainment, but a winking piece of metacinema that not-too-subtly likens the film director to the criminal mastermind, playfully hoodwinking the audience with the unique power over comprehension and perception exercised behind the camera before humbly submitting to the impossibility of total control.

Paths of Glory (1957)

If The Killing cemented Kubrick as a young maverick in exceptional command of cinematic storytelling, Paths of Glory announced him as a serious artist with serious thoughts on his mind. Adapting WWI veteran Humphrey Cobb’s novel of the same name, Kubrick reunited with Jim Thompson alongside playwright Calder Willingham (also a one-time collaborator of David Lean, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Marlon Brando, and Jack Garfein) to craft one of the great war film screenplays, a figurative slow pan up and down the ranks of the 1916 French armed forces in a Sisyphean 90-minute chronicle of institutional friendly fire.

There are quite a few literal slow pans and tracking shots too, of course, and Kubrick combines them with masterful blocking to establish the film’s two conflicting settings and worlds. There’s the palatial French estate (the same used in Last Year at Marienbad), established with ornate period architecture, angular military formations, and graceful X and Y-axis camera movements, where well-mustached generals (real-life WWI vet Adolphe Menjou and subordinate George Macready) dine on fine food, enjoy waltzes, and relay a casualty-heavy, practically infeasible strategy to repel Germany’s forces from above—no one wants to be deemed a coward and relieved of his command, so responsibility for the foolhardy assault is kicked continually down the ranks. And then there’s the snaking, filthy, crowded trenches, represented in claustrophobic lateral tracking shots, where the infantrymen treated as livestock and game pieces have to live with the shelling, the sickness, the dwindling rations, the omnipresence of terror and death, and the condescension of generals touring the frontlines to deny the existence of “shellshock” and demand to know whether each and every soldier is “Ready to kill more Germans?”

Serving as liaison between these conflicting strata is Kirk Douglas, the lone uncomplicatedly heroic leading man in the Kubrick corpus, as stout-hearted patriot Col. Dax, charged with the contradictory duties of protecting his men and obeying his callous superiors. In a subversion of genre norms, the film’s big battle sequence—the charge on the heavily fortified “Anthill,” filmed in slow, grueling right-to-left horizontal movements through fields of fire and flying dirt—is not the climax of the film, but its midpoint. When the operation fails just as Dax warned it would—due in part to the actual cowardice of nepo-officer Lt. Roget (Wayne Morris)—three corpsmen (Ralph Meeker alongside the returning Timothy Carey and Joe Turkel) are chosen as scapegoats to answer for the strategic and moral failures of their promotion-hungry superiors, men who disguise their interest in advancing and maintaining their own dominance as the interest of the state. The final act and climax are a grimly absurd show trial, imprisonment and execution, redolent of Camus’ The Stranger and shot in the film’s most imposing expressionist compositions, in which Dax’s shrewd dissections of the accusers’ obscene logic and the innocent prisoners’ own heartrending, “cowardly” pleas for their lives fall on deaf ears. “There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die!” beams Menjou’s cheerful, wine-sipping Maj. General Broulard while condemning his own countrymen—including, by the end, a man with a concussion who needs to be propped up and prodded awake for his own execution—to senseless deaths as communal spectacle, “for morale.” Broulard is a man, like the film’s other men of power, whose cold strategic models and macho death-cult ideals cannot countenance or survive flesh-and-blood human frailty, and whose hierarchical insulation from consequences for his own frailty diminishes his humanity.

Paths of Glory was an intellectually, professionally, and personally monumental film for Kubrick, held back only by his Hays Code-enforced inability to graphically depict war’s desecration of the body in ways he instead leans on (dreadfully evocative) dialogue to describe. (There is one gruesome exception: the image of a smoldering soldier killed by his own lieutenant’s hand grenade, thrown on an ill-advised nighttime mission in a fit of panic. His killer never faces any consequences.) For its harsh portrayal of the French military in a defensive war against Germany, with WWII so close in the rearview mirror, the film was deemed scandalous in France and denied distribution for nearly two decades. Of course Kubrick’s point was not to attack France: he treats them no less kindly than he would treat America in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, and presumably kinder than he would have treated Nazi Germany in the unrealized Holocaust film he was already contemplating by the late 1950s (an early concept of which—to follow the domestic life of a Nazi officer involved in the extermination of European Jewry—bears a notable resemblance to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest). Rather, Kubrick’s aim was to demonstrate the hypocrisies of hierarchical power and the logic of the nation-state as universal evils.

