It is arguably the best film about the first world war, and still has a reasonable claim to being Stanley Kubrick's best film. Paths of Glory (1957) is now re-released for the 1914 anniversary: this brilliant tale of macabre futility and horror in the trenches was adapted by Kubrick, Calder Willingham and pulp master Jim Thompson from a 1935 novel by Herbert Cobb, in turn inspired by a real incident.

George Macready plays General Mireau, an officer who in 1916 orders a suicidally pointless attack on a German stronghold and after the inevitable fiasco orders three men to be chosen, by lot, to be shot for cowardice. (Mireau is a cousin to Sterling Heyden's Brigadier General Jack D Ripper in Dr Strangelove: calculating percentages of acceptable loss is something that happens in both films.) The resulting execution scene is like a nauseous non-crucifixion — three thieves without Christ or three Christs without a thief.

Kirk Douglas plays Colonel Dax, the tough old soldier disgusted with his superiors' arrogant incompetence, who attempts to defend these innocent men. Kubrick's juxtaposition of battle scenes and this sickening petty tyranny behind the lines is masterly and there is a demonic flash of pure genius in making one condemned man, just before his execution, announce that he has not had "one single sexual thought" since the court martial. The final sequence, in which a German civilian woman sings to the troops, has a mysterious redemptive beauty. Kubrick combines compassion with something of those commanding officers' cool detachment and control. A real cinematic field marshal.