Stanley Kubrick

by David Mikics

  Paths of Glory was filmed in Geiselgasteig studios, near Munich. This was Douglas’s shrewd idea. Germany was an inexpensive place to make a movie in 1956, and Schloss Schleissheim, the vast château where the generals confer, was near the studio.

  Like most war films, Paths of Glory needed a swarm of extras. Kubrick hired six hundred German policemen to play the French soldiers. When the director told them to move slowly and with great difficulty through no-man’s-land, they shared a joke: oh, we get it, he wants us to advance like Frenchmen!

  Kubrick took a month to prepare Paths of Glory’s battlefield, and he was meticulous about the special effects. Erwin Lange, an old hand from UFA, the German film studio, designed explosions that would cast up torrents of debris and shrapnel, rather than the clouds of dust usually seen in Hollywood war movies.

  In Geiselgasteig, Kubrick said, “I found the last sad remnants of a great filmmaker”: the “cracked and peeling” sets of Lola Montès (1955), Max Ophüls’s final movie. Ophüls, who was famous for his elaborate tracking shots and the sophisticated continental mood of his films, was Kubrick’s favorite filmmaker, he said in an interview just after Paths of Glory. He confessed he had seen Ophüls’s Le Plaisir (1952) “countless times.”9 On March 26, 1956, the day Ophüls died, Kubrick dedicated a key shot to his memory: the camera tracks in an Ophüls-like intricate curling web around Mireau and Broulard, who are chatting in the sumptuous castle that is army headquarters. This is the movie’s first scene, our introduction to the two generals, and Kubrick’s sinuous camera reflects their Machiavellian maneuvering.

  The romantic, humane cynic Ophüls would have given his officers an air of old-world aristocracy. In Kubrick’s hands their dignity is too brisk to be impressive. Efficient and self-centered, Broulard and Mireau rule over a world in which ordinary men die en masse so that a general can score a promotion. Everything they do is a calculated dance, a self-serving game.

  Paths of Glory gives war a stark, ascetic look. We never see the enemy, and there are no soldiers croaking out dying words. In an early scene, the battlefield is empty like the dark side of the moon, scarred by shrapnel and craters. The château seems equally cavernous and soulless, and the trenches lined with soldiers transmit quiet dread.

  While Broulard and Mireau confer in their palatial headquarters, the camera winds around them, but when Dax strides through the trenches, it tracks boldly forward with him. (Jack in The Shining’s snowy maze will also get this “Don Juan” shot: the camera is in front of the actor looking back at him, and both are moving forward.) Kubrick, usually a stickler for such details, departed from historical fact and widened the trenches to six feet so that the camera dolly could fit.

  Douglas’s Dax is straightforward, square-jawed, and solidly virtuous. When he leads the attack through no-man’s-land, the camera follows him in a steady tracking shot, threading past wounded soldiers. His outrage about the battle plan, like his later ardent defense of the three soldiers in a military trial, allows Douglas to proclaim his liberal ideals. He must have insisted on Dax’s righteousness much as he demanded—so the rumor goes—that his character had to appear shirtless in at least one scene (an early one, washing up in his quarters). Douglas thrusts and struts, gritting his teeth with frustrated heroism, in contrast to the serpentine Macready and Menjou, who specialize in hooded glances and suave insinuations.

  Menjou and Macready are both exceptionally fine, never overplaying and never making their brand of corrupt evil seem too refined. Douglas, by contrast, overdoes it at times, as when he lets loose his fury at Broulard and calls him “a degenerate, sadistic old man.” Dax’s parting shot, “I pity you,” spoken from the heights of his moral superiority, misfires badly. Broulard in his own eyes is simply doing what generals do. After the execution he remarks, “The men died wonderfully”—for him it’s all an admirable spectacle. When Broulard realizes that Dax is not angling for a promotion by denouncing Mireau, but is instead genuinely indignant, he calls him an “idiot.” Gary Giddins remarks that in this scene the superb Menjou sounds “neither verbose nor practiced”: he is utterly genuine, and utterly corrupt.10 Broulard wins this one: this is his world and his war.

