For director Stanley Kubrick, “Paths of Glory” (1957) is a more important signature film than, say, the silly “Dr. Strangelove.” Based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb, the piece deals with a self-serving French general (George Macready) who tries to beget treasonable violence in the midst of the First World War, as if the war wasn’t violent enough. Then he sees to it that three French soldiers are arrested for refusing to take the Germans’ so-called Ant Hill, an impossible task. Their commander, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), asks to defend the men in court.

Military officers, the movie seems to be saying, can be depraved (although, in fairness, Macready and Adolph Menjou play caricatures here). Military authority is protective of soldiers only to the extent it is virtuous and wise. Self-aggrandizement makes war worse. Kubrick’s concern about violence has its advent in “Paths of Glory,” a mildly faulty but appreciably sturdy effort. The directing grips; indoor depth of field is in, tight shots are usually out. Unavoidably for Old Hollywood, the French characters are played by Americans with American accents, but the acting is excellent.

“A Bear Came Over the Mountain,” by Alice Munro, is an admirable story about a person’s dementia and what it means in the life of a relative. Fiona, the dementia-ridden wife of Grant, enters a nursing home and, as her condition worsens, grows emotionally close to Aubrey, another patient. Coinciding with this is a near indifference to Grant—rather a comeuppance for a once adulterous husband. The bear in the title is doubtless dementia, but it must also be for Grant the presence of Aubrey.

The story has all the gravity such a fiction should possess—it has a lot to do with contingency—and Munro writes well about men and not just women. Near the end, Fiona is said to have a “sweetly shaped skull,” which suggests that someday, before very long, she will die. But she is not forsaken; Munro sympathetically spotlights marital love.

Reviews by Dean

The 1969 Jiri Menzel film from Czechoslovakia, “Larks on a String,” which I saw on Amazon Prime, is a work of sad, anti-Communist satire and comic humanism. In tone it resembles Menzel’s “Closely Watched Trains,” both films based on novels by Bohumil Hrabal.

“Larks” concerns the limited worth of thought and ideas and the withering of spiritual values in a totalitarian society. (Intellectuals here are working in a junkyard.) It reveals the Red glorification of work being turned into a religion. An example of the satire is the sequence with a Communist trustee (Rudolf Hrusinsky) who clearly believes in the “new man.” He charitably washes the faces of underprivileged children before slipping into a flat wherein he contentedly bathes a young gypsy woman’s bosom and ass. The new man?

Arthur Penn‘s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) is a violent entertainment written by two men who want it to harbor some serious overtones. It doesn’t really, except that, being relentlessly tragicomic, its comedy is comic indeed and its tragedy, with realistic bloodshed, is tragic indeed. It isn’t frivolous. Or inartistically made. Superbly directed by Penn, who knew how to be powerful, and edited by Dede Allen, its camera placement and camera movement are marvels. The screenwriters are David Newman and Robert Benton, and one wonders why Benton couldn’t give us in 1984 something better than “Places in the Heart.”

The novelist Piers Paul Read wants us to know that the real Vitellio Scarpia, an 18th century Sicilian soldier for the Papal States, was not “sadistic,” as he is apparently shown to be in a play by one Victorien Sardou. Rather, in Read’s book “Scarpia” (2015), he is humane, dutiful, respectful of Catholicism—as well as highly imperfect. But not a cur.

In addition, Scarpia is anti-Jacobin, living when revolutionary France does bloody-minded harm to Italy. Not surprisingly for a Read novel, the subject of salvation crops up. The Arletty of Rome, the woman who sleeps with French Jacobins—Scarpia’s estranged wife, Paola—is the only character in the book who after repentance reaches a deep Christian devotion. One person, maybe more, has considered this Catholic propaganda. It is nothing of the sort. The conversion is one occurrence among many, taking place, remember, in Catholic Italy. And this book—riveting if not always satisfactorily edited—is not preachy at all.