Paths of Glory
A story designed to make the blood boil: blameless French soldiers carry the can for their superiors' mistakes after a botched WWI assault. A work of genius from Kubrick, with a brilliant performance from Kirk Douglas
Paths Of Glory was the first time Stanley Kubrick got to work with a major star - and in the late 1950s, stars didn't come any more major than Kirk Douglas. He championed this 'hard to sell' anti-war film to the Hollywood studios, and bankrolled the 28-year-old tyro director who, with his growing reputation, still had it all to prove in Hollywood. And with his indignant performance Douglas provides an emotional counterbalance to Kubrick's chilly, conceptual style. Adapted from Humphrey Cobb's based-on-fact novel, the film tells the ignominious, bitterly ironic, even absurd, WWI story of a botched French attack, which is motivated purely by the gains it will bring to high-up officers safely ensconced far from the front. In return for a promised promotion, General Mireau (Macready), charges his troops with the impossible task of storming Ant Hill, an impregnable German position. The attack is led by Colonel Dax (Douglas), who before the war was "the finest criminal lawyer in France" and who dutifully leads his men into the German guns, knowing that a slaughter is inevitable. When the attack dissolves into chaos and a rout, the furious general first orders his artillery to fire on his own men, and, to pass the blame, chooses three soldiers at random to go before a court martial to explain their cowardice, with Dax acting as defence counsel in the face their inevitable execution. This dark, misanthropic subject matter is typical Kubrick, and it drips with a savage, bleak understanding of man's inhumanity to man. The officers (Dax excepted) are scheming self-aggrandisers whose interest in strategy relates principally to the progress of their careers. In fact, Kubrick has formulated a double-bind as absurd and horrific as that of Catch-22: the French military command is structured so that it's more or less impossible even for conscientious officers to champion the cause of their men, who are basically pure cannon-fodder. Kubrick's telling of this story is highly lucid, even schematic. The officers in their chateaux are shot with elegant, fluid dolly shots and deep focus that Kubrick learned from Max Ophuls and Orson Welles, while the men in the trenches are treated with an almost documentary realism that emphasises the hell they are living through. The film is memorable for its extended, virtuoso tracking shots through the trenches (they anticipate the crazed Steadicam of The Shining) and for the unprecedented realism of its battle scenes, with Kubrick using 800 German policemen for his troops (the film was shot in southern Germany) and with his art department having to go before the German government to explain why they needed so much explosive. But aside from its brilliant battle scenes and unrivalled attention to detail, the film plays out like a game of chess, a cold-hearted working out of a pitiless strategy, where the infantry soldiers really are nothing more than pawns. Dax, condemned by his superiors as an "idealist" when he shows ordinary human consideration for his men, finally turns the machinations of Mireau against him after the terrible injustice of the men's execution. Kubrick's geometrical, symmetrical compositions (he was also camera operator on the movie) are designed to make his characters seem like chessmen on a board - which is an apt visual metaphor for the callous and calculating behaviour of the officers in the story. Not surprisingly, the film was banned in France for 18 years after its release. Verdict Kubrick's skilful blending of form and content mark him out as a master of cinema. For all its chilly symmetry and beauty, the sheer injustice shown will have your pulse racing. |
