Paths of Glory (1957)Every great filmmaker has a certain point in their career. One where they emerge from "promising" to "great". A vague distinction at times it separates the one hit wonders from the legends. For Stanley Kubrick after the independent features Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss he made his first certifiable classic with The Killing. However this post-noir caper with a then remarkable shifting time line was merely the prophecy. It was the film that showed that Kubrick was capable of making great pictures, but not necessarily that Kubrick was a great filmmaker. Paths of Glory, his follow up and second feature co-produced with James Harris would be the one that elevated Kubrick to a higher status. Star Kirk Douglas made a surprise turn as a French Colonel and served double duty as producer. Their relationship was good enough to have Douglas recommend Kubrick for Spartacus after original director Anthony Mann didn't work out. Much has been made of the fall out the two had while making that film and the inevitable ego clash between producer-star and director. Paths of Glory seems the happier idyllic partnership made without tremendously high expectations but a film that has stood up better than nearly all of its better received and hyped contemporaries.
Douglas plays Colonel Dax in one of his exemplary firebrand performances. You know from years of watching Douglas that there is a explosive fire underneath his dignified exterior that is waiting to come out. For the most part Douglas and Kubrick keep his character restrained, but you can sense Dax is boiling over at times, especially considering the hypocritical bureaucracy he has to swallow. In combat though Dax the warrior takes over. Relentlessly blowing his whistle and no matter how doomed his mission might be no one is going to question his particular heroism. They make a clear point of not putting Dax in the same position as the men who refuse to advance and the case of the company that refuses to even get out of the trench. We know the attack is a horrible idea but Dax the soldier is determined to carry out his orders and accepts his ill fate when his fortitude is questioned.
George MacCready plays General Mireau with a degree of sympathy to start but his character quickly becomes the villain. He takes a similar position as Dax when his orders are given to him from General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou who seems born for this part). His men have been cut to shreds and this General likes to pride himself on being in touch with his men and understanding their conflict. He fancies himself a soldier rather than a politician, even if we the viewers aren't quite buying it. When his ability to lead his men is questioned he feels threatened and accepts the ill fated mission of taking the German Ant Hill knowing that his best estimates will have him lose about 65% of his men. When first given his orders he doesn't think he has enough men to hold the hill let alone take it but in a constant show of bravado he does what any emasculated soldier would do, over compensate by biting off far more than he could chew, of course with the particular promise of a promotion or more "glory". Our opinion of this sympathetic General changes very quickly during his trench visit. He routinely asks a few soldiers whether they're ready "To kill some more Germans?" to which most of them unenthusiastically say "Yes sir". When he comes across a soldier who is shell shocked and doesn't respond with the instant answer he's looking for he strikes the man, says there's no such thing as shell shock, and orders the soldier transferred from his regiment. It seems like a scene straight out of Patton but unlike Patton who had already won our sympathy this move seems cold and unfeeling and makes us start to think that despite how "hands on" this Regiment Commander might be we start to see he has lost touch sitting in his opulent chateau commanding his troops from a desk.
It is interesting that our first shot of Dax is bent over washing himself in his quarters. It has him in both a symbolic position of figuratively "washing his hands of it" and also slightly exposed shirtless. Quickly when Mireau enters his quarters with an even more unsympathetic Major (Richard Anderson) who refers to the soldiers as "lower organisms" with a herd mentality the power seems to be in Mireau's hands. Once the unfeeling, ass kissing Major is excused it puts some degree of sympathy back with Mireau, who even after berating the shell shocked soldier seems more human compared to his companion. His "selling" of the mission to Dax is very much the same routine that he was handed. Dax raises the appropriate objections, here's dreadful estimates of casualties which include 5% by their own fire, and eventually is coerced into accepting the mission when Mireau threatens to remove him from command temporarily to "rest". The machismo of war is clearly the enemy here and this entire film can be seen as "the folly of testosterone". Nearly everyone bites off more than they can chew in the act of saving face or for the glory of France. When it is suggested that someone else can do the impossible it makes everyone determined to "man up" to accept the foolish suicidal mission.
It may now be a good time to talk about some of Kubrick's aesthetic choices. Although made in 1957 the film was still shot in 1.66 ratio, despite having wide screen cinema available for four years. Contrasted with the big budget Bridge on the River Kwai (released within months of this film) it's stark black and white photography makes it look almost like a B-picture from the outside. However Kubrick's seemingly behind the times visual choices seem to fit the picture so much better in retrospect. For starters black and white film and cameras allowed for a much greater and sharper depth of field. Kubrick was all in favor of showing every square inch of the frame. His camera is free to roam (something that was considerably more difficult with big bulky Technicolor equipped cameras. The violence of the film could be undercut with black and white stock allowing the picture to get away with more violence and blood by not being in bright red vivid Technicolor. With this choice it easily puts Kubrick's film in a category with classic WWI war pictures like All Quiet on the Western Front, Pabst's Westfront 1918, or Gance's J'Accuse. The fact that the entire war was essentially based on misguided national pride and ill advised machismo makes the story here all the more palpable. The entire conflict could be considered "unjustified" which makes the particular mission fit so perfectly with that grizzly conflict.
Kubrick has drawn a number of comparisons with his style to Max Ophuls whose ever roaming camera and depth staging certainly seem to be lingering influences over this picture. One scene in particular involving Broulard at a party in the chateau/command seems directly taken from any number of Ophuls' films. Ophuls loved balls and his tracking camera was perfectly suited to an opulent waltz, and I wonder how much of an homage this particular sequence was. Thematically it helps to show how out of touch Broulard is. He is entertaining guests while three random soldiers are condemned to be shot by a firing squad for cowardice. His General doesn't miss a meal, doesn't bat an eyelash, and never seems to drop his aristocratic facade that makes him so deplorable behind his devilish grin and his apparent but deceptive sympathy he offers at various points of the film. When confronted with the news that Mireau ordered his own men to be fired upon during the battle, he simply responds that he has to return to his guests. His detachment is legendary and infuriating and you realize that no matter how "just" these men will be executed as a "morale booster" for the remaining soldiers. It's sickening and you wonder how much he believes his own words. This war is ugly business and perhaps the only method of coping with it is to have a supreme detachment to humanity the way Broulard does. After all in war the price of human life is negligible.
The film doesn't offer any satisfying answers. The crisis is not averted, the war goes on, and we're left to believe that the eternal tug-of-war between the two fronts will continue much as it had the previous two years. History tells us who eventually won the war, but in Kubrick's world there really is no winner. Dax figuratively spits in Broulard's face when he is offered command of the regiment. It isn't the promotion that he resists, but the accusation that he somehow engineered the removal of Mireau all along as an act of ambition rather than justice. Broulard miscalculates and assumes Dax is of the same breed he and Mireau are not realizing that Dax unlike virtually every other officer in the film has some sense of honor and justice, not coincidentally he was a damn good defense lawyer as a civilian. There is some sense of justice in the film at times though. Mireau is left to answer for his actions, the officer who selected his enemy to be tried for treason is given the unpleasant task of being in charge of the firing squad. In a final touch of humanism Kubrick ends with a slightly sentimental scene featuring a tavern of French soldiers humming along to a German song*. The idiocy and folly of war have rarely been so accurately displayed in cinema, yet another reason why Kubrick would go from promising young director to the greatest of all time.
*As a side note that woman singing was Christiane Harlan (niece of the infamous German director Veit Harlan), who later wound up becoming Mrs. Kubrick.
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