I generally consider Stanley Kubrick one of my favorite directors. I know full well I haven’t seen all of his filmography, but I figure most of the films of his I haven’t seen are the early ones. And while there were a couple I didn’t much care for, I figured I would probably get at least something out of Paths of Glory, Kubrick’s first representation on the Stacker list. Somehow, this film is also not one I had seen before. Oddly enough, I was surprised to find it on Tubi of all streaming services. I don’t generally mind Tubi, but how did a 1950s Stanley Kubrick film end up on a free, ad-based service? Heck, Tubi wasn’t the only one. It’s just the one I like best because the ad breaks during movies aren’t as intrusive as they are from other such services.
Still, how did a film from such a well-respected director end up on the free services? Sure, it’s early Kubrick, but it’s still Kurbick, and it does have a strong anti-war message that might make it a good pairing with his Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket. But why here? Some things I will never know.
If anything, given this film came out in 1957, I think it’s easy to see why Kurbick could get away with making an anti-war film set during the First World War. As noted by a friend and co-worker, World War I has a reputation of being the messy war. World War II is “the good war,” when we took down the Nazis and Imperial Japan, the Civil War was the tragic war between brothers, and the American Revolution was the fight for our freedom. Vietnam hadn’t really happened yet, and Korea was probably too fresh in people’s heads. So sure, set the film that shows war for the messy, absurd thing it can sometimes be during World War I. When else could the film be set? The Spanish-American War?
I kid a little, but it does fit that World War I would be the right conflict for the story that unfolds. Many Americans, myself included, probably know more about that particular war largely by its reputation. My general impression for this war has always been that it was a lot of generals employing 19th century tactics like the bayonet charge against 20th century weapons like the machine gun and poison gas. Said generals were often safely behind the lines, throwing wave after wave of soldiers at various targets, losing large quantities of men, and between such disasters, men sheltered in trenches that barely moved over the course of the war. And since those generals still believed in things like codes of honor and were maybe not so well-versed on PTSD (which they called “shell shock” if they even recognized it as a thing), it wasn’t something that was going to go well for the men in the trenches.
And that is more or less what happened here. The French army really wants to take a location called the Anthill. The Germans have the place well-fortified, and while the film doesn’t really elaborate much on the Anthill’s strategic importance, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it didn’t really have any aside from the fact the Germans were holding it. Regardless, General Georges Broulard (Adolphe Menjoe) really wants his subordinate General Paul Mireau (George Macready) to take the hill within a short amount of time, and Mireau sees taking the Anthill as a personal challenge….sort of. He’s sitting in a grand palace sort of headquarters, and the actual leading of the men of the 701st to take the Anthill will fall to Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas). Dax, unlike the two generals, actually works in the trenches with his men. He’ll be the one under fire, and he won’t be admiring art or hosting ballroom galas.
As it is, there’s a general cynicism in the air even before the men attack the Anthill, with one officer’s showing some cowardice even before the attack, and the General’s showing disdain for a shellshocked soldier who can’t even remember if he’s married or not when Mireau comes for an inspection tour and not finding the men there all spouting his preferred nonsense about a fighting spirit and the like. It’s easy to say such things when you’re not going to be among the men shot at. Dax, who actually spends time with the men and is often in the thick of it with them, is a different breed, the one officer in the film who actually cares about his soldiers and has a strong moral sense of right and wrong.
So, naturally, when the attack goes pear-shaped and the men reach a point when they refuse to leave the safety of the trenches, that just means Mireau wants to charge as many as possible with cowardice, and that has the death sentence at the other end if the men are found guilty.
I’ve often found that when telling anti-war stories, the better ones try to avoid the whole idea that war is evil and aim instead for the idea war is absurd. Mark Twain’s short story “The War Prayer” points out that praying to God for a glorious victory really means praying that the other side’s people will die horribly and miserably. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 worked off the idea that a pilot couldn’t fly a mission if they were crazy, but they had to be crazy just to fly a mission. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five made mass death out to be just something that happens while playing up how ridiculous the events of the war could be. Heck, Kubrick himself would have his Marines in the middle of Vietnam take out a sniper, one that turns out to be a pre-teen girl responsible for multiple American GI’s deaths, and then have them wander off singing the theme to the Mickey Mouse Club. No one will argue that war is wrong, but it may mean something else if an artist can show how war is just really messed up, and while Kubrick’s film was doing that all along, no matter how close to Atticus Finch Douglas’s Dax gets in his defense, he’ll be no more successful in defending his clients than Finch was Tom Robinson.
However, Tom Robinson’s innocence was as much established by the fact he was the most harmless man possible; in this case, Dax’s evidence that the the three defendants, chosen by lot to represent the unit as a whole, were anything but cowards isn’t enough. The first managed to get out to the halfway point, realized there was only him and one other guy left, and turned around rather than assault the heavily-fortified position with just himself and one other guy who isn’t on trial. One was decorated for bravery previously, but that didn’t count as much as his “cowardice” this time. And the last was knocked unconscious before he could leave the trenches, but the court suggested the blatantly obvious injury to his head could have been self-inflicted. Like with Tom Robinson, the trial had a pre-ordained outcome. The best Atticus Finch could get was the jury spent time deliberating rather than just assume he was guilty inside of a minute. For Dax, the best he can hope for is to bring Mireau down too by showing Broulard evidence that Mireau tried to get his artillery to bombard his own troops to get them out of the trenches. It doesn’t save Dax’s men, but it does ruin Mireau.
And, to Broulard’s mild surprise, Dax didn’t do it to advance himself. Dax still has some genuine ideals.
The film ends not with the execution of the three soldiers, one of whom was propped up on a stretcher despite the fact that he had a self-inflicted head injury that was almost certainly killing him anyway, but with Dax seeing his soldiers moved to tears as a German woman, captured during the war, is forced to sing a song for their entertainment. The song is in German, but the sentiments are obvious, and Dax doesn’t have the heart to call the men back to the front just yet.
But on a side note, I am always generally amazed when a Hollywood type managed to stay married to someone for decades, and the aforementioned German actress, the only woman in the film, married Kubrick the following year and stayed married to him until his death in 1999. In fact, Wikipedia tells me Christiane Kubrick is still alive today at the age of 90. Anyway, I just thought I’d toss that out there that Stanley Kubrick, a man known for being very difficult on set in his pursuit of cinematic perfectionism, actually managed to stay married to the same woman for over forty years. Since it looks like they met while making Paths of Glory, I might as well put that here.
NEXT: After getting a number of films I was encountering for the first time, it’s time to see one I have not only seen before, but one I saw as a new release in a movie theater. Be back soon for 2016’s Manchester by the Sea.
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