  Kubrick’s practicality and shrewdness were evident in his dealings with the prickly Menjou. Kubrick had to trick Menjou to get him to appear in Paths of Glory. He told him that he would have the starring role and that Broulard was a “good general who does his best.” There was friction between the two on the set as well. One day Menjou, frustrated by the number of takes Kubrick wanted, threw a temper tantrum and told the twenty-nine-year-old director that he lacked experience “in the art of directing actors.” Calmly and quietly as usual, Kubrick said to Menjou, “It isn’t right, and we are going to keep doing it until it is right, because you guys are good.’ ”11 There’s a touch of boyish naïveté here that the young tyro Kubrick used to his advantage: “You guys are good,” said to a seasoned star like Menjou!

  Kubrick on the set of Paths of Glory, possibly with Adolphe Menjou in the foreground (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)

  Kubrick cleverly managed not only Menjou, but also his star, Douglas. Kubrick had to be quite adroit in both serving Douglas’s wish to be the courageous hero of Paths of Glory and betraying him by suggesting an ironic frame around the story: the ironist is Menjou’s Broulard, who presages that later powerful cynic Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut. Douglas loved the finished film nevertheless.

  At the end of Paths of Glory we learn that Dax’s men will return to the front. Everything will be futile as before; the executed soldiers are in the end forgettable, like all the war dead. In every meaningful way Dax has lost. Kubrick refused to grant Douglas his catharsis, the victory of humane ideals over the sinister higher-ups who oppress the common man. The oppressors, Mireau and Broulard, fit into the Kubrick universe, while Dax remains a naïve outlier.

  This no-exit ending saves Paths of Glory from Stanley Krameresque liberal piety, along with the futility of Dax’s leading his men to slaughter on the Anthill, even though he knows full well that the battle cannot be won. The casual viewer will identify with Dax’s high-handed denunciations, not quite realizing that he serves the war machine just as Mireau and Broulard do. But Kubrick still drives his point home: because the war requires enormous bloodshed for minute or merely symbolic gains, all soldiers are expendable.

  During the final minutes of Paths of Glory, a captive German girl is forced to sing in front of a group of French soldiers at an inn. The innkeeper pushes her on stage, bewildered and helpless. At first the soldiers taunt her, but she quickly reduces them to tears with her song.

  Christiane Harlan, listed in the credits under her stage name Suzanne Christian, plays the girl. With her short blond hair and sympathetic dark eyes, she is frightened yet also comforting. The catharsis that Kubrick denies us with the terrifying execution of the three soldiers he gives us in the song, the poignant “Der Treue Hussar” (The loyal hussar), an old German favorite chosen by Harlan. (Louis Armstrong sang it in English on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956.) Harlan is both girlish and maternal, and as the only woman in the movie, she voices the sorrow that the men cannot themselves express.

  Jimmy Harris remembered how Kubrick invented this final scene. “You know, the picture needs something more at the end,” he mused to Harris. “How about a German girl forced to sing a song?” “You’re gonna turn this into a musical?” the surprised Harris responded. “Anyway, how do we find the girl?” “I have just the right person,” Kubrick answered with a little smile. “Oh God, Stanley, oh no, how could you possibly suggest a girlfriend,” Harris exploded. “Okay, let’s shoot the scene, and if you don’t like it, we won’t use it,” Kubrick coolly said.12 As it turned out, Harris was as moved as everyone else when the scene was shot, and it stayed in the picture.

  Harlan was in fact Kubrick’s girlfriend, just as Harris guessed. Kubrick first saw her one night on German television and was bowled over. A few days later he went to see her perform at
the Kammerspiel theater in Munich. Fascinated, he then sought her out at a Red Cross benefit during Fasching, Munich’s rowdy carnival season. “He was not exactly a drunken ball person,” Harlan remembered: Kubrick was the only one there without a costume. “At a German carnival you get real retro drunks, the lowest of the low. There was a river of pee. He felt very scared. Stanley never forgot it.”13

  The carnival tumult might have reminded Kubrick of Ophüls’s Le Plaisir, which features an uproarious masked ball filmed with stunning, swift fluency. There, a dancer boldly kicks up his legs, then faints and is revealed to be an old man who cannot keep up the youthful pace. Kubrick, led by his desire for Harlan, was a different kind of outsider at the revelry. Like the unmasked Bill Harford in the orgy scene of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick felt out of place and endangered in Munich.

