Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1957 World War I 88-minute black-and-white film “Paths of Glory,” starring Kirk Douglas, is getting the Criterion Collection treatment for a HiDef Blu-ray Disc release on Oct. 26 ($39.95).
Among the extras in Criterion’s special edition of the story of a French colonel who goes head-to-head with the army’s ruthless top brass when his men are accused of cowardice after being unable to carry out an impossible mission in treench warfare:
• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• New audio commentary by critic Gary Giddins
• Television interview from 1979 with Douglas
• New video interviews with Kubrick’s longtime executive producer Jan Harlan, Paths of Glory producer James B. Harris, and actress Christiane Kubrick
• Excerpt from a French television program about real-life World War I executions
• Theatrical trailer
• PLUS: An essay by Kubrick scholar James Naremore
Criterion is also releasing another black-and-white classic on Blu-ray in October (19th), a two-disc special edition of the 1954 Japanese 3 1/2-hour “Seven Samurai,” which inspired the 1960s American adaptation “The Magnificent Seven.”
Special features with the Akira Kurosawa film starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura in Japanese with English subtitles include:
• Restored, high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Two audio commentaries: one by film scholars David Desser, Joan Mellen, Stephen Prince, Tony Rayns, and Donald Richie and the other by Japanese film expert Michael Jeck
• Fifty-minute documentary on the making of Seven Samurai
• My Life in Cinema, a two-hour video conversation between directors Akira Kurosawa and Nagisa Oshima
• “Seven Samurai”: Origins and Influences, a documentary that looks at the samurai traditions and films that helped shape Kurosawa’s masterpiece
• Theatrical trailers and teaser
• Gallery of rare posters and behind-the-scenes and production stills
• PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by Kenneth Turan, Peter Cowie, Philip Kemp, Peggy Chiao, Alain Silver, Stuart Galbraith, Arthur Penn, and Sidney Lumet, and an interview with Toshiro Mifune from 1993
— By Scott Hettrick