From the beginning, most American filmmakers have been idiot-savants: technically brilliant but unintelligent about life. (p. 439)

Although Stanley Kubrick began his career within [this] artistic tradition …, he soon displayed signs of rejection. After two obviously apprentice films …, Kubrick made a tightly plotted action movie that nevertheless subverts some of the genre's basic assumptions. So far from showing a meticulously planned heist as the expression of human adroitness, The Killing reveals how poignant an error it is to neglect needs and feelings in one's dependence on technique. Without departing from the crime-does-not-pay formula, The Killing humanizes its characters just enough to produce a modest critique of faceless organizational efficiency.

[In] Paths of Glory, Kubrick attacks one of American filmdom's most admired exponents of action. He depicts the army unheroically, as a vainglorious organism that thrives on the sacrifice of weaker members, adding vindictiveness to brutality when its methods fail...