  Before her scene was filmed, Harlan was already living with Kubrick. Early the next year, 1958, she became his third wife. Stanley and Christiane stayed with each other for more than forty years, until the end of his life.

  Harlan had one notorious relative, her uncle Veit Harlan, director of Jud Süss (1940), one of the Nazis’ most famous propaganda films. “Stanley and I came from such different, such grotesquely opposite backgrounds,” Christiane told an interviewer. “I think it gave us an extra something. I had an appalling, catastrophic background for someone like Stanley. . . . For me, my uncle was great fun. He and my father planned to join the circus. They were acrobats. They threw me around. It was a complete clown’s world. Nobody can imagine that you can know someone who was so guilty so intimately—and yet not know.”14

  Kubrick briefly considered making a movie about Veit Harlan and Jud Süss, a striking way of managing the disturbing fact that Christiane was connected, via her uncle, to the evil of Nazism. Without telling his wife, Kubrick also began a script about a ten-year-old German girl, similar in age to Christiane during the war, who sees Jews hunted by the Nazis. (“I was the little girl who moved in where Anne Frank was pushed out,” Christiane told an interviewer many years later.)15

  Kubrick enjoyed Germany, Christiane remembered, though he was anxious about being there as a Jew so soon after the war. He especially liked her relatives, “a noisy, well-dressed crowd,” most of them theater and film people. (Her parents were both opera singers.) “They were showboats, and they looked and acted it, and I was a little embarrassed,” she recalled. “Stanley liked them because they were fun, real fun—my film star auntie was a Swede [Kristina Söderbaum], and boy could she drink you under the table, and she was a sweetie—he got on with her, and she sort of introduced him to everybody.” Christiane adds that Kubrick was glad that his future wife “wasn’t really that kind of person, I wasn’t a dance on the table type.”16

  When I talked to her in England in the summer of 2018, surrounded by her paintings, Christiane, at age eighty-six, was still the woman Stanley Kubrick had fallen in love with. She is a warm, witty, fast-talking storyteller with perfect comic timing, whose mordant sensibility matched Kubrick’s own.

  In late 1957 Kubrick returned from Germany to Los Angeles with Harlan and her three-year-old daughter Katharina from her previous marriage. “We both had been miserably married and decided never to marry again, we were all bitter and twisted,” Christiane said. “And then we married immediately, so it must be love.”17 (Stanley and Christiane married on April 14, 1958, in Las Vegas, though it wasn’t until 1961 that New York State issued his divorce decree from Ruth Sobotka.) In LA Christiane studied painting, drawing, and English at UCLA. She had always seen herself as an artist, despite her acting career, and after Paths of Glory she never acted again. But her paintings play a significant role in several Kubrick movies, including A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut.

  After Paths of Glory “we were penniless in Beverly Hills,” Christiane recalled. Kubrick’s mother, Gert, who was “up on films,” was still buying his clothes. Before Spartacus, Kubrick made money playing poker. “I was a nervous wreck, I thought oh God I’ve landed in the Wild West, my husband makes money from poker to put dinner on the table.”18 Kubrick insisted that his cardplaying buddies, who included Martin Ritt, Calder Willingham, and Everett Sloane as well as Jimmy Harris and Vince Edwards, read Herbert Yardley’s Education of a Poker Player, a piquant autobiography containing much clever advice and some very exact probability tables. Kubrick made his poker gang write down the probability tables on notecards.

  Meanwhile, Kubrick was having a dry spell with the studios. He told Michael Herr years later that “the way the studios were run in the fifties made him think of Clemenceau’s remark about the Allies winning World War I because our generals were marginally less stupid than their generals.”19 By the end of the decade Kubrick would carve out substantial independence from the studio system, but first he had to prove he could make money for them.

  Paths of Glory opened on Christmas Day, 1957. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times panned it, but his dislike of the movie was nothing compared to that of the French government, which banned it until 1974. The French seem to have been particularly incensed by Gerald Fried’s use of the Marseillaise in his score. In the British sector of Berlin, French soldiers disrupted the screening by throwing stink bombs. Even worse, the Berlin Film Festival buckled to French pressure and refused to show Paths of Glory. Like The Killing, Paths of Glory failed to turn a profit.

