"The men died wonderfully!" crows the wicked, vain and corrupt French general Broulard (George Macready) as he enjoys tea and delicate pastries at General Staff HQ. No matter that they died in droves, failed to secure the objective and almost came under fire from their own artillery, they died wonderfully.

Paths Of Glory is structured around the grotesque disconnect between Macready's airy rear-echelon abstractions and the godawful reality of life in the trenches of the first world war. Down there, amid the rats, the mud and the corpses of one's friends, there is at least a sense of solidarity and honour among the doomed, and all emotions are real. But back in the General Staff's Versailles-like HQ, among the columns, frescos and sweeping staircases, the Fragonards and the Bouchers on the walls and the marble floors underfoot, the aristocrats and the officer class – their faces mean, smug, scarred or fat – trade ghastly obscenities about acceptable death tolls and national honour, their moral universe and patterns of thought throttled by protocol, precedent, military codes and banal social etiquette.

This was the first Kubrick movie to fully showcase themes, imagery and tactics that would proliferate throughout the rest of his work. That pre-1789 Versailles imagery – for Kubrick the distilled essence of a corrupt paradise built on bloodshed, poverty and suffering – would reappear in the last shot of A Clockwork Orange ("I was cured all right!"), throughout Barry Lyndon (and presumably, the unmade Napoleon project), and in the coldly elegant room Bowman wakes up in after the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The battle scenes in Paths Of Glory – those relentless right-to-left tracking shots through a no man's land strewn with corpses and wire, the explosions that hurl showers of muddy debris on actors, crew and camera in real time – were state of the art when they appeared, though Kubrick managed to outdo himself as a battlefield director again in the climax of Spartacus, the inhumanly bloody and stupid Seven Years War battle in Barry Lyndon, and the finale of Full Metal Jacket. No American director before or since equalled him on the battlefield.

Among the other Kubrick trademarks already in place we can count his real gift for casting faces, even in the smallest of roles. Of the leads, the faces that resonate most are crazy old Timothy Carey's (he was the racist sniper in The Killing) and Macready's, badly facially disfigured in a car crash, magnificently feline and malign. The director's misanthropy and pessimism are already baked in: "Gentlemen of the court," says Kirk Douglas, in a line that could plausibly recur in any subsequent Kubrick movie, "there are times when I'm ashamed to be a member of the human race, and this is one of them."