Of what there is no doubt is that I had little trouble making sense of the latest Kirk Douglas movie Paths of Glory (and incidentally Stanley Kubrick although that connection was beyond me at the time). What I actually remember was my mother’s reaction of utter horror at what she saw: “Oh, they really shouldn’t be allowed to make such horrible pictures,” she declared as we shuffled in the confectionary queue at Oakleigh Drive-in. Behind her, the three children were a little shocked themselves—it had been Rosely and myself, enamoured  of Mr Douglas for entirely different reasons—who had provoked the choice of venue in the first place. “They just don’t make pictures about nice things anymore,” she moaned.
    By nice things, I knew she meant people singing and dancing and a lot of slobbering, but I also clearly understood that what shocked her was the reality of it. The images of Douglas leading his troops across the muddy, chaotic battlefield from trench to trench, urging his men onward with blasts on his whistle, resembled nothing quite so much as a certain recent football match on sports day at Moorabbin Tech, slugged out in a quagmire between blue team and green team—for whom I scored the only goal with a desperate kick off the ground—in which the two sides were soon indistinguishable and the only colour was the occasional flash of red from bloodied noses. Mr Demetre umpired that game, but seemed more interested in propelling us to a higher level of violence than adjudicating free kicks. “Hit him!” “Make it hurt!” “ Come on, get stuck into it, you little monsters,” was the sort of thing he roared.
    But Paths of Glory provided another clear reality as well—a profound demonstration of the unfairness of life. When the attack fails, the generals try to hide the obvious incompetence of their strategy by blaming the troops, and to provide proof, order three randomly chosen heroes be executed for cowardice. Even a powerful acting performance from Mr Douglas as their defence advocate cannot save them. Now such injustice I knew only too well, and who I learned it from was Mr Demetre.