  Just when his finances were in a deep hole, the twenty-nine-year-old Kubrick attracted the notice of one of Hollywood’s top moneymaking stars, Marlon Brando. At the time Brando was under contract with Paramount for a western written by the young Sam Peckinpah, who had adapted Charles Neider’s novel about Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. Brando would play Billy, of course. Now he just needed actors and a director. Brando had liked The Killing, and early in 1958, after Paths of Glory, he pitched the western to Kubrick, who was quickly sold on the idea.

  Kirk Douglas generously agreed to let Kubrick work with Brando, despite the director’s deal with Bryna. The risk for Kubrick was that, Brando being Brando, the star rather than the director would be running the show. But Brando’s box office magic would make it worthwhile, or so Kubrick thought.

  Unfortunately, One-Eyed Jacks, as Brando called his western, hit a long series of snags. Kubrick hated Peckinpah’s script, and he persuaded Brando to bring in his old screenwriting partner Calder Willingham to revise it. The story conferences dragged on through the summer of 1958, moving to Brando’s home on Mulholland Drive after his wife left him in September. The stone-faced Brando, who clearly wanted more sway over the script, sat cross-legged on the floor and banged an enormous Chinese gong to cut off arguments.

  In a letter Willingham wrote to Kubrick the following year, he recalled the miserable boredom of poker games with Brando and added that he still resented Kubrick’s playing along with the star’s ideas.20 The tedious routine of cards and talk finally ended in November, when Brando made it clear that he had no more use for Kubrick. Brando now wanted to direct One-Eyed Jacks himself. Meanwhile, he had hired Karl Malden for the movie for a staggering $400,000, and his shooting budget would be even more extravagant. One-Eyed Jacks nearly drowned in an ocean of red ink, but it eventually came out in 1961, and put the kibosh on Brando’s fledgling directorial career. Twelve years later, Peckinpah returned to his script and made what is probably his greatest movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

  “I was just sort of playing wingman for Brando while he directed a movie,” Kubrick recalled about the One-Eyed Jacks script sessions.21 Meanwhile, Kubrick hadn’t made a movie in almost two years. But that was about to change. In February 1958, while he was still tangled up with Brando, Kubrick got an unexpected phone call from Kirk Douglas.

  Douglas was playing the gladiator Spartacus, leader of the failed slave revolt that shook Rome. He had bought the story from Howard Fast, author of the novel Spartacus (1951), and he was using the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo as his scriptwriter. Universal had insisted on Anthony Mann as director, but after a week
and a half on the set, it was clear to Douglas that Mann wasn’t working out. Mann had made the mistake of criticizing Douglas’s acting. He told Douglas he was wrong to play Spartacus at the beginning of the film as a “Neanderthal” and an “idiot.”22 So Mann had to go, and Douglas instantly thought of Kubrick as his replacement.

  Douglas reached Kubrick in the middle of a weekend poker game and told him he’d have to start in twenty-four hours, early Monday morning. Fast’s Spartacus was already one of Kubrick’s favorite novels, so he didn’t hesitate.23 But directing a full-scale sword-and-sandals epic was something new for Kubrick.

  After Spartacus came out, a journalist asked Kubrick whether it had been exciting to work with such a distinguished cast, which included, along with Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis, and Jean Simmons. Kubrick gave a sardonic wince: “Oh yes, I was given a beautiful dinner and a gold plate, you know.”24 Making the film was no party. The select club of actors that Douglas had assembled feuded constantly. When the bisexual Olivier wasn’t flirting with Tony Curtis, he was telling Laughton how to read his lines, and since Laughton was being paid only $41,000 to Olivier’s $250,000, Olivier’s advice stung.

  For the first time in his career, Kubrick felt outranked by the eminences surrounding him. One day on the set he feared that his actors Olivier and Laughton were whispering together about him, only to discover that they were running their lines. Kubrick stayed in control of the picture, yet he faced more challenges to his authority on Spartacus than ever before.