Extending the absurdist themes of The Killing, Paths of Glory brings the conflict of individuals and systems into sharper political focus. The film foreshadows much of Kubrick’s future work with its forensic depiction of individual men’s egocentric and rationally self-interested maneuvers within a state institution producing, in concert, abjectly cruel and irrational outcomes, devouring the weak while destroying the strong from within. Kubrick’s most humanist film also illustrates his evolving ideas about human nature: here war reduces men to numbers and thus to lesser, colder versions of themselves, compelling them to assume masks of detachment and barbarism as they’re told their natural desire to live is cowardice and their natural individuality is illusory before the uniform abstraction of the nation. (Kubrick’s clever casting and framing emphasize the men’s individuality in size, shape, and skin tone even as they stand shoulder to shoulder in uniform.) One of the film’s most repellent antagonists, Macready’s Brig. Gen. Mireau, initially seems sympathetic and protective of his division until his command is threatened from above; Kubrick’s Rousseauist ideas about cruelty as learned behavior would be complicated by later films that weigh the dehumanizing effect of social systems of control against the violent and senseless aspects of man’s barbarian and animal heritage. The grimly ironic, procedurally detailed depiction of a self-cannibalizing institution in which “the shit rolls downhill” would also be a key inspiration for revered TV writer David Simon, who has cited it as a template for the 21st-century stories of HBO’s The Wire and Generation Kill.

Paths of Glory was also, finally, the film that introduced Stanley to actress Christiane Harlan, his third wife and the love of his life—and, in an irony Kubrick himself couldn’t have bettered, the niece of infamous Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, director of likely the most antisemitic film ever made, the Holocaust-era agitprop drama Süss the Jew. To Kubrick, one of the great Jewish filmmakers whose awareness of his own Jewishness and haunted fascination with the Holocaust would only grow as the years went by, the notion of guilt by association hardly registered. With Christiane (and her brother Jan, eventually to be a trusted production partner and guardian of the Kubrick estate), Kubrick would be personally and artistically transformed, raising three daughters as he matured from young upstart to wise master, and remained blissfully married until his death more than four decades later. In Paths of Glory’s coda, she plays the lone female character in the entire film: a tearful German girl coerced by the French troops, brought to a drunken tavern to sing before a crowd of leering, barking, animalistic men ready to let loose the pent-up cruelty of the trenches. As her halting nightingale voice rises in the German folksong “The Faithful Hussar”, the masks of barbarism slip from the men in a montage of faces steadily joining her in singing and in tears. For just a fleeting moment before their redeployment, the power of music and visage of a woman acts on them like the opposite of a gun: it destroys rather than reinforces the boundaries of nations, and sheds away everything that death and war have made of men. It’s the most personal and heartfelt grace note imaginable for the likes of Stanley Kubrick.

Criterion’s 4K Paths of Glory disc features a commentary reused from their 2010 Blu-ray, in which critic and author Gary Giddins offers an exhaustive breakdown of the film’s innovative technique, cast and production history, subtle symbolism, revealing changes from the novel, and comparisons to other war films—most of which, unsurprisingly, reveal just how exceptional Kubrick’s directing is even when quietly supporting an exemplary script and set of performances. Arguing against the popular characterization of Paths of Glory as an “antiwar film,” Giddins dissects the verbal chess matches between characters, along with the various ways in which they’re shot, scored, and performed, to highlight how Kubrick uses the theme of war as a platform to examine issues of power, control, and class. Despite some factual errors (Giddins repeatedly misidentifies the waltz favored by Maj. Gen. Broulard as “The Blue Danube” of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame; in fact, it is “Künstlerleben,” also by Johann Strauss), the commentary is a must for those eager to discover whole new layers in a deceptively complex film.

Spartacus (1960)

For his Roman sword-and-sandal epic, Kubrick took over directing duties from postwar genre pioneer Anthony Mann—after filming had already begun—at the invitation of executive producer and star Kirk Douglas. The finished film is the one “studio picture” over which Kubrick felt little sense of authorship, though a Kubrick-approved 1991 reconstruction (the basis for Criterion’s disc) restored several provocative scenes and shots cut by Universal from the original release. It’s nevertheless Douglas and HUAC-persecuted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s film at heart, with Kubrick as uncharacteristic journeyman merely translating their words and characters to the cinematic canvas.

Adapting the historical novel by Howard Fast, Spartacus is a thunderous, speechifying, and comparatively left-wing peer to the likes of Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments, ditching its contemporaries’ Christianity for an insistently secular parable of the ancient world, framed around the eternal struggle of social underclasses against the wages of exploitation and imperialism. While loosely based on the actual life of the man Karl Marx deemed “the most splendid fellow in all of ancient history,” the film’s vision of Rome—shared by Fast, Trumbo and Kubrick despite a host of other creative differences—analogizes the cruel and decadent twilight years of the Republic clearly enough to a postwar America riven by inequality that it inspired backlash in its day, with prominent conservatives including John Wayne calling for boycotts of the blacklist-breaking production.

Spartacus (Douglas) is a Thracian born into the crucible of slavery, whose muscular stature and knack for defiance earn him a spot in the lucrative and deadly gladiatorial circuit under oily manager Lentulus Batiatus (snake charmer Peter Ustinov, who wrote a substantial portion of his own dialogue to create an urbane and affable antagonist where lesser actors might have leaned into one-note vulgarity). Forced to fight his fellow slaves for the entertainment of Rome’s upper classes—“ladies and gentlemen of quality, those who appreciate a fine kill,” as Batiatus puts it—Spartacus is eventually spurred from quiet defiance to collective solidarity and open rebellion by the petty cruelty of power-hungry oligarch Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier, who like Ustinov sketches welcome texture into what could have been a cutout villain—as in a memorable scene, cut by studio censors from the original 1960 release, in which the surprisingly libertine Crassus reveals himself through salacious culinary double entendre as one of Hollywood’s first openly bisexual characters). Crassus in turn finds himself opposed both on the battlefield by Spartacus and in the chambers of the Senate by corpulent operator Sempronius Gracchus (Charles Laughton), a principled sleaze who correctly perceives Crassus’ ever-growing authority as foreshadowing the collapse of the Republic into an Empire.

