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PATHS TO GLORY | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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Kubrick's next film, "Paths of Glory" (1957), questions the conduct of the French Army in the First World War. (It was banned in France for 18 years.) Using a suicide mission to expose civilized European savagery, it gives us military stupidity in microcosm, with the tale of an ambitious aristocrat who orders an infantry unit to advance at impossible odds, and the humane lawyer-colonel (Kirk Douglas) who leads the soldiers into battle but defends three men who refuse to fight. Kubrick's own generalship is already masterly (he made the film when he was 28) -- in the swirling tracking shots that underline the artifice of military decorum, in the kinetic chaos of the battle footage shot with hand-held cameras. He sticks to his debunking vision right up to the Brotherhood of Man climax, in which a German girl warbling a love song reduces French soldiers to tears. We know that they have only a moment to give in to emotions before they must move out.

Douglas, who had been superb as the morally handcuffed hero, pushed Kubrick into the big time when he recruited him to assume the troubled production of "Spartacus," a Roman epic based on Howard Fast's historical novel about a slave revolt. Produced for Douglas' own company, it was first and foremost a Douglas extravaganza; the exemplar of proletarian grit had the title role of the miner-turned-gladiator who sets off the Servile War when he and his fellow gladiators revolt. Kubrick got off on the action sequences, but he also had the skill to put over screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's best epigrams. (His cast included Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov.)

The result is more thrilling and ticklish, and in more ways, than any other Hollywood sword-and-toga epic. It's a Robin Hood adventure and a satire of decadence, a democratic myth and an imperial tear-jerker dropped into an opulent Roman circus. Spartacus wants to spin a refugee nation out of the gladiators' giddy, egalitarian camaraderie. The tyrant Crassus (Olivier), with a typical blend of egomania and patriotism, bases his program on abstract reveries of order and glory: His Rome "is an eternal thought in the mind of God." The movie's charge comes from the clever and instinctive ways that Kubrick and Douglas work the contrast between democratic slave and authoritarian patrician into the look and feel of the film. When the gladiators improvise their revolution, anything -- a spiked fence, a stew pot -- can become a weapon. When Crassus strikes them down, he arranges his cohorts in a living geometry, like a halftime show imbued with military might. Near the end, when Spartacus' men come together to hide his identity and save him from crucifixion, their rallying cry resounds. As a mythical declaration of common cause, "I am Spartacus!" rivals Dumas' "All for one and one for all!" Like everything else in the film, it's potentially ridiculous -- but exhilarating.

Kubrick himself always denigrated "Spartacus" -- wrongly, I think -- as commissioned work. Along with his frequent producing partner, James B. Harris, he did the commissioning on his next film, "Lolita" (1962), hiring Vladimir Nabokov himself to write the script, then rightly scrapping it. It was Kubrick who chose Peter Sellers to play what could easily have been a subordinate role: Clare Quilty, the playwright and minor celebrity who lures the nymphet of the title away from Humbert Humbert (James Mason), the French-literature professor who's obsessed by her. Mason is perfection as Humbert -- but with Kubrick in control, Quilty steals the movie. This cheeky act of larceny allows the director to transcend the sobering constraints of early-'60s censorship and retain the novel's satiric flavor (so pathetically lacking in the 1998 Adrian Lyne version). Though "Lolita" was the first film Kubrick shot in England -- where he was to remain for the rest of his career -- it's still eerily wise about American culture; if this were a '90s comedy about, say, the Long Island Lolita, Quilty would be the guy tying up the TV rights.

The brilliantly hip young American and the British comic who combined antic wit and a sure attack with a fillip of emotion made an inspired team. As Quilty, Sellers is quicksilver-changeable -- a portrait of the artist as a phony. He's ostentatiously high style. At a summer dance in a high-school gym, he manages to look good even though he bops only from the chest up. As he haunts Humbert, he takes on one flaky disguise after another: At one point, he impersonates a suspiciously ingratiating state cop; at another, a German psychologist with a dagger glint in the eyes that tells Humbert he has his number. Quilty sees Humbert's weakness and hypocrisy. You feel that the ultrarefined Humbert is able to kill Quilty because his victim starts his death scene under a sheet and finishes it hiding behind a painting -- in the end, Humbert doesn't have to look at him.

N E X T_P A G E _| A comedy of annihilation and an interplanetary head trip

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