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The final sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film “Paths of Glory” doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the story. What do we see now after witnessing horrific battlefield carnage, an ethically bankrupt court-martial, and the most corrupt and cynical French army generals ever? As the owner introduces a terrified German girl to the stage, drunken troops are crammed into the bistro and banging beer steins on the tables.
She has been kidnapped and must be made to perform, despite his lewd comments about her appearance and cruel ones about her lack of ability. From the audience, whistles and hoots are heard. The terrified child starts singing. The crowd’s clamor gradually goes gone. The room is filled with her shaken voice. “The Faithful Hussar” is sung by her. There is a brief hush, and some of the soldiers start to hum the notes; they are familiar with the melody but not its lyrics.
If “La Marseillaise” singing in a bar during the film “Casablanca” was a cry to patriotism, this scene is evidence against it. In a world where generals casually predicted that 55% of these very men might be killed in an idiotic assault and found that acceptable, it brings about a moment of calm and tenderness in the daily horror these soldiers experience.
Dramatic songs typically leave us feeling better. They contribute to closing. This movie’s closing music only adds to our sense of desolation. It is a twist on Kubrick’s emotional knife rather than a relief. It’s unlikely that Truffaut was thinking of “Paths of Glory” when he famously claimed that it was impossible to create a pro-war film because action always justifies itself; this is understandable given that the movie was outlawed in France until 1975 for its pejorative portrayal of the French army.
The 1957 film is characteristic of Kubrick’s earlier work in that it is brief (84 minutes), focused, and told with an economy that borders on terseness. Later on, the length and epic scope of his pictures would increase, sometimes to their benefit and sometimes not. The extended camera movement, which unfolds to reveal details of a set or location and continues long after we anticipate it to, is one of his favorite visual techniques, and the film does contain examples of this technique.
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The camera follows Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas), the movie’s hero, on an inspection tour of a muddy, endlessly-long fortified ditch early on in the narrative. Later, the camera tracks the men who are doomed into No Man’s Land, moving alongside them through trenches, craters, and shell blasts as bodies fall in front of our eyes. Even later, a dolly view is used to search for a French general inside of a formal ball. Finally, there is a lengthy military procession leading up to a firing squad in which the camera follows three men who have been sentenced to death as they trek endlessly toward their execution.
The significance of their topics is made clear to us by these long-duration shots: the endurance of trench warfare, the destruction caused by an attack, the hypocrisy of the ruling class, and the dread of the condemned men. The shots in “Paths of Glory” are directly targeted at our emotions, in contrast to some of Kubrick’s later extended shots, such as the endless tracking shot down long hotel hallways in “The Shining” (1979).
Simply put, the narrative is a summary. Along 500 miles of heavily fortified trenches, the French and German forces are facing off. For the past two years, neither party has budgeted. Any effort at advancement results in a terrible human cost in terms of lives. Adolphe Menjou’s effete little Gen. Broulard commands Gen. Mireau (George Macready), a subordinate, to capture the improbable German position known as “The Anthill” by the day after tomorrow. Mireau contends that it is impossible. According to Broulard, it might be possible to complete it with no more than 55% fatalities. He makes a suggestion that the general who completes it will receive a raise and a third star. The two-star Gen. Mireau demonstrates his disapproval by saying, “The lives of 8,000 soldiers! What is my goal in relation to that? My standing?” But by God, we might actually pull it off!
Paths Of Glory Quiz
Col. Dax must take the initiative. Despite his protests and knowledge of its impending doom, he obeys instructions. Two of his men argue whether it would be better to die by machine gun or bayonet in a scene that takes place the night before the attack and that, if written in another language, might have been imagined by Shakespeare. The machinegun is preferred because it is fast; the bayonet would hurt but not necessarily kill. The other asserts that demonstrates his greater fear of pain than of mortality.
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Even after watching Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” and Stone’s “Platoon,” the actual attack has a realism that is convincing. The right decision was to use black and white photos because this is not a world for color, but one of shapes and shadows, mud, and smoke. The death toll is horrifying. Advancement is stopped. Gen. Mireau decides the soldiers are cowards while observing from the protection of the trenches and orders the French artillery to fire on their own soldiers in an effort to push them forward. Without a written directive, the battery leader declines to take action.
In the end, Mireau decides that three men—one from each company—must be executed for cowardice in order to maintain his reputation and keep his advancement. One is picked at random. He is “socially undesirable” for one reason. One, he saw firsthand the cowardice of a superior officer who deserted a comrade while they were on a reconnaissance assignment. Outraged, Dax requests to represent the defense at the military tribunal, which is, as we might anticipate, a farce. The prosecutor retorts, “If it was impossible, the only proof of that would be their dead bodies at the bottom of the trenches,” in response to Dax’s claim that any further advance was “impossible.” The fact that the survivors are still living proves that they are cowards.
The condemned guys sleep in the same cell that night. One says, “Do you see that cockroach? “I’ll be dead tomorrow morning, but it will be alive.” Up until this moment, the movie has been depressing and unromantic, but we believe the plot is about to change. Dax is informed of Mireau’s directive to engage French soldiers with French artillery. He tells Gen. Broulard of Mireau’s artillery order while he is at a posh ball. The condemned men would be spared at the eleventh hour in any typical war movie, produced by 99 out of 100 directors, and Mireau would be publicly humiliated for his stupidity and treachery.
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Not right here. Kubrick manages to bind all the threads of his narrative together without sacrificing his harsh and unforgiving theme. Yes, the plot is resolved, but cruelty and deceit continue to exist, and private troops continue to be pointless playing cards. According to Broulard, the executions will be “a perfect tonic” for the army: “Shooting a man now and then is one way to maintain discipline.”
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Stanley Kubrick first joined the ranks of great directors with “Paths of Glory,” and he would never quit them. Kirk Douglas described it as the pinnacle of his acting career when I spoke with him in 1969: “There’s a picture that will always be excellent, years from now. I already know that; I don’t need to wait fifty years to do so. It is one of the few story movies where you can feel the rage in the telling, and it has an almost brutal economy of expression. In “The Big Red One,” Samuel Fuller, who served in the military throughout World War II, recalled it with fondness for the comradery of his unit. Paths of Glory doesn’t contain any sentimentality. horror only.
For every image, Kubrick and his cinematographer George Krause use sharp and deep focus. The film’s visual style is to look, and look intently; there is not a single image that was specifically composed for beauty. The majority of the character’s emotion is found in Kirk Douglas, a star whose intellect and ambition occasionally led him away from the convenient route laid out by the system. We can tell when he is furious, but he never goes quite far enough. He’s still a police detective. He fulfills his obligations. Although his superiors would not have preferred it, he finds a way to define his responsibility in a way that they cannot condemn.
Then came the last tune. Christiane Harlan, a young actress who shortly got engaged to Stanley Kubrick, sings it. I paid her a call one day in the summer of 2000 at their farm outside of London, and we ventured through the garden to the boulder bearing Kubrick’s name, where he is buried. I wanted to express to her how remarkable and potent that scene was, how it appeared out of nowhere to serve as a heartbreaking coda, and how Kubrick had cut directly to the heart of his primary narrative by cutting away from it. However, it didn’t seem like the right time for movie critique, and I was confident that she already knew everything I had to say.
The Music Box unveiled a repaired print of “Paths of Glory” on Friday. Also check out my 1969 Kirk Douglas interview in Esquire, as well as my evaluations of Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb,” and Fuller’s “The Big Red One” for Great Movies.
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