As the black sheep of the Kubrick oeuvre, Spartacus is distinct for its stylistic indistinctness amid the genre blockbusters of its day. It’s Stanley’s most talkative film by a mile, filled to the over-three-hour brim with moralistic and expository speechifying, filmed in mostly conventional shot-reverse shot coverage to highlight the performances of its hallowed thespians. It’s also the only Kubrick film with no ambiguity or irony of note: a clash of noble heroes and dastardly villains all neatly sorted out from one another by the pyrrhic finale, with bellowed Trumbo monologues telling the audience what to think and an insistent full-orchestra Alex North score telling them what to feel at all times, should any questions arise. Yet it’s not without distinct traces of Kubrick: dense and wordless panoramic shots establish the scope, depth, and brutality of the film’s world in between dialogue scenes, with clear distinctions drawn between the loose, rough and warm compositions of Spartacus’s growing slave army—in which women, children, and the elderly march to the sea alongside barely-trained men—and the cool, angular regimentation of “civilized” Rome. A morbid vertical tracking shot of corpses stacked to the blood-red horizon in the aftermath of battle is one of the great moving images in the Kubrick library. Institutional decay and barbarism in the guise of civilization return as central Kubrickian themes, and the director clearly takes special interest in aspects of the script exploring the psychosexual and gendered dimensions of power, dehumanization and control: the first act draws particular attention to the commodification of Spartacus’s masculine body and persona by the thirsty consumers of the Roman slaveholding class.

It’s also an early instance of a Kubrick film presenting indirect, secularized reimaginings of distinctly Jewish narratives: the Roman-Judean conflict is never brought up in the film, yet the framing of the ostensibly pagan Spartacus as armed anti-Roman rebel and unassuming liberator-prophet evokes martyred Hebrew anti-occupation militants like the Sicarii and the slave exodus of Moses. Crucially though, Spartacus is not motivated by religious, ethnic or ideological agendas but by his material conditions and thoroughly individual human desires: the final spark that sets off his revolution is not an intellectualized call to arms but his erotically evoked and consensually reciprocated love for the female slave Varinia (Jean Simmons), whose defiant spirit in spite of her bodily captivity raises the acquisitive lust and ire of Crassus.

To Kubrick, the value of Spartacus was mainly pragmatic: its success assured him the clout to secure studio backing for his more personally ambitious future projects. And a success it was: the film’s box office returns dwarfed Kubrick’s combined previous efforts by orders of magnitude, winning four Academy Awards (albeit none personally for Kubrick) and such high-profile fans as newly elected President John F. Kennedy. The film’s most iconic scene and line—“I am Spartacus!”, an inclusion initially resisted by Kubrick for being too corny—became a cultural meme that survives to this day among internet users who have, in many cases, never seen the other 196 minutes of the film. Contemporary Spartacus admirers include handpicked Kubrick disciple Steven Spielberg, who’s professed his affection for the film (to the public and to Kubrick personally) on multiple occasions; Ridley Scott, whose less ideologically charged Gladiator (and, alas, Gladiator II) would be unimaginable without Spartacus as template; Mel Gibson, whose Braveheart is similarly indebted; and almost certainly John Milius and George Lucas, whose Conan the Barbarian and Star Wars prequel films respectively draw heavily from the images and themes of Kubrick’s epic. (One of the climactic sequences of The Phantom Menace, set in rolling green hills packed with geometrically imposing infantry and vehicle formations, is essentially the final battle of Spartacus with CGI droids and lasers—and a happier outcome.)

Criterion’s disc includes two commentary tracks, both recorded for their previous 1992 LaserDisc release. One features excerpts from Trumbo’s extensive production notes and writings on the film, read aloud by voice actors Michael McConnohie and Barbara Goodson. The other assembles an impressive array of contributors to take turns offering their perspectives on the film, including Douglas (who clearly adored it more than anyone), Ustinov (even more charming behind the mic than in front of the camera), Saul Bass (not just the film’s title designer but an art director sharing significant visual authorship with Kubrick), and Howard Fast (who in an amusing departure from commentary track norms spends much of the film’s runtime tearing it apart, nitpicking every historical inaccuracy, change from the novel and hypermasculine performance choice by Douglas in ways Kubrick himself may have agreed with). Fast at least correctly pinpoints the film’s undervalued MVP: Woody Strode (Golden Globe-nominated for only a few minutes of screen time) as the stoic Ethiopian slave Draba, whose dramatic choice to turn his spear on the masters rather than execute Spartacus for their pleasure plants the thought of revolution in the hero’s mind—and provides one of the most thrillingly intimate and gruesome scenes in the film. Its possible resonance with a 1960 American audience is left unspoken.